Valley classic was on Fresno radio for 30 years. It’s back with new ‘legacies’

Elizabeth Laval is a human repository of Fresno history, both broad and specific.

She can tell you how electricity first came to Fresno County. It was hydroelectric, worked down from Shaver Lake and it came to Fresno just eight years after Edison invented filament lightbulbs. But she also has the odder factoids. Like how the 100-year-old Wilson Theatre only had air conditioning because it was piped down the block from the old Benham Ice Cream building.

“There are hundreds of thousands of these stories,” says Laval, the president of the Fresno County Historical Society and author of the radio series “Valley Legends…the Legacies Continue,” which debuted on KMJ last week.

The Valley’s Legends and Legacies, redux

The series is actually a refresh of a segment that ran on KMJ for the better part of 30 years beginning in the late 1980s.

The original “Valley’s Legends and Legacies” was created by then-general manager Al Smith, who came to Fresno from Louisiana and saw an opportunity to inform listeners like him on the region’s rich history.

He enlisted the help of Cathy Rehart, a native Fresnan and notable historian, and together they produced some 2,000 radio spots over the next three decades. Rehart wrote the scripts, which Smith narrated in what would become the series’ signature voice.

The series spawned its own five-volume book set and Rehart was still writing scripts in the months before her death in 2013.

“It’s started out for people who were not from here,” Laval says. It turned into something important for the entire region.

“It was, basically, sometimes the only history lesson people ever got.”

The legacies continue

The new series is much like the old series, in that it plays off a dynamic pairing of author and narrator.

While Laval takes over for Rehart’s research and writing, Mark Standriff replaces Smith as the voice of the series. KMJ ran auditions for the part before landing on Standriff, an actor and a figure in city’s theater scene. He’s directing “the Buddy Holly Story,” at Roger Rocka’s Dinner Theater through May 23.

In his day job, Standriff is the director of Beautify Fresno.

Like Smith, Standriff’s narration has become part of the storytelling, Laval says.

“I’m writing with his voice in my head.”

The 90-second segments air twice daily (at 8:30 a.m. and 5:55 p.m) on KMJ’s AM and FM stations, with three new stories each week. They will also be shared and archived online in a digital format that will allow listeners to interact with the content in ways that weren’t possible when the series started in 1989.

Laval has access to the entirety of the Historical Society’s archives, which includes not only a full collection of The Fresno Bee newspapers but also the Pop Laval photo collection. That in itself has some 35,000 digitized images, some of which aren’t open to public view.

When it happens, Laval’s story on Boyden Cavern in the Sequoia National Forest will include photos that never been seen before, at least not by anyone still alive, Laval says.

And while Rehart’s stories were driven by historical narrative, Laval uses first-person narratives, often pulled from newspaper reporting from the time. “I’m loving this idea of bringing the words of the day to life,” Laval says.

Though it won’t be just past legacies getting featured.

Laval just finished a story on Tom Flores, who was born in Sanger and went to Fresno City College before becoming an NFL quarterback and Raiders head coach (who was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2021). She could also see stories on people like Audra McDonald, the Fresno native who happens to hold the most Tony Awards for acting. “It’s important to capture what’s happening now as well,” Laval says.

“That’s where we pull the threads of history forward.”

The first batch of new stories aired last week and covered the origin of Nisei baseball, frontierswoman Carrie Sage, the Fresno Scraper, which was used to dig the Panama Canal, and the Wilson Theatre.

This story was originally published May 12, 2026 at 5:30 AM.