Background and career
John Donald Imus Jr. ( EYE-məs; July 23, 1940 – December 27, 2019), also known as Imus, was an American radio personality, television show host, recording artist, and author. His radio show Imus in the Morning was aired on various stations and digital platforms nationwide until 2018. Imus began his first radio job at KUTY in Palmdale, California in 1968. Three years later, he landed the morning broadcast position at WNBC in New York City. He was fired from WNBC in 1977, worked for a year at WHK in Cleveland, and was rehired by WNBC in 1979. He remained at WNBC until it left the air in 1988, at which time his show moved to WFAN, which took over WNBC's former frequency of 660 kHz. Howard Stern's success with national syndication led Imus in the Morning to adopt the same model in 1993. Imus was labeled a "shock jock" in his later career. He was fired by CBS Radio in April 2007 after describing the Rutgers University women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos". In January 2018, Cumulus Media told Imus that the company was going to stop paying him, and his final show aired on March 29, 2018. He died the following year of complications from lung disease.
Imus was born in Riverside, California, to a wealthy family, the son of John Donald Imus Sr. and Frances E. Imus (née Moore) who ran a 35,000-acre (140 km2) ranch named The Willows near Kingman, Arizona. Imus claimed at one time to practice Judaism then later recanted, calling himself, "spiritual." He had a younger brother, Fred Imus (1942–2011). Imus disliked school, moving "from one hideous private school to another" and described himself as a "horrible adolescent". When he was 15, his parents divorced. His father died when Imus was 20. In 1957, while living in Prescott, Arizona, Imus dropped out of high school and joined the United States Marine Corps. He was stationed at Camp Pendleton where he was in an artillery unit before transferring to the Drum and Bugle Corps. He left the Marines with an honorable discharge, and secured work as a window dresser in San Bernardino, before he was fired for performing strip teases on the mannequins for passersby. Imus then moved to Hollywood with his brother in an attempt to find success as musicians and songwriters, but they struggled to get radio DJs to play their songs on the air. This left Imus homeless, resorting to sleeping in a laundry and hitchhiking back to Arizona. After dropping out of the University of the Pacific, Imus worked as a brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad and in a uranium mine in Arizona. He suffered a mining accident that broke both of his legs.
In 1966, Imus enrolled at the Don Martin School of Radio and Television Arts and Sciences, in Hollywood, after seeing a newspaper advertisement; he was thrown out for being "uncooperative", but studied enough to obtain a broadcasting license from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Upon winning a talent contest at Johnny Otis's night club, he worked as a singer-songwriter, with Otis serving as his manager. After hearing a morning radio DJ at KUTY, in Palmdale, California, Imus went to the station and successfully persuaded the owner to hire him. He signed on the air on June 2, 1968. While at KUTY, Imus debuted his on-air character Billy Sol Hargis, a radio evangelist inspired by and named for preacher Billy James Hargis and businessman Billie Sol Estes. Imus was an instant success at the station; in two months, he had become number one in ratings for his time slot, and earned a Billboard Award for Air Personality of the Year in a medium-sized market. Imus then had a brief tenure at KJOY in Stockton, California, from which he was fired due to an incident that some sources attributed to his Eldridge Cleaver look-alike contest in which the winner would be incarcerated for a year. Other sources suggest the firing was because of his saying "hell" and multiple raunchy jokes on-air. Imus moved to KXOA in Sacramento, California, whose management team—including general manager Jack G. Thayer and program director John Lund—both left for identical positions at Cleveland station WGAR and took Imus with them. Thayer and Lund were hired by WGAR to revamp the station's old-line middle of the road (MOR) format, and had Imus as the centerpiece for their new adult contemporary format that had been developed at KXOA. Imus's tenure at WGAR lasted for less than 15 months but immediately showed success. The October/November 1970 Arbitron ratings listed Imus at number one in the 18–49 demographic, ahead of WKYC's Jim Runyon and WJW's Ed Fisher; WGAR as a whole topped both the 25–34 and 25–49 demographics. Imus was honored by Billboard as the number one radio personality for 1971, an honor he shared with KMPC's Gary Owens. Imus in the Morning was controversial and satirical, with Imus's existing characters and comedy skits garnering immediate attention. One of his earliest on-air jokes involved promoting the 1958 Bobby Darin single "Queen of the Hop" as "a WGAR exclusive" and talking over it in the mode of a Top 40 DJ. Imus also became infamous for his series of prank calls, even dialing Ohio Attorney General William J. Brown's publicly listed phone number and inviting him to "join the swinging world of show biz". He once contacted an Ohio Bell phone operator to ask if she was married and if "you mess around", prompting the phone company's lawyers to contact the station. His most infamous prank call was to a McDonald's restaurant claiming to be an Ohio National Guard official and ordered 4,000 hamburgers as lunch for the troops. While the phone call was entirely scripted by Imus and Lund (with Lund voicing the McDonald's worker) the segment influenced a later FCC ruling that required all radio DJs to identify themselves when they make phone calls on the air. Imus also devoted one show to help a Yugoslavian immigrant find a bride in order to prevent his deportation after it was discovered he had entered the United States illegally. Meanwhile, Imus, Jack Thayer, and WGAR were hit with a defamation lawsuit by television meteorologist Robert Zames after Imus repeatedly questioned Zames's sobriety and joked about it on-air.
