The voice of Shaggy also counted down America's hits for decades
Casey Kasem, a Detroit grocer's son named after Atatürk, launched American Top 40 on July 4, 1970, when Top 40 radio looked finished. A year earlier he had started voicing Shaggy in Scooby-Doo. He later walked away from Transformers rather than voice a cartoon Arab villain.
Kasem's Lebanese Druze parents kept a grocery in Detroit, where he arrived in April 1932; his father admired Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and named his son after him. A 1940s radio show, Make Believe Ballroom, reportedly made him want to be a disc jockey. He called school sports on air, voiced children in radio dramas such as The Lone Ranger while at Wayne State University, and after being drafted in 1952 worked as a DJ for the American Forces Korea Network.
His early career zigzagged: stations in Flint and Detroit, a spell as a children's TV clown, time back at the family store, and six months chasing stage work in New York, where he lost a part to Ed Asner. In Cleveland he climbed to second place on weeknights within three months, then moved through Buffalo, San Francisco and Oakland. At KEWB he found his trademark in a pop trivia magazine pulled from the trash, mixing artist stories with the records. Dick Clark hired him to co-host the teen show Shebang in 1964.
American Top 40, created with Don Bustany, Tom Rounds and Ron Jacobs, counted down the Billboard Hot 100 and sprinkled in trivia and listener long-distance dedications. It started on seven stations, went national and grew to four hours in 1978. After a contract dispute in 1988 he signed a five-year, 15 million dollar deal with Westwood One for Casey's Top 40, then reclaimed the original name and relaunched it in 1998.
Voice work ran alongside. He played Shaggy from 1969 and Robin in Super Friends from 1973 to 1985, and voiced Merry in the 1980 animated Return of the King. He quit the pilot of the sitcom Soap over its content and left Shaggy in 1997 over a Burger King advert. He died on June 15, 2014; artificial nutrition was withdrawn in line with an advance directive he had written, a decision that prompted wide debate among bioethicists.
Source: Casey Kasem
