Gordon McLendon

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Gordon Barton McLendon (born June 8, 1921 in Paris, Texas; died September 14, 1986) is widely credited for perfecting, with great commercial success, the Top 40 radio format during the 1950s and 1960s which was first invented by Todd Storz.

He attended Yale and fought in World War II before briefly attending Harvard Law School and leaving to buy an interest in a station in Palestine, Texas, KNET.

McLendon, nicknamed "The Old Scotchman", is also noted in radio history as the founder of the Liberty Radio Network (noted for its daily national broadcasts of Major League Baseball) in the 1940s. Most of Liberty's MLB broadcasts were re-creations of games, utilizing McLendon himself and future sportscasting stars such as Lindsey Nelson and Jerry Doggett on play-by-play.

Interestingly, it was a live, not re-created game that provided McLendon and Liberty with their greatest career moment. The Scotchman himself was behind the Liberty mic at the Polo Grounds in New York for the October 3, 1951 finale of the three-game National League play-off series between the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers). Bobby Thomson of the Giants swung at Dodger Ralph Branca's 0-1 pitch in the last of the ninth with two runners aboard, and McLendon barked:

Bobby swings, there's a long one out there out to left! Going, going, GONE and the Giants win the pennant!

With radio still the more popular nationwide medium then, and with Russ Hodges' famous radio call limited to WMCA and its Giants' network, McLendon's call is how most Americans heard the NL clincher.

In other radio milestones, McLendon was one of the originators of the "beautiful music" format on his KABL in Oakland, California in 1959; and as the founder of the first all-news radio station (WNUS in Chicago) in the 1960s. McLendon also founded and named KOST in Los Angeles and introduced the all-news format to Southern California through XETRA in Tijuana, now primarily a sports station.

In 1959, McLendon co-produced two sci-fi monster movies filmed in Texas, The Killer Shrews and The Giant Gila Monster. Both are now considered cult classic b-films and were even featured on the show Mystery Science Theatre 3000 in the 1990s.

McLendon was also the last owner of ABC affiliate KCND-TV in Pembina, North Dakota. In 1975, he sold that station to Winnipeg executive Izzy Asper, who moved the station to Winnipeg and used it to start up CKND, which would become the genesis of the present-day Global.

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. One of the FM stations most instrumental in the downfall of KLIF was its former sister station KNUS (now KLUV), of which McLendon retained ownership after selling KLIF and revamped as a rock-oriented Top 40.

Jack Ruby was both a listener and admirer of McLendon and known to the staff of the station. Conspiracy theorists Warren Hinckle and William Turner (in their book Deadly Secrets) and Peter Dale Scott have alleged that McLendon played a peripheral role in the John F. Kennedy assassination. [1] [2] [3]

McLendon, a conservative Democrat, lost the primary election against incumbent US Senator Ralph Yarborough in 1964. He entered the primary for the 1968 Texas gubernatorial election, but withdrew from both the election and the Democratic Party, citing President Lyndon Johnson's Vietnam War policies.

McLendon was inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame in 1994.