REMEBERING AN AMERICAN LEGEND.....

Radio personality Casey Kasem has died, according to a Twitter update from his daughter Kerri. He was 82.





The radio icon, famous for his "American Top 40" countdown and voicing the character Shaggy from “Scooby-Doo,”

“The day the music died,” according to Don McLean’s legendary 1971 hit “American Pie,” was February 3, 1959, when Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson (“The Big Bopper”) perished in a plane crash while touring. Fifty years later came another day that rock music sustained a mortal blow—July 4, 2009, when the famed disc jockey Casey Kasem retired. TheAmerican Top 40 brand he co-created continues, with Ryan Seacrest as host, but no one can argue that it isn’t the same without his flagship personality.

The program debuted almost 30 years earlier, on July 4, 1970.  AT40 was the culmination of a career spent mostly over the airwaves, with a sideline in voiceover work and the occasional film and TV appearance. Born on April 27, 1932, in Detroit, Michigan, the Lebanese-American Kasem found his calling early. “I started in radio in 1950 on The Lone Ranger program, which emanated from Detroit,” he recalled. “I was 18 years old and just beginning college.” 

Upon graduating from Wayne State University, Kasem was drafted into the US Army, where he acted as a DJ/announcer for the Armed Forces Radio Korea Network. Back in the United States, California beckoned, and in the early 1960s he deejayed at KYA in San Francisco and KEWB in Oakland, where he began to hone a persona that mixed platter spinning with trivia about the tunes. Kasem would go on to deejay in Cleveland, OH, Buffalo, NY, and Los Angeles.

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