John Draper

John T. Draper aka CaptainCrunch is the son of a U.S. Air Force engineer; he described his father as distant in an interview published on the front page of the Jan 13-14, 2007 issue of The Wall Street Journal. Draper himself entered the Air Force in 1964, and while stationed in Alaska helped his fellow servicemen make free phone calls home by devising access to a local telephone switchboard. After Alaska, he was stationed at Charleston Air Force Station in Maine. In 1967, he created WKOS [W-"chaos"], a pirate station in nearby Dover-Foxcroft, but had to shut it down when a legitimate radio station, WDME, objected. He was honorably discharged from the Air Force in 1968 and did military-related work for several employers in the San Francisco Bay Area. He adopted the counterculture of the times and operated a pirate radio station out of a Volkswagen van.