Buffalo’s Own Tom Donahue Retiring
• After 55 years on Buffalo radio, the last 15 years in morning drive on The Big WECK, “Buffalo’s Oldies Station,” Tom Donahue will hang up his headphones after his final show this Friday, Sept. 29.
Big WECK’s owner Buddy Shula said, “Tom is a throwback to when broadcasters would do anything and everything just to be in the business of broadcasting. That is not a learned skill. It’s in your DNA. Either you have it, or you don’t. Tom always has. He is a statesman for the radio industry, hard-working, professional, and always a gentleman.” WECK PD John “JP” Piccillo noted, “Tom is one of the Buffalo legends I listened to in my teenage years. Fifty years later, it’s a privilege to call him a colleague and a friend. He will always be a member of our BIG WECK family. Friday morning will be very bittersweet at WECK.”
Aside from a brief stint in Utica, most of Donahue’s radio career has been spent in Buffalo, most notably at WKBW (KB Radio 1520), where he was host of the ratings giant Original Saturday Night All-Request Oldies Show from 1981-1986. Other stops prior to WECK included WGR 550, WYSL 1400, WKSE, 107.7 WNUC, 104.1 WHTT and 107.7 WLKK.
Concurrent with his long radio career, Donahue also served as an Associate Professor in the Communication Department at Buffalo State University for over 35 years, where he propelled many of his students into their own broadcast careers, including Tom Calderone, Dave McKinley, Claudine Ewing, Dan Rinelli, Susan Rose, Chris “Bulldog” Parker, and Howard Simon, to name just a few. Donahue said, “The one thing I stressed as a professor in all my years of teaching is ‘passion.’ It’s a business that will ‘eat you alive’ if you do not possess that trait. Students always appreciated that I was practicing what I was preaching. I was always in the industry while I was a communications professor, and my students could sense that you must love what you do.”
In closing, Donahue said, “Jeff Kaye hired me at WKBW in 1972, and he always said, ‘You have to respect the business of radio, because as a radio personality, you affect more people in one show than most people do in a lifetime.'”
Post-retirement, Donahue looks forward to not waking up at 3am, which will give him more time to sleep in, and spend more time with Barbara, his wife of 48 years, his two kids, Kimberly and Robbie, and six grandchildren. Donahue’s successor at Big WECK has not yet been announced.
