Syracuse’s Kathy Rowe Celebrates 30-Year At Y94

Radio is all about connection.

When listeners wake up and turn it on every day, they’re inviting a personality into their home, their car, their workplace and their life. There are no visual judgments to get in the way. It’s left to the listener’s imagination and to the personality’s voice. Listeners become familiar with that personality’s beliefs, family, life and attitudes and learn about the world through their words. The listener trusts him or her.

But radio is an ever-changing medium. On-air personalities come and go, station formats change and companies buy and sell call letters every day. But WYYY-FM 94.5 (Y94) morning host and program director Kathy Rowe, 52, has defied all the odds of the fluctuating business.

Syracuse New Times profiles Rowe, who’s been on Y94 for 30 years steady and in radio even longer. She’s a voice, a personality and an icon who listeners have brought and continue to bring into their homes and lives every day. She’s not just a personality. To many, she’s a friend.

And so, for more than 30 years she’s stayed local and made her way quickly through the radio ranks: from Onondaga Community College’s radio station, WOCC, to WOLF-AM 1490 to WAQX-FM 95.7 (95X) and in 1982 to WYYY, then 94 Rock with its album-oriented “rock of the 80s” format, but now Y94.

She has emceed events and introduced bands, championed causes and organizations, interviewed countless celebrities, watched the entire medium shift from tape to digital, mothered three children and throughout it all has remained current with the trends, respected by her peers and loved by her audience.

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