AM radio listeners under 65 are rare—except for those who ardently believe that Rush Limbaugh is right. For many of us, AM radio conjures memories of being forced to endure what dad listened to while driving home from visiting the aunts and uncles. Invariably, the old man favored a mix of news, sports, and increasingly, ultra right-wing commentary hosted by obnoxious demagogues—all blaring out of a four-door Dodge Monaco’s tinny speaker.

No wonder most Americans have long had the dial selector superglued to FM. But the times are changing—especially in Monterey.

Today, two talk outlets, KRXA and KOMY, are both drawing listeners to the AM bandwagon. It’s curious that this is happening in the country’s 79th largest market—most cities, even San Francisco, have only one left-wing radio outlet, and many have none.

How the Monterey Bay became home to a liberal talk radio battle is, like most things in commercial radio, a matter of economics.

Ever since conservative firebrand Limbaugh’s success in the early 1990s, the conventional wisdom in commercial talk radio has been to ape Rush’s ultra-conservative approach throughout the day. Copycatting the pundit has proven to be a gravy train for mainline AM stations that long ago gave up on music formats in part because their mono signals can’t hold a candle to the stereo sound offered on FM.

Still, the conservative AM radio pie can be sliced up only so many times—especially for outlets with weaker signals. While smaller stations on the band can still turn a profit with Mexican music and niche formats like traditional country and oldies, for the most part AM long ago became what’s known in radio today as the information band.

Even with that somewhat lofty designation, it’s still the home of floundering stations with little or no quantifiable audience. Under these circumstances, the switch to progressive talk was a gamble some station owners were willing to take.

In the Monterey-Santa Cruz-Salinas market (radio-speak for the more than 50 Monterey Bay Area stations heard locally by over 500,000 listeners age 12 and up), Monterey’s KRXA 540AM and Watsonville’s KOMY 1340AM made the switch to progressive talk last summer. Although they both flipped to the new format at about the same time, their approaches are quite different.

KRXA 540AM debuted last July, when longtime San Francisco Bay Area radio personality Peter B. Collins and his business partners Tony Seaton and Washington, DC lawyer Hal Ginsberg bought the frequency from People’s Radio. A company best known for broadcasting KNRY with conservative hosts like Sean Hannity, People’s Radio also sells time to would-be broadcasters who want to host their own shows.

Under the banner “Think for Yourself,” KRXA’s line-up includes Stephanie Miller in the morning followed by Thom Hartmann (9am to noon), Ed Schultz (noon to 3pm) and Collins in the afternoon from 3 to 6pm. Seasoned lefty radio veterans all, the hosts (except Collins) are all nationally syndicated.

Ostensibly the local guy, Collins sometimes broadcasts his show from KRXA’s Sand City studios, but often chats it up from his San Rafael, Calif. office near his Marin home over an ISDN line. The show is also heard on a Eureka, Calif. station and Collins is looking to syndicate it elsewhere.

Collins started in the business early. As a 19 year old in the early ‘70s, during the height of the Watergate hearings, he went from producing an overnight talk show in Chicago to hosting it, often bashing the Nixon administration. He moved to San Jose in the mid-’70s to work as a rock DJ, and made his mark in the ‘80s as the morning host at KRQR, then San Francisco’s premier rock station. Before moving to KRQR, Collins moonlighted as a fill-in talk host at KGO.

Collins returned to talk radio again in the early ‘90s at San Francisco’s KNBR, the most powerful station on the West Coast, when it made the transition from music to talk (it’s now a sports station, and home of the San Francisco Giants). At the time, he followed Rush Limbaugh and even went toe-to-toe with the host in a no-holds-barred on-air slugfest.

Collins says he was fired by KNBR despite decent ratings. His run-ins with management, he says, included a call for the elimination of Political Action Committees (PACs) while KNBR’s then-owner, Susquehanna Broadcasting, sponsored a conservative PAC. Collins also took the side of the Teamsters when Safeway was in the process of moving its main distribution warehouse from Oakland to Tracy in the Central Valley—a move the union was concerned would cost them all their jobs. In his view, it didn’t help Collins that Safeway was KNBR’s biggest advertiser.

Collins resurfaced at San Francisco’s KSFO in the mid-’90s, before that station was, thanks to FCC deregulation, swallowed up by KGO and eventually turned into one of America’s first all-conservative talk stations. Collins also has a political media consulting business (he works primarily with Democrats) and produces other radio shows and commercials. Most recently he hosted “All American Talk Radio”—a show he described as being “not just for right-wing nuts”—on the Sirius network.