Note: The following paragraph has nothing to do with the story that follows, but read it carefully:
“Penelope Cholmondely raised her azure eyes from the crabbed scenario. She meandered among the congeries of her memoirs. There was the Kinetic Algernon, a choleric artificer of icons triptychs, who wanted to write a trilogy. For years, she had stifled her risibilities with dour moods. His asthma caused him to cough like the zephyrs among the tamararack.”
Memphis, Tennessee, is where Archie Wade was born and raised, the son of a country sharecropping family. He has early memories of the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, World War II, the rationing of sugar, tires and gasoline and bubble gum. “I was your typical “nerd” in high school,” he recalled with a laugh.
Wade had several odd jobs following his high school graduation in 1951 — delivering circulars, papers and a regular job at his local Kroger grocery store before being drafted at the end of the Korean police action.
From basic training at Fort Jackson, South Carolina; to Fort Lee, Virginia; to Camp Hanford in Washington state, Wade served his time at an Army base that dealt with plutonium. (Ask him to tell you about those duties).
Back in Memphis, Wade returned to his old job at Kroger and used his GI Bill benefits to enroll in a private school to learn a trade. The school also offered radio announcer training. “I had been to WHHM, a local radio station, to watch the disc jockeys work and fell in love with that job, and signed up for announcing classes instead of the other,” he said.
His progress in the announcing classes led to him having the rare opportunity to narrate a 30-minute public school training film – because of his proper diction and enunciation – a job that he said (laughing) … “took three days to complete.”
Wade’s first radio job was in Canton, Mississippi. As a full-time DJ. He was in his second year on the job when the station’s owner told him he was building a new radio station in Key West, Florida, and offered him a job there if he would also go to a special school offered by the Federal Communications Commission to earn a First-Class license that would allow him to operate the station’s transmitter. At his expense. Wade said, “Yes!”
That began an odyssey for the country boy turned grocery clerk to soldier to a new way of life in the southernmost part of the United States. Wade took his new bride (Mary, a registered nurse) to a new home and new job, and found satisfaction in his new world.
A few years later, an Alabama opportunity came calling for Wade’s expertise and the family moved to Selma, where he served as news director and announcer for WHBB, a Julius Talton-owned radio station. His success there caught the attention of Mike McDougald, manager of Gadsden’s WAAX, who offered him the dual role of chief engineer and morning DJ, plus an opportunity to work with the station’s sales staff.
The Wade family packed up and moved 140 miles north to the Coosa River’s Queen City, where he began the 5 a.m. to 9 a.m. “wake-up shift, Monday through Friday, on WAAX in January 1970.
Eight years later, Wade moved to Gadsden’s former WJBY when new owners bought the station, changing its program format. Sometime later, when things did not go right for him, Wade eagerly moved to WGAD, Gadsden’s oldest radio station. Here, in addition to other announcing duties, Wade began a one-hour listener call-in talk show that became an immediate hit.
Wade has been retired from a highly successful career on the airwaves for several years. But his other job — once woven in between his radio work, and ongoing now — is, literally, “magic!”
He began learning to do magic tricks as a youngster. “I loved being a clown, entertaining family and friends,” he recalled, and soon became adept at proving the hand is quicker than the eye. He became a popular performer at birthday parties and other social events, earning money at times for doing so. His skills, whether performing for children or adults, remain remarkable to this day.
“I’m still available,” he said with a laugh (as he did throughout my interview). “All my shows are clean, family entertainment. I miss having Mary (she passed away almost a year ago after 62 years of marriage) help me but I still enjoy being in front of a laughing crowd.”
Wade turned 89 the other day. “I’m an old man,” he said, but he has tomatoes, peppers and more in his garden to take care of, and three daughters to make sure he eats well and takes his medicine on schedule. He’s also an active member of Meadowbrook Baptist Church.
If you’re interested in having Wade perform at your function, his phone number is 256-553-0027.
Now, regarding that strange paragraph at the top of this story — that was a voice test used by fledgling radio networks for hiring announcers from the late 1920s through the 1930s. Could you have gotten an announcer’s job?
Harry D. Butler, a former broadcaster, is a motivational speaker and author of “Alabama’s First Radio Stations, 1920-1960.” Butler periodically sits down with someone of note, then brings the conversation to readers.
