Wyman Rice ‘Rick’ Wade Jr.

A storied life

SELF

PORTRAIT

Date and place of birth:

Sept. 7, 1946 in Jacksonville, Fla.

Family:

Wife Rosanne, daughters Jana Hayes and Jordan Wade, one grandchild

Occupation:

Partner at Daily & Woods P.L.L.C.

and adjunct professor at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith

The reason I don’t own a cell phone is

I like the escapability of not having one.

The story from my life I’ve told the most times is

from the 11th grade. Albert Lukaszewski and I were at the blackboard, whispering over a trigonometry problem. The teacher said, to the whole class, “Well, well, if it isn’t Mr. Wade and Mr.

Lukaszewski, the blind leading the blind.”

The best part of my job is

as a lawyer, helping others.

As a teacher, it’s teaching others.

My favorite wins as a sports fan were

Florida State’s two national championships, 1993 and 1999.

Also, any win against the [Florida] Gators.

What I learned from Scouting was

even if it took longer than I expected, I could succeed if I worked hard and persevered.

Last great book I read:

Other than the Bible? Gone With the Wind. It remains a uniquely American treasure.

A phrase to sum me up:

Unpretentious and caringFORT SMITH - In between Vietnam and Arkansas, Rick Wade was a fantastic car salesman.

Fresh off earning his master’s degree, Wade headed to Oregon, where he landed a job at a General Motors dealership despite having zero experience selling cars. He got the job only because the owner wanted to hire disabled military veterans, and Wade had sustained a serious arm injury during the Vietnam War a few years earlier.

As it turned out, Wade excelled at selling Pontiacs, Chevrolets and Oldsmobiles. When General Motors held a sales contest, Wade sold a bunch of Camaros and earned an all-expenses paid trip to Puerto Rico.

Wade was feeling pretty good about his career choice until another salesman made fun of him.

“He said, ‘Rick, I understand you have a master’s degree,’” Wade recalls. “I perked up with pride. Hesaid, ‘Well, you’re not very smart, are you?’ I said, ‘How’s that?’ He said, ‘Well, you’ve got a master’s degree and I’ve got a high-school diploma, and we’re doing the same job.’”

Within a week, Wade had applied at the University of Arkansas School of Law. He wasn’t guaranteed a spot, but he decided to take a chance, speeding across the country to get to Fayetteville.

His gamble paid off, and he was accepted just days before his first class.

So Wade got into law school, only to discover it made him miserable. It was a ton of reading, way too hard for his liking.

Not even a week into his studies, he bailed out, and headed to Louisiana to see an old military buddy. Like Wade, he had begun law school only toimmediately have second thoughts.

He counseled Wade to go back, to avoid making the same mistake he had, namely dropping out at the first sight of those Tolstoy-size texts that are a hallmark of law school. Wade heeded the advice and returned to Fayetteville, determined to “do it my way.”

In Wade’s case, that meant studying like a man possessed. He studied to the point that it was “almost like torture,” and after a semester, he was near the top of his class.

“So that brings a new pressure,” he says. “Now I’ve got to stay in there and do well.”

Wade’s life is filled with stories like this, everything from basketball games with NFL Hall of Fame quarterback Roger Staubach to a sudden triple bypass that briefly left him dead in 2008.

But the stories, and the life that made them possible, came as a result of Wade’s surpassing intellect and a strong belief in fairness. He’s been with the Fort Smith law firm of Daily & Woods P.L.L.C. since 1980, and his vast efforts in the community recently earned him the Arkansas Bar Association and Arkansas Bar Foundation’s 2011-12 Outstanding Lawyer-Citizen Award.

“He knows that life is not fair, and everybody has not been dealt the same hand,” says daughter Jana Hayes of Fort Smith. “He believes there’s no reason why people in our society, with the resources we have, why they can’t just try to help someone.”

STANDING UP

Wade didn’t understand why everyone was staring at him.

As a boy, Wade’s mother had taught her only child that it was important for a Southern gentleman to be polite to women. So when a woman got onto the bus, Wade offered her his seat without hesitation.

