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Radio host Bill Moen used his straightforward Midwestern delivery to unspool vignettes and bon mots about San Francisco.

Bill Moen, announcer for S.F.’s bell-ringing contest, appears in a promotion to save the cable cars.

In his first 14 years playing “the beautiful music” on KABL-AM, Bill Moen was not allowed to mention his own name on the air.

The station format dictated that soothing instrumental standards would be interrupted only by the news and a recording of a ringing cable car bell. On-air talent was restricted to utterances of “KABL music” between songs, but Moen was able to inject enough personality in those two words to launch an improbable 33-year career as the morning drive host at KABL. His signature was the 15- to 30-second city-centric vignette that came to be known as “Bill Moen Moods.”

“When, finally, he was allowed to say his name and talk a bit, he revealed what a real San Franciscan he was, dropping bon mots about the local scenes, about restaurants and shows, like a Herb Caen with an announcer’s voice,” said radio historian and writer Ben Fong-Torres. “He came across as a gentleman — with a sense of fun.”

Moen’s show on KABL ran from 1960 to 1993, outlasting Don Sherwood and Don Rose, among his morning drive-time competitors. Moen’s ratings were consistently high and his listeners loyal to the point that when he ran a promotion for a travel agency booking a tour of Europe, enough people signed up and paid their own way to command two tour buses of 35 passengers each, hitting 14 cities in 21 days.

He was the play-by-play announcer for the cable car bell ringing competition and a leader in the campaign to save the cable cars. When he was finally eased out of KABL after a format shift, he took his morning show to KXBX in Lakeport (Lake County), where he spent 20 more years on the air.

“That’s 50 years on morning radio. Nobody lasts for 50 years,” said Clark Reid, a fellow host at KABL.

Moen died from complications of an infection he developed while living in Lake County. He died Easter Sunday at a hospital in Napa, said his daughter, Heather Moen. He was 93.

Moen wasn’t a screamer or a jokester on air, and his voice wasn’t tricked up or exaggerated. He had a straightforward Midwestern delivery, speaking slowly and with precision.

“He just had the ability to put something memorable into a little statement on the radio,” Reid said. “He didn’t go on and on. There aren’t many disc jockeys who can competently quote Shakespeare on the air and keep listeners, but Bill could.”

Moen wrote most of his own material or told stories spontaneously, always playing up the sentimentality of the San Franciscans who chose KABL over its competitors, KSFO and KGO.

“You’re truly clearly an old-timer if you caught the dinner show in the nightspot in the city, the Venetian Room in the Fairmont Hotel. Wow,” he said in one of his vignettes.

“The Mills Brothers, Peggy Lee, Nat Cole. Remember John Gary? I’ll bet that you don’t remember Sergio Franchi. The biggest names and the names that you don’t quite remember but all part of the excitement of San Francisco and all remembered by KABL music.”

William Iver Moen was born Feb. 11, 1929, in Minnesota, where he grew up. His first career path was as a bank teller in Duluth, where he chatted up one of his customers, Vivienne McCormack. They married, and Moen made the unlikely transition from banker to disc jockey, first in Fargo, N.D., then in Duluth.

His big move was to a Top 40 station in Houston. He was instructed to use the handle “Bill Scott” so he was used to keeping his own name off the air when he got the job at KABL.

While playing what would come to be known as “elevator music,” Moen could make it sound like he was at the height of Nob Hill sophistication.

“Moen punched his way through that tapioca-pudding format and became a personality, ” Moen’s rival, Jim Dunbar of KGO, said when Moen made the Bay Area Radio Hall of Fame in 2006.

According to former KABL station manager Bill Clark, the process of elevating Moen from morning shift announcer into a full-blown personality and standard-bearer for the station was gradual. The idea was not to compete with Sherwood, who was untouchable, or KNBR’s Frank Dill and his partner, Mike Cleary, who produced morning comedy and talk shows with music sprinkled in.

“The only thing we were trying to do was to take advantage of Bill’s inherent talent,” Clark said. “His personality would not overpower the music but would contribute to the appeal of the station.”

The talent on the AM dial was tremendous during Moen’s tenure. In addition to Sherwood, there was Jim Lange, Frank and Mike, Carter B. Smith, Ronn Owens, Gene Nelson. Moen topped them all when “Evening Magazine” on KPIX gave Moen the Bay Area’s Most Popular Radio Personality Award after a vote by its viewers, in 1983.

“Those vying for the honor of cable car bell ringer of the year are still dead serious in their efforts,” he announced in one of his more recent “Moods.” “The lunchtime crowds back then were huge and enthusiastic, and the winner got worldwide attention. Well, somebody else (sponsors the bell-ringing competition), but the bells still ring in the temple of our memory at KABL music.”

But Moen did not ride the cable cars or live in the city or even work there. He got up at 3:30 every morning to commute in the dark to a studio near the Bay Bridge toll plaza in Oakland from Novato, where he and Vivienne raised two kids, Tim and Heather. Vivienne Moen died in 2018.

Heather Moen recalled that whenever she would go to a friend’s house, she would be greeted by a parent with, “I wake up to your dad every morning,” she said. “Even the cashiers at Safeway would comment when they’d see his name on a check.”

In 1990, Moen was assigned a co-host, a South Bay shock jock named Trish Bell, to handle weather and traffic. The format switched from easy listening and standards to soft adult contemporary and was simulcast on FM, at 98.1. “Soft and easy KABL” was the slogan. In 1993, Moen was let go. The AM station evolved into KNEW business talk, and the FM station became KISQ, the Breeze.

By then Moen had bought a second home in Lake County, and he and Vivienne moved there. But he could not shake the habit of getting up while it was still dark out. So he figured he may as well get in a car and drive to work, which he did at KXBX for another 20 years.

Even in retirement, the “Bill Moen Moods” lived on, when David Jackson of the Bay Area Radio Museum asked Moen to join a “Classic KABL Music” station online in 2009. Moen contributed some 50 taped vignettes to air sporadically mixed in with the old music on KABLradio.com. They will be airing in concentration along with testimony from his radio contemporaries on the Bill Moen Tribute Show, from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. Friday, May 20, and repeating from noon to 2 p.m. Sunday, May 22.

“I knew I had landed the gig of a lifetime watching Bill and bantering with him on the KABL morning show,” said Bell, who hosts a Sunday morning show on the Internet KABL. “His sarcasm and wit was better than any talent I’ve ever known or worked with. He is sorely missed.”

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @SamWhitingSF

Sam Whiting has been a staff writer at The San Francisco Chronicle since 1988. He started as a feature writer in the People section, which was anchored by Herb Caen's column, and has written about people ever since. He is a general assignment reporter with a focus on writing feature-length obituaries. He lives in San Francisco and walks three miles a day on the steep city streets.