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Veteran
Adam Wade, Network Game Show Pioneer, Is Dead at 87
As a singer, he had three Top 10 hits in 1961. As an actor, he had a long career in film and on television. As an M.C., he broke a racial barrier.
Adam Wade in 1975. An accomplished singer and actor, he made history that year when he became network television’s first Black game show host.Credit...Everett Collection
July 12, 2022
Adam Wade, a versatile, velvet-voiced crooner who scored three consecutive Billboard Top 10 hits in a single year, appeared in scores of films, plays and TV productions, and in 1975 became the first Black host of a network television game show, died on Thursday at his home in Montclair, N.J. He was 87.
His wife, Jeree Wade, a singer, actress and producer, said the cause was complications of Parkinson’s disease.
In May 1975, CBS announced that it would break a network television racial barrier by naming Mr. Wade the master of ceremonies of a weekly afternoon game show, “Musical Chairs.”
Staged at the Ed Sullivan Theater in Manhattan and co-produced by the music impresario Don Kirshner, the program featured guest musical performances, with four contestants competing to complete the lyrics of songs and respond to questions about music. (Among the guest performers were groups like the Spinners and singers like Irene Cara.)
The novelty of a Black M.C. was not universally embraced: A CBS affiliate in Alabama refused to carry the show, and hate mail poured in — including, Mr. Wade told Connecticut Public Radio in 2014, a letter from a man “saying he didn’t want his wife sitting at home watching the Black guy hand out the money and the smarts.”
The show was canceled after less than five months. Still, Mr. Wade said, “It probably added 30 years to my career.”
In 1961, he recorded three songs that soared to the upper echelons of the Billboard Hot 100 chart: “Take Good Care of Her” (which reached No. 7), “The Writing on the Wall” (No. 5) and “As if I Didn’t Know” (No. 10).
Patrick Henry Wade was born on March 17, 1935, in Pittsburgh to Pauline Simpson and Henry Oliver Wade Jr. He was raised by his grandparents, Henry Wade, a janitor at the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research (now part of Carnegie Mellon University), and Helen Wade.
He attended Virginia State University on a basketball scholarship, but, although he had dreamed of playing for the Harlem Globetrotters, dropped out after three years .
He appeared on TV on soap operas including “The Guiding Light” and “Search for Tomorrow” and sitcoms including “The Jeffersons” and “Sanford & Son.” He was also seen in “Shaft” (1971), “Come Back Charleston Blue” (1972) and other films, and onstage in a 2008 touring company of “The Color Purple.”
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For all his success in show business, Mr. Wade said he was particularly proud that 40 years after dropping out of college he earned a bachelor’s degree from Lehman College and a master’s in theater history and criticism from Brooklyn College, both constituents of the City University of New York. He taught speech and theater at Long Island University and at Bloomfield College in New Jersey.
“I was the first one in my family to go to college,” he told Connecticut Public Radio. “I promised my grandmother back then that I would finish college someday. Many years later, I kept that promise