But this was Jacksonville, Fla., in the 1950s, and black women were supposed to sit in the back of buses. They weren’t supposed to be offered seats by white children.

“I remember getting unbelievable stares from the white people, and at that young age I didn’t understand it,” Wade says.

What confused Wade even more than the stares were the mixed messages he was getting in church. There, he sang songs and heard that Jesus loved everyone. But in the same sermon, Wade’s preacher would tell the parishioners not to worry if any black churchgoers showed up, because the church had cordoned off rows in the back to segregate them from the white attendees.

“It just didn’t jibe with me,” Wade says. “It really impacted me when the preacher told us we were going to put ‘them’ in the back of the church, behind yellow police ropes.”

Growing up in a segregated city, Wade developed a strong sense of equality, along with a belief that it was important to stand up for what you believed in. In college, he would argue in favor of the Civil Rights Movement and against the Vietnam War with anyone who would listen, and after heserved in Vietnam, he actively promoted amnesty for those who had resisted the military draft.

Additionally, Wade has always believed it is the obligation of the fortunate to help the needy, which explains his decades of volunteerism. He served on three different boards with St. Edward Mercy Medical Center between 1985-2002, chairing each of them at different times.

He’s been on the Fort Smith School Board even longer, having sat on it since 1994. That includes two terms as its president.

“He has such a pleasant personality,” says longtime School Board member Yvonne Keaton-Martin of Fort Smith. “He’s very sharp, verywitty, and very well read. He’s always prepared; you can tell that he has done his homework prior to the meetings.”

AN EDUCATED MAN

When Wade was the president of the School Board, one of his tasks was delivering back-to-school speeches to teachers.

During one of the speeches, he told them he was “a latchkey kid before there was such a thing.” It’s because his mom would routinely work as a telephone operator on Sundays and holidays, any time she could earn extra money to support herself and her only child.

Wade’s parents split up when he was about a year old, and he never knew his father. His mother’s education hadn’t gone past the eighth grade, but she was determined that Rick would go much further. (Wade’s legal name is Wyman Rice Wade Jr., after his father, but he has been called “Rick” his entire life.)

Although his mom worked long hours, she always found ways to make time for Rick. Wanting him to have positive male role models, she pushed him to get involved with the Boy Scouts. He made Eagle Scout at a young age, and earned the God and Country award.

“Rick feels he was given a lot as a young child,” says Rosanne Wade, his wife of nearly 35 years and a retired teacher. “He wasn’t wealthy, but he feels like he owes a debt to society for the things he was given.”

Wade says everything hehas accomplished goes back to his mother and the excellent public education he received growing up in Jacksonville. He’s a passionate advocate for schools, and since 2004 he has been teaching at the University of Arkansas at Fort Smith.

He teaches legal environment of business, a sophomore-level class required of all business students. Wade’s knowledge and engaging nature make his classes extremely popular, says Steve Williams, dean of the College of Business.

“Rick is a lot of fun, and the reason is because he’s got an appropriate life event for any situation that arises,” Williams says. “That makes him so valuable in the classroom and at meetings. He’s an active part of the College of Business. ... His classes are always maxed out.”

Through his firm, Wade has been Fort Smith’s assistant city attorney for decades, handling almost every civilrights case facing the Fort Smith Police Department. He has frequently given seminars to the department on civil-rights issues, working to ensure that when inevitable lawsuits come up against the department, officers are on the right side of the law.

“Police officers are sometimes a hard group to connect with, especially with attorneys,” Fort Smith Police Chief Kevin Lindsey says. “Rick has been able to establish a level of respect and admiration, as well being a good person to have [working with the city’s police officers].”

SEMINOLE EXPERIENCE

Wade’s office is a shrine to Florida State University, with FSU gear covering his desk and the walls.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in government from Florida State in 1969, but he began college at the University of Georgia, attending for a year before transferring.

His mom was worried about him going to Georgia. It was a conservative school, and Wade was an outspoken young man, strongly in favor of the Civil Rights Movement and against the Vietnam War.

