Legendary Gordon McLendon Once Picked Crappy Call letters

Gordon McLendon

An interesting story about radio and music marathons by Paula Allen at mysanantonio.com, contains an interesting note about Top 40 Pioneer Gordon McLendon.

In 1958, the year the King became an Army private, San Antonio’s KTSA 550 AM Radio briefly changed its call letters to KAKI.

This was one of then-station owner Gordon McLendon's “biggest and most humorous blunders,” Ronald Garay writes in his biography, “Gordon McLendon: The Maverick of Radio.”

McLendon is widely credited for perfecting, during the 1950s and 1960s, the commercially successful Top 40 radio format created by Todd Storz.

McLendon and his father founded radio station KLIF The Mighty 1190 in Oak Cliff, Dallas, Texas in 1947, and introduced the Top 40 format there in the early 1950s to great success. KLIF enjoyed a long run at the top of the Dallas radio ratings in the 1950s and 1960s, but its standing in the market fell in the early 1970s thanks to growing competition from FM radio.

Anyway, the new call letters KAKI, pronounced “khaki,” as in uniform fabric, “were meant to more closely identify the station with San Antonio's sizable military population.”

The heavily promoted switch was expected to boost ratings, but instead, the station lost listeners.

In Spanish, the slang word caca has a meaning associated with, say, diaper contents. 

McLendon's secretary, Yolanda Salas, alerted The Old Dutchman to the unwelcome association, and the station's call letters were changed back to KTSA after only three months.