PA Radio: RIP...Veteran Country Personality Dandalion

Country Radio's Dandalion

Country radio veteran Gwyneth Seese, better known in the indrustry as Dandalion, died Saturday.

She was 77-years-of age.

Dandalion was country music's premier female disc jockey For nearly 20 years, she was the all-night disc jockey on WRKZ 106.7 FM in Hershey.   Her show was number one in the Harrisburg, Lancaster, York, and Lebanon ADI for many of those years.

Seese credited a CB radio with launching her radio career. During the 1970s, at the height of the CB radio craze, Seese drove 110 miles each night for the U.S. Postal Service. She bought a CB for protection but soon discovered the fun of communicating with other nighttime travelers, most of them truckers.

Using Dandalion as her handle, Seese developed a special respect for the individuals who were her nightly traveling companions. She wrote a book about truckers which led to her being invited to guest on radio. When Big John Trumble, a well-known trucker DJ in Richmond, VA at WRVA invited her to substitute for him during his vacation, she moved into a new career as an overnight DJ in trucker radio. At the time,  she was 41 years old.

She was hired by WIOV 105.1 FM where her show debuted in 1979. Three years later, she moved to WRKZ where she became the dominant female disc jockey in the area. In 1999, she became the first woman in the history of country music to host her own network show, "Dandalion's Cat Country Network."

Seese is the first woman in country music to be nominated for the industry's top three DJ awards (Academy of Country Music, Country Music Association, and Billboard). In 1989 she was nominated for all three awards simultaneously. She was named the Academy's Top Country Disc Jockey that year, the first woman so honored. She was inducted into the Country DJ Hall of Fame in 1999, one of the first women to be elected to the Hall.

She was the first female to be named Music Director of the Year (1992) by Gavin.  She has won that award three additional times (1997, 1999, 2000). Billboard named her Music Director of the Year in 1993 and Local Air Personality of the Year in 1996.

Seese went off the air in 2002 to work as a music director for WRKZ and WCAT. She was fired in 2004 when the stations were sold, and she filed an age-discrimination lawsuit against parent company Citadel Broadcasting. They settled out of court.