This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Family Radio, operated by Family Stations, Inc., was founded in 1958 in Oakland, California, by Harold Camping together with Lloyd Lindquist and Richard Palmquist, beginning broadcasts the following year over KEAR-FM in San Francisco before growing into one of the largest independent, non-denominational Christian broadcasting networks in the United States. Camping served as the network's president from its founding until his death in 2013, with Tom Evans serving as president and general manager since.
The network built its reach through decades of ordinary Christian radio programming, Bible teaching, hymn broadcasts and listener supported fundraising, well before the biblical numerology that would later define its public reputation came to dominate its output. Camping himself was the network's central on air voice for most of that history, hosting long running Bible teaching programs that built the loyal listener base the network would later depend on for both its ordinary operating budget and, decades on, the donations that funded its billboard campaigns. That earlier, longer institutional history, four decades of steady growth from a single Bay Area station into a national network under three founding figures rather than one, is easy to lose behind the single episode the network is now most remembered for, but it is the foundation the network built everything else upon.