A trailblazing broadcaster whose career took her from Rochester to St. Louis, before moving back to this area has died at the age of 90.
Anne Keefe started in 1946 at WHAM Radio after graduating from the University of Rochester.
She started out playing bit parts in soap operas, and then moved with the station to its new location on Humboldt Street.
The first local news broadcast aired at WROC-TV in 1957. Keefe said she had a lot of opportunities to learn her craft during those early days of broadcasting, and she talked about that during an interview with Scott Fybush on WXXI in May of 2013.
“It was the war years, the boys were gone, girls could run the newspaper, girls could run the drama club, they had big influence because the guys were gone. So, that was lucky, I edited a paper, I edited a yearbook and I did it all.”
In the mid 1970s, Anne Keefe moved to St. Louis, and hosted radio shows on the legendary station there, KMOX. She also worked for the public TV station in St. Louis.
Keefe said in her WXXI interview that one of the secrets to her long career was her ability to talk to women as well as men, at a time when that wasn't always the case on the air.
“Because I was the first one to say, you don’t have to vote the way your husband does or even think the way he does; You’ve got to know your husband and if he’s a certain kind of guy you don’t tell him what you think, but you have a right to think whatever you like, and if he’s the kind of guy that will take it, lay it on the line and say, wait a minute, there are two of us here, and women really appreciated that, you know?”
Keefe retired in 1998 and left St. Louis in 2011 to come back to Rochester and be closer to her children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren.
