Now, after 15 years in the industry, she constitutes half of WWKL’s Kool Morning Crew. It’s her first show in which she teams up with another person, in this case R. J. Harris. However, Rooney pointed out that all of her previous experience has prepared her to take on the difficult task of teaming up with an already-established radio personality. “A lot of women make the mistake of becoming a partner,” she explained to me, “and then they’re never really a personality in the sense that they haven’t done it by themselves.” At the same time, she had to make the necessary adjustments. “I liken it to a pre-arranged marriage,” she told me in regard to their initial compatibility. The chemistry has changed, and now Rooney and Harris could pass off as lifelong friends, a realization they both reached when Rooney first finished one of Harris’ thoughts while on air.

Rooney has also felt her role in the Kool Morning Crew evolve into one more equal to Harris.’ “We both have something to contribute; we both have something to complement the other,” she said. And they both see room for even more change. “One of R.J.’s goals for me is to ‘talk more,’” she laughed.

Her responsibility for the news portion of the show motivates her enough to get her to the station every morning at 4am. While she first delivered news on WNNK in the mid-’80s, she continues to find it satisfying. “I enjoyed being a jock … but the news really allowed me to take off and do more of what I want to do, which is writing and interviewing and things like that,” she said. In fact, she left radio for television for a few years, thinking that she had exhausted her possibilities within the news field. “I was looking for a way to challenge myself, and I wasn’t really getting those challenges that I wanted,” she said.

Television pulled her even further away from her goals. “I thought because you’re adding the element of pictures to sound that it would be more creative, but actually … it really narrows what you can do and how you have to write.” Her current position with WWKL has helped her to rediscover her passion for news. “That’s kind of a nice, fulfilling feeling,” she said, “that you can put together something and someone else likes it.”

Although she feels as though she spends all of her time at the station, she made sure that I knew about time spent on her other passions, mainly her husband and their three sons. And her life is not as serious as the news she delivers. When the time comes for a little rest and relaxation, her ideal setting is the seat of a roller coaster car with family in tow — except for her youngest son, who tolerates roller coasters about as well as he tolerates his mother’s pink flamingo lawn ornaments.