One Man’s Opinion: They Don’t Make ‘Em Like That Anymore

By Bill Crane

As a teenager growing up in Griffin, Georgia, Scott Slade would point out the local radio station in a two-story walk-up just off the town square and say, “Someday, I’m going to be working there.”

At the age of 15, Slade, looking a bit older with heavy sideburns and a mustache, and freshly in receipt of his broadcasting license (in those days any on-air personality in the industry required a broadcasting license), entered the radio station to inquire if there were any job openings at WGRI Radio, a daytime AM station. As it happened, the Sunday noon to 6 p.m. (sign-off) host had just quit, and the receptionist told Slade he would need to go back into the studio and record a demo for the station general manager. Although he had never been in one before, Slade went into the studio and figured out the equipment sufficiently to produce an aircheck, leaving the same behind for the station management. When he arrived home, the phone rang, asking if he could start that Sunday at noon.

Slade would labor in other stations and markets for nearly a decade, before finding a niche in traffic reporting and landing at AM 750 WSB Radio in Atlanta. I would suggest to you in the secret sauce that would later become Atlanta’s Morning News with Scott Slade on WSB Radio AM, and later FM, is that everyone in north Georgia – old folks, youngsters, Republicans, Democrats, black, white, Asian, Hispanic – can all agree on ONE thing. They all HATE traffic. Slade and cohorts like Captain Herb Emory could guide you around 285 and the downtown connector and major surface street corridors, avoiding the logjams and tie-ups, providing alternate routing, or even letting you know WHY you were sitting in what appeared to be an endless parking lot of tail lights. And they did so while informing you of the news and hot topics of the day, with an occasional chuckle. Slade was the air traffic reporter flying the friendly skies when station management called him back into the offices at the end of a shift in 1990. With all the brass on hand, Slade was told some changes were coming to the morning show and the station’s branding and format. He thought he might be fired, but instead was promoted in some respects to build out the longest-running and most respected radio franchise in the southeast, rebuilding itself from the ground up around him.

Also in 1990, the “other” news format station in the market, WGST NewsRadio 640, had several things going for it, including some names you may know in radio: Rush Limbaugh, a young Sean Hannity (then local), Atlanta Braves Baseball, and at that time, Clark Howard as well as the Talkmaster, Neal Boortz. Eventually, each of those now Atlanta institutions would follow Slade’s morning show and example, moving south from Buckhead to Midtown and WSB studios.

During the summer of 2000, Slade would become the instigator and unofficial “godfather” of the annual WSB Radio Careathon, benefitting the Aflac Cancer and Blood Disorders Service Centers at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Proceeds from those Careathons now exceed $30 million over twenty-three years, and there is a wing of the Center at the Scottish Rite Campus of CHOA named for Scott Slade and the WSB Radio listeners who support the Careathon each year.

A Renaissance man of sorts, Slade is also a voracious reader, pilot

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