Stephen Gruber-Miller

sgrubermil@press-citizen.com

Longtime KXIC radio host Dottie Ray will be remembered as "one of the pioneers in broadcasting for women," a former co-worker said Tuesday.

"She was one of the first women to have their own talk show on the radio. … Back then it was a very male-dominated business," said JJ Cook, senior vice president of programming for iHeartMedia and KXIC. "She left newspaper writing to take up stuff with the radio, and she just became a success."

Ray died at age 93, the station announced Tuesday on its Facebook page. Her media career in Iowa City spanned generations, dating back to the 1940s. Her colleagues remember her as someone who cared about her community and was deeply involved beyond her work in radio.

"She was instrumental in helping raise money and do a lot of awareness for many of the nonprofits and civic groups, fine arts in the schools in the Iowa City area," Cook said.

Those groups included the Ronald McDonald House, Habitat for Humanity, Riverside Theatre, the Crisis Center of Johnson County and many other local arts programs and nonprofits.

Ray's career covered 55 years with KXIC, where she hosted "The Dottie Ray Show," which first aired on Sept. 4, 1959. She held her final broadcast in May 2014 after 14,144 shows and 32,397 guests.

Her longevity is practically unheard of and is one of the reasons there are so many memories of her, colleagues said.

"In media in general, it's very rare to see someone in a role for that long," said KXIC morning show host Jay Capron. "Over 50 years with the same station is very rare, and so the fact that she was with KXIC for that long is quite a feat."

When Capron started at the station in 2010, long after Ray established herself as an essential part of the community, he said she welcomed him with open arms.

Capron said he'd look to Ray to learn more about what was happening in the community. He called her an inspiration.

"One of the things you would hear repeatedly from all of the guests that were on her show was how welcoming she was and how easy she made it for people to talk to her," Capron said. "She was very kind and she was just very easy to talk to so a lot of people would say they forgot they were on the radio because they were just sitting in the living room talking to her."

And, Cook said, Ray did everything herself, from booking her guests to conducting the interviews in her own Iowa City apartment turned radio studio. He called Ray "the nicest person I've ever met in broadcasting."

Ray is a native of Eagle Grove and attended the University of Iowa in the 1940s, where she was the fifth female editor-in-chief of the Daily Iowan.

MORE ON DOTTIE RAY:

Ray ran the student newspaper's first all-female editorial staff, putting the first female sports editor in the Hawkeye press box, during an eventful era that saw D-Day on June 6, 1944, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt's death April 12, 1945.

Ray also spent time as a student announcer with WSUI and substitute editor with the Press-Citizen and graduated from UI — where she would later teach journalism — with bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism.

Ray married future director of the UI Institute of Public Affairs Robert Ray — who died in 1982 — and, outside of a three-year stint in Albany, N.Y., she lived in Iowa her entire life.

She was inducted into the Iowa Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame in 2008 and in 2014 won the national Marconi Small Market Personality of the Year award.

Ray loved talking to kids, Capron said, and as the years went by those kids became parents who brought their own children to Ray's show. Capron said those generations of Iowa City residents Ray touched will keep her memory alive.

"She'll be dearly missed and I don't think she'll ever be forgotten because there's so many people that remember her," he said. "And she touched so many people over the years that there's always going to be stories of what she did."​

Reach Stephen Gruber-Miller at 319-887-5407 or sgrubermil@press-citizen.com. Follow him at @sgrubermiller.