Fab in Her Own Right

Sundays have lost something for the many baby boomers who found in Deirdre O’Donoghue’s long-running “Breakfast With the Beatles” radio show the background sound for day-off freeway trips and leisure time.

O’Donoghue, who died unexpectedly at her Santa Monica home this week, held an encyclopedic knowledge of all things related to the Beatles and their music, which nourished boomers’ romanticized recollections of the 1960s. In their temperate years of midlife, her radio program offered a bridge from a formative cultural time to the sassy FM era of their own children.

O’Donoghue’s passion and knowledge for the Beatles transcended the ordinary realm of the disc jockey. She inhabited a plateau on her subject comparable to that of Jonathan Schwartz, the peerless New York City expert on Frank Sinatra. A product of one of the great early alternative radio stations, WBCN in Boston, she also belonged in the same exalted company with that station’s Charles Laquidera and with Scott Muni of the old WNEW-FM in New York.

Her enthusiasm for discovering good new bands and her knowledge went far beyond the Beatles, but her name always will be twinned with the band’s. Her work in Southern California radio, beginning in the late 1970s at KKGO-FM, later at KCRW-FM and other stations and finally at KLSX-FM, stood far above the commercial rigidity of format radio today.

The Beatles anthology CDs released in recent years had in O’Donoghue a worthy tour guide for expert listeners, as well as for today’s teenagers just now discovering the Fab Four and putting them back at the top of the charts.