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SEPTEMBER 11, 2023 — For generations of Southern Californians, he’s known as the brainchild behind the “Los Angeles Radio People” website, which kept an ongoing log of nearly every individual who worked at an AM or FM in the nation’s No. 2 market by size between 1957 and 1997. He launched KIQQ-FM 100.3 in Los Angeles in the 1970s.
Today, the name Don Barrett is one thousands of individuals in the Golden State know, thanks to those efforts. And, many are now mourning the passing of Barrett, who was 81 years of age. RBR.COM
(INSIDERADIO.COM) Don Barrett, who chronicled Los Angeles radio and the personalities that contributed to it in a pair of books and the LARadio.com website, has passed away after battling liver cancer. He was 81.
Barrett, who launched L.A.’s KIQQ (now KKLQ) in the early 1970s, wrote “Los Angeles Radio People – 1957-1995” and launched the LARadio.com website to publicize the book and its follow-up “Los Angeles Radio People Volume 2 – 1957-1997,” according to Los Angeles media reporter Richard Wagoner.
The website evolved into a news source for radio changes and developments in the Los Angeles market until October 2020, when he stopped publishing daily updates.
Last month, Barrett posted news of his diagnosis on the website relating to the writings of Joan Didion, who coined the phrase “ordinary instant.”
“For the past two months, I have been in constant pain. Doctors, hospitals, and ERs,” Barrett wrote, Wagoner reports. “Yesterday, I was in the San Luis Obispo ER for more tests. And there it was in an ordinary instant – advanced stages of liver cancer that had spread… The doctor was sorry to pass on the news and couldn’t hold back tears. Cherie and I looked at each other, burst into tears, and almost simultaneously said, ‘I think this is my ordinary instant.’”
Upon his death, the website now consists of two photos of Barrett and his wife and the sentence “In an ordinary instant – cancer has taken LARadio.com.”
Barrett’s career spanned several decades and multiple roles within the broadcasting and entertainment industry. Starting as a DJ at KNEZ-AM in Lompoc, California, he quickly climbed the ranks to become the Program Director of KABL in San Francisco and General Manager for WWWW and WDRQ in Detroit.
When we return we’ll hear from a lucky person that survived today’s storm and lived to tell about it.