On With the Countdown: Happy 50th Birthday to the ‘American Top 40’ Program

If you were listening to radio station KDEO (now KECR) in El Cajon, Calif. on the evening of July 3, 1970, you were one of the first people to hear the very first episode of American Top 40, a show that would become a pop-culture classic, and that would turn many people (including me) on to popular music in general and the Billboard charts in particular.
Casey Kasem kicked off that first countdown with this welcome: “Here we go with the top 40 hits of the nation this week on American