Judy Rose was the host of Simply Folk for almost 25 years,
and was heard Sunday evenings from 5pm to 8pm on most Wisconsin Public Radio stations. She retired in August of 2005.
Family and folk music are Judy's twin passions and, in the fall,
finding perfect apples for sauce and pie. Her roots are in New England where family members
still milk Jerseys, boil sap for syrup, and root for the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox.
Most of Judy's children (and their children) are now in Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Besides hosting Simply Folk, Judy worked in Audience Services at WPR.
In the 1980s she produced a 13 part series, The Wisconsin Patchwork, on the folk music of
Wisconsin collected by Helene Stratman-Thomas in the 1940s.
Before coming to Wisconsin Public Radio in 1980, Judy worked in
archives in New York, cataloguing a collection of letters of Episcopal bishops, and
North Carolina, indexing a collection of British folk music. She taught high school
English and was program secretary at a university YM/YWCA.
