The following are my remarks at The Celebration of Life service for Bill Wade given at Living Hope Baptist Church in Bowling Green, Kentucky on October 16, 2022. I will have some parenthetical notes.
Please be aware that this was given as an eulogy for my close friend.
There were six other men speaking (one was the police chief of Bowling Green, Kentucky) and I was asked to limit my remarks to six or seven minutes.
Bill asked me to be a participate in the service when he learned he had Stage IV Pancreatic Cancer that had metastasized to his liver and lymph nodes.
For a couple of months, I had been working on my remarks and had around 3100 words. I googled to see how many words a seven minute speech has: 1050 words. Next week, I will publish a fuller tribute to the best person to ever come out of Pearl, Mississippi.
Before I begin, allow me a moment to tell you how honored I am to speak to
you about a subject I know well: Bill
Wade. We’ve known each other for about forty-four years. (Originally, I had written that we had an understanding that we would each speak at the other's service depending on which one went first. I left it out and ad-libed something that I had forty years of stories because it flowed better with what I said next.)
Shortly after my wife, Lori and I were married, we took a trip to Pearl, Mississippi to see the Wades: Bill, Dianne, Toddler Joey, and Baby Katy.
When Sunday came around, Lori and I decided to skip Sunday School and just go to the worship service at the First Baptist where Bill was on staff.
We got to the church just as the service was starting. Bill was behind the pulpit giving the weekly announcements. Being the good Christians we are, we found a seat near the back. Then I heard Bill say, “I would like my college roommate, Alan Manis, visiting here from Georgia to give our opening prayer”. Oh yeah, Bill hadn’t said a thing to me about the opening prayer.
It wasn’t the first time Bill pulled a prank on me and wouldn't be the last.
I must admit I gave a pretty awesome opening prayer. (No brag, just fact) After the service was over, a lady came up to me and said, “So, you were Bill Wade’s college roommate”. I said “Yes, ma’am”. She said, “Why, bless your heart”, which in Mississippi can have several connotations.
Well, I am blessed to have been a friend of Bill’s for all these years.
I’ve seen Bill though all of the churches he served and Living Hope was one of his favorites. I can see why. The way you have supported Bill and Dianne in this extremely trying time has been tremendous. Both Bill and Dianne felt blessed by the response of Living Hope.
Twenty some odd years ago, Bill used me as a reference for a para-church ministry he wanted to do part time. The man at the ministry called me. He asked "What can you tell me about Bill Wade?" I said, "He drove three and a half hours to help me move six miles."
To me, that sums up Bill Wade. He would always go out of his way to
help somebody. But there's more I would like to add. (Bill was a real life Genie from Disney's "Aladdin". He was always in the mood to help you, dude.)
Bill Wade was real. Bill was six foot and six inches of total Bill-ness. What you saw was what you got. There wasn't a pretentious bone in his body. When he wasn't joking around (which wasn't very often) he said what he meant and meant what he said. Because of this, Bill had little use for phony people.
Bill's faith was not shallow. It was deep, firmly held. He knew what he believed and why he believed it. You can’t coach that. And you saw that this summer.
I'm from Marietta, Georgia and I grew up with a lot of people whose fathers were engineers at Lockheed and became engineers themselves. So, I’ve known many smart people. I can honestly say Bill was one of the smartest. On top of that, Bill was blessed with common sense which made him a very wise person.
I met Bill Wade in college. Bill considered college a challenge-a challenge to see if he could outwit the professors and he usually did. For example, on the first day of class, he would check the syllabus when it was handed out to see how many classes you could miss before it effected your grade. Bill called those "free days" because he said you didn't pay for them
I don't know what Bill's IQ was, but his emotional intelligence was off the charts. Bill could empathize with people and see where they “were coming from”
It goes without saying, but Bill was as smitten with Dianne in 2022 as he was when he met her in 1976. I’ve talked with Bill a lot over the years and I’ve never heard him say a bad thing about her. He forgot all about other girls when he met Dianne.
You can’t talk about Bill Wade without mentioning his sense of humor. If you
spent an hour with Bill, you were guaranteed to have at least one belly laugh. He
was very witty and truth be told, could be a little “smart” as my mother would
say Once, a guy saw Bill’s pictures of
Dianne on his desk. He had a lot of pictures, sort of like a shrine. The guy
looked at the pictures and asked, “Is this your fiancé?” Bill said, “No, she is my sister. We are very
close.” (If Bill had just added, "And here's your sign", he would have been a millionaire.)
Bill would also make up parody songs like “Weird Al” Yankovich. He came up with a song called “Jello” based
on the Lionel Ritchie song “Hello” which had this line: “Jello, is it me you
wiggle for?” Several years later, I was flipping through a MAD magazine and
they a section titled “Songs We’d Like To Hear”. “Jello” was one of them. Bill was ahead of
his time. (I swear this is true.)
He loved “Veggie Tales” and made up his own Veggie: "Opie Okra”. His song
contained the line: “Stomach Punch, lose your lunch, hurts a bunch. Opie Okra”.
When my son was 7 years old he loved the Opie Okra song and can still sing it
today, word for word, as a 31 year old. (My son, Ben, sent Bill a video singing the "Opie Okra" song. Bill thought it was great.)
You may find this hard to believe, but when I was single I wasn’t too successful with the ladies. Something about being a short, near-sighted guy with no money didn’t attract a lot of attention. But the Lord had mercy on me and Lori Stanley took pity on me. When we became serious, I called Bill to tell him the good news. He said, “Alan, is this a real girl or did you just make it up?”
Bill and Di accepted Lori just as they accepted me. We’ve been to just about everyone of their houses. We’d roll up to the Wade’s house, sit around and talk, and eat chocolate chip cookie dough. We had a lot of adventures with the Wades: movies, plays, hockey games, and a six mile hike with a belly full of “Slick Pig” BBQ wings just to name a few.
Bill Wade was a humble man. This is remarkable because he was in a profession where “humility” is not the first word you think of when you meet some of these guys. (I wasn't trying to Evangelical clergy bash because that's like shooting fish in a barrel. However, some of them, even the really good ones aren't very humble.) He would be “blown away” by the response of the past few weeks because he didn’t start your pregnancy center, your counseling center, and work as a police chaplain to have his name entered into the Congressional Record. He just did it because he was Bill.
Bill Wade was the best friend I could ever have. He did more for me than I could ever repay. I miss him terribly and I think of him often especially when I hear a train in the distance. (Bill was a train fanatic. His grandfather worked on the railroad and I think Bill really saw himself as a train man. I talked to him about taking a train trip to celebrate my retirement when I retire. Life has a way changing plans.)
