Faye Gade, R.I.P.

There is a house at 1129 Hope Road in Tinton Falls, New Jersey. Behind that house, there is a shed, as many houses in Tinton Falls have. Next to that shed, there's a commercial FM antenna, and not many houses at all have one of those. Nor do they often have studio facilities in them.

Faye Gade, that house's owner, has passed away. From 1985 until 2000, that made her the owner of FM106.3.

(Yes, the station became FM106.3 in 1984, I'm getting to that.)

She let Rich Robinson take the reins of WHTG-FM's format in 1984, and when he brought in Mike Marrone as music director, she might not have realized she'd caught lightning in a bottle. She could have given up when her father, quite upset that his beautiful music station was now playing rock, tried to sell the station out from under her in 1985, but she didn't. She did everything in her power to make sure she could make the payments on loans she could barely afford (and still make payroll.) In fact, most people in radio would have simply run a format that didn't require that many people to pay, but not Faye. She wanted to own an eclectic rock station, and that's what she owned. In the world of today's radio, this simply would not have happened.

When, in 2000, she finally took an offer no sane person would have refused, and that payday came, it ultimately didn't matter that the station had been one of the best alternative rock stations that ever graced the planet. She had the signal, it was that signal that sold for an obscene sum, and I can't think of anyone that would ever have begrudged her that outcome. For 14 years beginning in late 2000, up 'til recently, she got to enjoy a fairly magnificent payday that she, quite frankly, earned.

But never forget that, regardless of what we who worked for her might have thought at the time, she simply allowed that station to be the station that it was, and for that, she should be remembered with honor.