“With all the turmoil that was going on in the ’60s, I wouldn’t trade living through that for anything,” he says. “If you were alive and breathing, there were things for you to be interested [in], either for or against.”

As it turned out, though, Wade had a lot of fun at Georgia. He was secretary of the freshman class, and routinely wound up in pickup basketball games with Staubach, who was in the Navy and attending a supply school.

Wade had worked at Prudential Insurance for more than a year following his high school graduation, and so he went to school with a few bucks in his pocket.After a year, he had run through a lot of money, in large part because he was spending so much money on clothes at the image-conscious school.

He returned to Florida and enrolled at Florida State, where he continued to spend money, buying a house anda car. He joined a fraternity, and for the only time in his life, his grades nose-dived. It wasn’t until his senior year, when he ran out of money and needed to get a job delivering telegrams on his bicycle, that Wade shaped up academically.

Upon graduating, he faced a dilemma about what he should do next. Although he had spoken forcefully against the war, he “didn’t want anyone thinking I’m a coward,” so he ruled out going to jail or fleeing to Canada. He looked into enlisting in the Israeli army, before ultimately deciding to enlist in the Air Force in 1970.

Ironically, the Air Force decided that Wade would make a good teacher. He was sent to a language institute in San Antonio, where he learned how to teach English as a foreign language.

Thus, Wade’s assignment in Vietnam was to teach English to members of the South Vietnamese Air Force, and then teach them how to fly aircraft.

“We were discouraged from learning [Vietnamese]; their idea was you learn language through repetition and association,” Wade says. “I’d teach them ‘500 Miles’ [a Peter, Paul and Mary song] if they taught me a Vietnamese song.”

On July 21, 1971, Wade was a passenger in a truck that flipped over when the driver thought they were about to get bombed by a North Vietnamese fighter pilot. The truck wound up on top of Wade’s left arm, shatteringhis ulna and radius.

He was ultimately sent to Texas, where he endured multiple surgeries. The Veterans Administration assigned him a 30 percent disability, due to loss of mobility and strength.

“It aches sometimes [due to weather], but he’s not a complainer,” Rosanne says. “He hardly ever says one bad thing.”

After being released from the hospital, Wade got to travel throughout Europe as part of convalescent leave, and he eventually wound up as the assistant manager of the NCO club in Laredo, Texas.

Wade was discharged earlier than expected, on Aug. 15, 1973, and true to form, it came with a story. He says then-President Richard Nixon shut down the Laredo Air Force Base as a payback for the Laredo mayor’s refusal to ride in a car with him.

“I got into a car with a UHaul behind it and headed to Fayetteville, a place I had never been in my life,” he says. “Within about three days, I was sitting in a graduate school classroom.”

DYING, AND LIVING

Though he didn’t get there until he was 30, it was evident all along that Wade was headed to law school.

As a ninth-grader, he decided he wanted to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which meant that he would need a law degree. He lost interest in the FBI in the years that followed, but law school remained a target.

Still, after leaving the military, Wade thought he would struggle after being out of school so long. He decided to go for his master’s in political science at the University of Arkansas; he was looking for a school with a good football team that wasn’t in Texas.

He earned his master’s, sold cars in Oregon, then returned to Arkansas for law school. He graduated near the top of his class, and was editor of the law review.

“He has an extreme knowledge of the law,” Williams says. “This man is a fountain of knowledge when it comes to legal issues of any type - and because he has a story for anything that comes up, he can always contextualize it.”

Wade’s story almost ended June 13, 2008. He was in the hospital, recovering from his second hip-replacement surgery, when family members insisted that something else was wrong.

The next thing anyone knew, Wade was being whisked into the operating room for an emergency triple bypass. Doctors used a defibrillator three times to shock him back to life.

Since then, he has “certainly appreciated life a lot more,” but the truth is he hasn’t made radical changes. He has simply continued living a life that amasses great stories - and then helping others write better ones in their own lives.

“He just enjoys life, [but] he was doing it before,” Rosanne Wade says. “He’s probably the most Christian man I have ever met. He has so much knowledge to tell other people.”

Northwest Profile, Pages 35 on 10/21/2012

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