Tom “Big Daddy” Donahue was born in South Bend, IN. He broke into radio in Charleston, WV and then spent nine years as the morning host at WIBG in Philadelphia. WIBG would become one of the stations targeted in the top-40 “payola” scandal of the late ’50s and early ’60s, and that’s when Donahue chose to cross the country to San Francisco.
KYA program director Les Crane was building an all-star lineup, installing Donahue on the afternoon shift as KYA rose to market dominance. Donahue and fellow KYA DJ Bobby Mitchell (also an alumnus of WIBG) launched a number of other ventures, ranging from a music column in the San Francisco Examiner to a concert-production company to a thoroughbred racing stable to a record label. Autumn Records is best remembered for its most successful act, The Beau Brummels.
Donahue left KYA in 1965 but remained busy with Bay Area business interests, including promotion of the 1966 Beatles concert at Candlestick Park which would prove to be their final live performance.
Donahue’s return to radio is what cemented his reputation as a trailblazer. It began at KMPX, where in 1967, Donahue launched a radio format no one had ever heard before. Convinced that the rigid playlists of top-40 radio were a road to nowhere, Donahue’s evening show went the other way: whatever he felt like playing, woven together with his relaxed, conversational voice.
A year later, Donahue and KMPX owner Leon Crosby got into a dispute over whether Donahue could take on additional duties at another Crosby station, KPPC in Pasadena. Unhappy with the situation, Donahue walked out. He was followed by the rest of the staff in what became known as “the first hippie strike”.
Within two months, Donahue was hired by Metromedia’s KSAN, which took the free-form FM concept far beyond what had been accomplished at KMPX. Donahue began as an on-air personality and program director at KSAN and became general manager in 1972. KSAN, named BARHOF “Legendary Station” in 2014, remains an indelible memory for those who heard it.
Tom Donahue died in 1975 at age 47 and was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996.
ADDITIONAL EXHIBITS:
A Brief History of 106.9 FM in San Francisco