Rosalie Howarth was born and raised in Northern California, starting her radio life in 1977 as a volunteer at Pacific Grove’s non-commercial community station KAZU.
It wasn’t long before she was heard on the local “free-form underground FM” station KLRB in Carmel. She remembers, “Six thousand LP’s lining the walls, from the Sex Pistols to Spyrogyra, and you could play pretty much anything you wanted”.
In 1983 she joined San Francisco’s KFOG. She stayed for 35 years. As KFOG grew into a Bay Area institution, she became the only on-air personality to work under every Program Director or interim PD through her retirement in 2018: Dave Logan, John Rivers, Sky Daniels, Greg Solk, Kenny Wardell, Pat Evans, Paul Marszalek, Dave Benson, Dennis Constantine, Bill Pugh, Bryan Shock, Jim Richards, and Mat Bates, plus talented female Music Directors like Kelly Ransford and Haley Jones.
Known to listeners simply as “Rosalie”, she fulfilled a wide variety of roles at KFOG including Specialty Programming Director, Assistant Music Director, Public Affairs Director, Live Recordings Archivist and Intern Training Coordinator. She interviewed major artists such as Paul Simon, Bonnie Raitt, David Byrne, Ed Sheeran and Brandi Carlile.
Her most enduring role was as host of the beloved Sunday program “Acoustic Sunrise”, which ran for 28 years. A blend of acoustic rock, folk, singer/songwriter tunes and rare “unplugged” cuts, the show was appointment listening for many in the Bay Area.
Rosalie Howarth retired from radio in 2018 but continued to perform on the Putumayo World Music Hour, a syndicated program celebrating the music of many different cultures.