Art Astor is a renowned entrepreneur and collector. He was born in Fresno to Armenian-immigrant parents. After a tour in the Army Air Corps (earning him the Air Medal with four clusters) he took a communications degree from University of Southern California in 1949 on the G.I. Bill. Degree in hand, he started in TV as what he described as `the Armenian Dick Clark,' but that was more than 50 years ago. Since then his efforts have mostly been off the air in radio sales and management. He has been involved in the Southern California broadcast industry ever since.
By the late seventies, Astor was in partnership which owned KIK-FM, a country station out of Orange County. By 1982, he had bought out his partners and, with the purchase of an AM/FM operation in the Bay Area, he became the proud owner of the Astor Broadcast Group. In this age of corporate broadcasting, where programming people in New York issue memos every day on what to air to people 3,000 miles away, the Astor Broadcast Group remains one of the last of the independent entrepreneurships in Southern California.