On December 2, 1971, less than three years into his radio career, Imus started his morning show at WNBC in New York City, with a $100,000 annual salary which was said to have been double his WGAR salary. On his second day, he overslept and missed the show. Imus was involved in various projects during his time at WNBC. In March 1973, he began a stand-up comedy and stage act called Imus in the Evening; his first shows were held at The Bitter End in New York City. On January 30, 1974 he appeared as himself (a patient at Hope Memorial with a broken leg from skiing while on vacation from his radio show) on the NBC-TV daytime soap opera The Doctors. By the early 1980s, he was earning as much as $10,000 a performance. Imus retired his stand-up in December 1985. He released an album containing radio segments and songs: 1200 Hamburgers to Go (1972). Imus started to drink heavily during this period, which soon affected his working life. He started to miss work and became increasingly unmanageable. He missed 100 days of work in 1973. In August 1977, WNBC decided to reformat the station and let go of their on-air staff. Imus described himself as "awful" and "a jerk" during this time, and struggled to find a suitable job in New York City that satisfied his salary demands. He returned to Cleveland and began an afternoon drive show on WHK in 1978. He found the experience humiliating but took the job in order to earn money and "get my act together".
On September 3, 1979, Imus returned to the air in mornings at WNBC from 5:30 am. By this time, Imus had started to use cocaine; he quit in 1983. He continued to drink, and his on- and off-air behavior became erratic; he turned up for work without shoes and slept on park benches with large amounts of money in his pocket. By 1981, Imus and Charles McCord secured a deal with Paramount Pictures that involved the development of three screenplays, including work on Joy of Sex. In April 1981, Imus renewed his contract with WNBC with a five-year deal worth $500,000 a year with bonuses if he surpassed ratings targets. Following the addition of Howard Stern in afternoons in 1982, Imus and Stern began a longtime feud though both were paired on WNBC print and television advertisements. In July 1981, Imus released his first book, God's Other Son, a novel about the life of his on-air character Billy Sol Hargis that he wrote with McCord. It was republished in 1994 and spent seven weeks on The New York Times best seller list. By October 1981, Imus was the most popular radio DJ in the US, reaching 220,000 regular listeners and number one in 12 of 13 demographic categories. Imus was also the utility announcer for Geraldo Rivera's monthly TV series Good Night America, which aired as a recurring segment of ABC's Wide World of Entertainment program (1973–1976), and he was one of the inaugural video jockeys (VJ) for the launch of VH-1, sister cable channel to MTV, in 1985.
In 1989, Imus signed a five-year deal to continue his show on WFAN. In April 1989, Imus was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame. Later in 1989, Imus accepted an invitation to become an honorary assistant coach for a basketball game between the Fordham Rams and La Salle Explorers the following January. The show began syndication in June 1993 when it was simulcast on WEEI in Boston, followed by four other stations around the country. Imus was instrumental in raising over $60 million for the Center for the Intrepid, a Texas rehabilitation facility for soldiers wounded in the Iraq War.
Sources
Net-worth figure: Celebrity Net Worth (October 2026), in USD. Biography and career facts: the person's Wikipedia article and linked reporting. Snapshot date for all StarWorth figures: 28 October 2026.
