Country 107.3 WRWD carries a family name in the truest sense. The call letters were not chosen for branding or market research. They belong to three actual children, and the station that grew up around them is now the Hudson Valley's leading country outlet.
An Orchard Owner Signs On
WRWD-FM went on the air in September 1989 on 107.3 MHz, licensed to Highland, New York, put there by apple orchard owner William H. "Bud" Walker. Walker came from a family that had been growing fruit in the Town of Lloyd since 1889, four generations of orchard work before he ever touched a broadcast license. He named the station's call letters after his own children, Rachel, William Jr., and David, turning a family tree into a set of FCC call letters that still identify the signal today.
Country Music Nobody Else Wanted to Play
The station did not start as a country outlet. Early programming leaned on satellite feeds before Thom Williams took over as program director in 1990 and pointed WRWD toward country music specifically because area stations had avoided the format for years, ceding the Hudson Valley to out-of-market signals from New York City, Albany, and Hartford. That gap is what gave a small Highland station room to build an actual regional audience rather than compete directly with bigger city signals already crowding the dial.
From Family Business to Clear Channel Market Leader
Walker sold WRWD and sister station WBWZ to Hudson Valley Radio Partners in 1996, and Clear Channel Communications took over operational control in November 2000 after acquiring the remaining stations in the cluster. Under that ownership the station hit a real milestone, becoming the number one station in Dutchess and Ulster counties for the first time in 2002, a sign that the country format Williams had bet on a decade earlier had fully taken hold of the market.
Still Growing Under a Bigger Roof
WRWD now operates under iHeartMedia, the successor to Clear Channel, and carries The Bobby Bones Show, a nationally syndicated country morning program the station picked up in 2018. The lineup connects Bud Walker's original family-named signal to a national country radio brand, but the call letters on air every day still spell out the same three names an orchard owner chose back in 1989.