Program director Alfredo Rodriguez and chief engineer Jerry Lewine wished to bring back the original KHJ call sign; however, the FCC stopped issuing three-letter call signs to radio stations in the 1930s. Rodriguez and Lewine conceived a plan to convince the FCC to change the station's call sign. Since the Spanish pronunciation of KKHJ's first two letters ("kah-kah") sounded like "caca" (slang for "feces" in that language), the call letters were pronounced in English for a decade. This was awkward, so the station collected letters from listeners and lobbied the FCC to allow the station to drop one of its letters. The commission allowed the station to return to its original call, KHJ, on March 15, 2000.