Don Wade & his wife Roma were the morning talk show team on WLS-AM since before WLS flipped from Rock to Talk in 1989.
He had a seizure a year ago and was diagnosed with brain cancer and he has lost the fight to stay alive.
Don Wade & his wife Roma were the morning talk show team on WLS-AM since before WLS flipped from Rock to Talk in 1989.
He had a seizure a year ago and was diagnosed with brain cancer and he has lost the fight to stay alive.
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I thought I had listened to him as a kid in Philadelphia, WLS was ABC as was WFIL in Philadelphia. Turns out I had confused Don with John… and more interestingly Don and John were brothers:
http://www.broadcastpioneers.com/longjohnwade.html
I wasn’t as confused as I had thought. I had posted before I had read the article. Brother Don was on WIBG 990, in Philadelphia. Long John was on WFIL 560.
Long John Wade was actually Carl Wehde… I suspect his brother Don was once a Wehde as well…. did anyone ever ask Larry King why he had changed his name? 😉
Enjoy the Wades on WFIL/WIBG
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySG2I-04DOU
BTW- That Fred Lowery doing the news on WFIL later became Larry King’s news guy on MBS
http://lists.bostonradio.org/bri/v02/msg03908.html
John Landecker also wound up at WLS…reading the WLS history website is very interesting. Under the ownership of Cumulus, it will have no history and probably no future.
Memories of Don Wade, Jake Hartford, Stacy Taylor, Steve and Gary… were part of my warm feelings toward my time in Chicago. In the last year, my TSL to Chicago radio is probably under 10 hours.
Here is your Joey Reynolds, John Landecker, Don Wade connection in this post from 2007. I too remember Joey Reynolds telling the kids to light a candle and then pour the melted wax over the radio dial and repeat after him saying, “”I will not be a dial twister or I will get a Wibbage blister.” – When I found him decades later doing overnight talk on WOR New York, I wanted to call him and tell him that was why I hadn’t listened to him in decades. lol
http://radiodiscussions.com/showthread.php?505830-Memorial-Day-If-We-Could-Rewind-Philadelphia-Top-40-Radio
Arriving in Chicago in 1989, I knew none of Don Wade’s history as a rock jock and his various characters or that he was married to Roma. Their act was that Roma played the compassionate liberal reading from her Little Red Book – it may have even been genuine. When their son joined the military afte 9/11 she changed dramatically on air.
Jeff Christie was too…. once the music moved to FM, that basically left two main choices for those guys.