Rosalie Trombley

Rosalie Trombley (born circa 1939) is a Canadian former music director of AM Top 40 radio station CKLW, also known as "The Big 8". She was known for her ability to select songs that would later become big hits. At the time, she was one of the few female music directors in AM top 40; Kal Rudman, editor of the Friday Morning Quarterback, a music trade publication, referred to her as "the number one music director in the United States." Her influence as a music director later led to an annual award being named after her.

Trombley was born in Leamington, Ontario. She worked for Bell Canada while in high school.

Trombley and her then-husband Clayton moved to Windsor, and she was hired in 1963 to work as a part-time switchboard operator and receptionist at CKLW. After becoming familiar with how a top 40 station worked, she accepted a position in the music library, and in the fall of 1968, she was offered a full-time position as CKLW's music director, a job she later attributed to "being in the right place at the right time."

As music director, her job was to find the songs that listeners liked best; her decision to add a song to CKLW's playlist could influence its success. Known for her "good ears", Trombley was frequently able to predict when an album track had the potential to become a hit single.

CKLW was a Windsor, Ontario based station, but it programmed for the Detroit market in the USA; part of its programming strategy was to downplay the fact that its city of license was Windsor, Ontario, and to present itself as an American station. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, With its 50,000 watt AM signal, CKLW covered Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana and Illinois, as well as southwestern Ontario, Cleveland and Toledo. In the early 1970s, the station had one of the largest cumulative audiences in North America.

In the 1970s, the CRTC mandated that radio stations follow Canadian Content rules and play a certain percentage of Canadian music. Trombley picked the Canadian records she felt stood the best chance of becoming hits for airplay. In some cases, listener response to the Canadian records the station featured led to an American single release, and occasionally a national hit, as in the case of the Skylark song "Wildflower", playing it for over three months as an album cut before its release as a single. Another example is The Carpenters' 1977 cover of Canadian band Klaatu's "Calling Occupants Of Interplanetary Craft".

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