John KampfeHome, New Jersey Profiles

He might not be well-known in his home state but New Jersey-born Jay Towers is quite a presence in his adopted city of Detroit.

That’s because Towers is one of Motown’s top media personalities, a fixture in the morning on both radio and TV. Towers hosts Jay Towers in the Morning during morning drive time on iHeart Radio’s FRESH 100.3 WNIC. The Toms River native also is weekday co-anchor on the Fox 2 Morning News on WSBJ-TV, which is where he also broadcasts his radio program.

Incredibly it’s not a simulcast but two separate programs. Towers takes multi-tasking to new level by “running down the hall at Fox 2” between studios. That kind of exposure led to Towers being voted Detroit’s “Best Media Personality” in 2013 and 2014.

When it comes to radio, Towers was a child prodigy. He got his start at age 14 at WJRZ in Manahawkin just as he was entering Central Regional High School in Bayville. He said in an interview in My magazine a few years ago that he got interested in music at age 6 when he came across his dad’s “45s” collection. That led to him putting together a cassette demo tape that he pitched to WJRZ. So while classmates were working after school at the local supermarket or on the boardwalk, Towers was building an audience by playing Top 40 tunes at the Jersey Shore radio station.

After high school Towers moved a few miles south to WAVY/WBSS in Atlantic City before heading west to Michigan and a job at WMAX in Grand Rapids. He came back east to work at WIOQ in Philadelphia before landing in Detroit in 1996. And he has stayed there ever since.

Towers began his “side career” in television in 2003 when Fox 2 hired him as a weekend anchor.

“Before that my only TV experience was making announcements on my high school’s closed-circuit channel in New Jersey,” he told My magazine.

Towers apparently took well to the medium because Fox 2 appointed him co-anchor in the highly visible weekday morning slot in 2014. This year he tackled a new area — film. Towers this spring made a cameo appearance in the blockbuster Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

It was a dream come true for Towers. He told the Detroit Free Press that he has been a Superman fan since age 4 when his parents took him to see Superman starring the late Christopher Reeve, coincidentally a fellow Jerseyan who grew up in Princeton. In fact his radio station office is a veritable shrine to the superhero. And it was Towers’ office decor that got him the movie appearance.

“When Zack Snyder, the director, was in Detroit scouting locations on the weekend,” Towers explained in a radio interview earlier this year, “he would watch Fox 2 and it was on a weekend that they did a story about my Superman office at the radio station. He said: ‘That’s great; put that guy in the movie.'”

Towers has established firm roots in Motown over the past two decades there. The single father of a teenaged daughter has moved his parents to The Detroit Metro area, and lends his name and time to several local charities. These include “Jay’s Juniors” through which he takes children with chronic or terminal illnesses to Walt Disney World at Christmas.

‘I love this city so much,” Towers told My magazine. “The people here are the best in the world and it’s a great place to raise a child.”