How Much Money Did Casey Kasem Amass? It Was Millions

I grew up and even spent adult life listening to Casey Kasem host his national radio show. His work definitely was part of my inspiration to go into broadcast.

Casey Kasem was one of the most legendary individuals in show business. On June 15, 2014, he died at St. Anthony's Hospital in Gig Harbor, Washington at the age of 82. He was survived by his wife, four children, and four grandchildren.

Kasem was born in Detroit, Michigan on April 27, 1932, to Lebanese immigrant parents. They settled in Michigan, where they worked as grocers.

Kasem, whose professional radio career started in the mid-1950s in Flint, Michigan, was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1952 and sent to Korea, where he was a DJ/announcer on the Armed Forces Radio Korea Network.

He developed his rock-trivia persona from his work as a disc jockey in the early 1960s at KYA in San Francisco, California, and KEWB in Oakland, California. He also worked for several other stations across the country, including WJW (now WKNR) in Cleveland, Ohio; WBNY (now WWWS) in Buffalo, New York; and KRLA 1110 in Los Angeles, California, before launching the national show American Top 40 on July 4, 1970.

Kasem performed many TV commercial voice overs for companies and products like Chevron, Ford, Red Lobster, Raid, Oscar Mayer, Hoover vacuum cleaners, Velveeta, Joy dishwashing liquid, Heinz ketchup, Sears, Prestone, Dairy Queen, Continental Airlines, the California Raisin Advisory Board, the National Cancer Institute, and promos for the NBC television network. In March 2010, Kasem appeared in a commercial for Sprint 4G.

He was the cartoon voice of Shaggy in Scooby-Doo, Robin in Super Friends, and several of the characters in the Transformers cartoon series.

He spent 39 years in the radio countdown business helping him amass a fortune of $80 million.

Me made several appearances in TV shows over the years. One I remember was an episode of Hawaii Five-0 in season seven. Here's a little clip of that: