Mays got a bachelor’s degree in petroleum engineering from Texas A&M before joining the Air Force, which sent him to Taiwan to supervise construction of a pipeline for the Chinese Nationalist government. Mays never intended to get into radio- Forbes once dubbed him “the accidental broadcaster.” He was born in Houston and grew up in Dallas, the son of a salesman who was killed in a car accident when Mays was twelve, leaving Mays’s mother to support the family by selling real estate. In the end, iHeart fell victim to simple mathematics. But as a song that probably didn’t get a lot of play on Clear Channel stations would have put it, the harder they come, the harder they fall. This is all a far cry from the days when Clear Channel was the most dominant player in the radio industry it helped to usher in the era of talk radio and was regarded by many as a nearly unstoppable force for the blandification of rock music.

Credit analysts predict it could file for bankruptcy any day now. The company has lost money every year since 2007, and it’s saddled with $20.4 billion in debt. It adopted the tech-hipster moniker iHeartMedia, and its finances are a mess.

Today Clear Channel is a markedly different company from the one Mays sold.

Play kfi on iheartradio