For exactly one year, 50,000 watt clear channel KGA was the finest Top 40 station in the Pacific Northwest: great jingles, great DJs, great music, great chart — several excellent singles never made Billboard’s Hot 100 but were heard on KGA. The Superhit Survey was a Top 30 with another 11 DJ picks and a list of 10 albums.

Listen and hear how they flushed it all away in less than 10 minutes. They stuck it out for another month, but their credibility and listeners gone, KGA switched formats to C&W and the air staff left. According to a book on Promotion, this same scenario was tried at a Texas station several months earlier, with similar results. They should have known better.

Outside of Spokane, you had to wait for sunset to hear KGA, but then it usually came in like a local from San Diego to Vancouver and through the Rockies. That made Shane’s 6-10pm program the station’s most popular. He ended each night talking emotionally over most of Barbra Streisand’s “People”. He was always extremely competent, so he must have been very nervous about this plan, given all the mistakes in this aircheck. Rumor has it he went to Top 40 CKXL in Calgary, to capitalize on KGA’s listeners there, but no one has heard of him since.

On a personal note, more because I thought it was a good idea than as a tribute to Shane and KGA, “People” was the last song on my last show — in November 1974 at CFYK in Yellowknife in Canada’s North West Territories.