Stan Bunger

Stan Bunger grew up in Los Gatos and San Jose before anyone called it the Silicon Valley and actually knows what a prune orchard looks like. He graduated from San Jose’s Leigh High School, West Valley College in Saratoga, and San Francisco State University where he received a B.A. in Radio and Television. Stan has been married since 1977; he and his wife Tharon have two children. He lives in one of the Bay Area's great communities: Alameda. Stan has been fortunate to have spent most of his working life within shouting distance of where he grew up. In King City, Sonora, South Lake Tahoe, and Sacramento, he covered the small stories and the big ones. He first joined KCBS at the young age of 25 in 1982 and stayed for 10 years. During that time, he won or shared in all sorts of prestigious awards including the Peabody Award for KCBS’ coverage of the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. Stan says he doesn’t get that excited about awards and couldn't even tell you where he stashed them. “I get my fulfillment when people tell me that KCBS is a part of their lives.”

Stan left KCBS in 1992 to try something very different: life in Texas. He stayed for three years and then got back to the Bay Area as fast as he could. He spent the next five years covering high-tech stories on television and running his own digital media startup company. He returned to KCBS in 2000 and feels that his circle has been completed. “This is where I belong. I absolutely love the challenge of all-news radio, where we work without a net and manage an endless flow of information.”

“I'm lucky I found this career– it's a perfect fit for a know-it-all, talked-too-much-in-school kid who was curious about everything, " he says. Stan stumbled into the radio news group at San Francisco State's KSFS, and he’s never really looked back since. There have been a number of remarkable people who shaped him as a broadcaster: the late Harv Morgan, Peter Laufer, Don Schrack, the late Chet Casselman, and Charlie Seraphin foremost among them. “For some reason," he says,  "these people took the time to tutor and mentor me, and I try to remember their lessons every day.”

More from Stan: “I wouldn't even know how to add up the number of stories I've covered or people I've interviewed in 29 years of doing this. Odd things stick in my mind, like the shard of glass I once saw embedded in a telephone pole (like a dart) after a natural gas explosion. Or the rippling of the glass in the Candlestick Park press box in which I rode out the '89 quake. Or the molten pools of metal that had been car engines (I found these during the 1991 Oakland firestorm). I've rubbed shoulders (sometimes literally) with Presidents, a Pope, Mother Teresa, sports stars, and a homeless guy who urinated on my shoe while I was delivering a live report from a phone booth. I will certainly never forget the night of the '89 quake, when I drove back from Candlestick to our studios to anchor our coverage and heard KCBS coming out of parked cars, darkened buildings, and small groups of people clustered on street corners. It was a humbling reminder that what we do really matters.”