According to a recent Detroit News article on his upcoming retirement after 45 years, nearly all spent in Detroit since 1965, Dick Purtan was at WKNR in 1967. The WKNR charts from ct30.com show that “Beggin’” spent just 4 weeks on the WKNR charts, charting 27-19-16-17 before falling off the chart. Here is the peak chart (third week on the WKNR chart):

http://www.ct30.com/wknr/keener13/670320w.txt

The #16 peak matches the #16 Hot Hundred peak (from Joel Whitburn).

Often, if a record wasn’t moving up the station chart fast enough, it was dropped after a few weeks. Unfortunately, that is what most likely happened at many radio stations with “Beggin’”.

We can speculate about the reasons why. Perhaps it wasn’t promoted aggressively, perhaps we were already into the psychedelic era and Joe Long’s strong bass line and the wonderful violins and vocals weren’t enough to carry the crowd on Plum Street and in the Haight Ashbury district.