The Last DJ? Pffffffft!

Those who have lived in the Los Angeles area between 1972 and the present day, if they listened to rock music on the FM band have probably heard of, and even listened to Jim Ladd on the radio. During his career he has worked at at least four radio stations, being fired from some and having one fold up and change formats.
This writer remembers Ladd best from his days at KMET (aka The Mighty MET), and this writer remembers him as being the most self-absorbed, self-congratulatory and most pretentious disc jockey on the air. He was one of those idiots who thought that music could save the world. Actually, to be more accurate, he was one of those knuckleheads who felt that rock and folk-rock and art-rock music could save the world when in fact said music was not able to save a good number of the musicians in the genre (Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, John Bonham and on and on).
Ladd was clever with his choice of music and his play lists, but he was no better than most of the DJs at KMET or KLOS. In fact, your faithful correspondent would posit that Mary Turner, Rachel Donahue, Allen Burton and Pat Kelly were better than Ladd. There were, and are, better DJs on public radio (one of the best being Ian Whitcombe on his show about the history of popular music), but, for some reason or another, Ladd survived until a few days ago.
This survival has done nothing to make the man modest and has done nothing to promote rock music. The man long ago became a bit of a fossil. His playlist was stuck in the '70s and '80s and his mind set was stuck in the same period. And while some of the music from that time was good and entertaining, it was nothing really exceptional. It was music of its time. Listeners to Boss radio on the 1960s got a much later variety of music than did any listener of Ladd's show. But Boss radio was a product of a time before teenagers and young people still spent time with real adults and were exposed to singers ranging from Perry Como to Mungo Jerry. Ladd appealed to an audience stuck in amber-- fifty year old men still wearing Led Zeppelin t-shirts and grandmothers reminiscing about how high they got at the last Cheap Trick concert while telling their grandkids to just say no.
Ladd, although he will deny it, acts as if he invented free-form FM radio. He gives a nod to Tom Donahue, but does not realize that the AM station KLON had the same thing before Donahue hit the air. He likes to think of himself as the last DJ. But he forgets that the last passenger pigeon (a species that once was so numerous that when it migrated in the East and Midwest that its numbers hid the sun for hours) ended up in a zoo until it died and was later stuffed and exhibited in the Smithsonian.
Unlike the passenger pigeon, there will always be another free-form DJ somewhere in the US. Said DJ may not be playing Tom Petty and the Doors, but he will be playing something that appeals to his crowd whether the crowd be in Los Angeles or Bangor.
In fact, this writer posits that Ladd will find another gig. And as much as he is an irritant, that is probably a good thing. If nothing else it shows that for a few hours a station will not have an auto tune play set. It's just too bad that a more worthy person could not get the gig.