by John BINDER
Recalling his childhood, Joe Radder said, “I could always make my own fun. A chair
turned on its side became an airplane cockpit, a card table set up on four chairs would be
a Hall bakery wagon and our sunroom on Coolidge Drive in Snyder was a trolley car.”
He still loves street cars and is past chairman of the Citizens Regional Transit
Corporation and chairman of its Vintage Trolley committee.
After the crash of 1929, Joe’s parents had to scratch to make ends meet. “My
Mother had to work in my Dad’s pharmacy. So, instead of going home after school like
the other kids, I had to jump on a bus and go in to the drug store.” Recalling those
days he said, “Actually that experience would serve me well in later years because I
got to play with city kids of various ethnic groups. That couldn’t have happened in
the suburbs.”
“I was having too much fun in high school to be a good student,” he said.
“But the years I spent at Amherst Central High School, the teachers there and the
friends I made were to be of lasting value. I especially remember teachers like Elsie
Walker Waldow who convinced me that I had some talent for writing.”
After graduating from Amherst, he went to work as a trouble shooter for National Outdoor
Advertising. Simultaneously he was taking evening courses at U.B.’s Millard Fillmore
College.
“The sign company job was a scary one,” he said. “I had to clamber up on
steel frames, sometimes five or six stories in the air, to replace a burned-out bulb or
remove a broken piece of neon tubing. I soon got used to it,” he said, “but I
never really got to like the job, especially in the middle of winter.”
And so, every Saturday morning, Joe Radder would tour the advertising agencies and
department stores, toting some hypothetical ads he had written, to try to better his lot
in life. Finally he was hired to write copy for the Wm. Hengerer Co. “To a depression
kid like me,” he remembers, “the 22 bucks a week salary seemed like a lot of
money.”
Six months after Joe Radder’s 21st birthday the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Soon he
was in an Army uniform taking basic infantry training. Luckily, he escaped the infantry
and was assigned to the 7th Armored Division. “We might as well have been in the
infantry,” he said. “They worked us up to 25 mile hikes with full field pack.
Today I’m lucky to be able to walk my daily mile.”
After desert training in California, field maneuvers in Georgia and an Army Administration
course at the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss), Joe went overseas with the 7th Armored
in 1944. The division trained for a couple more months in England, then they went across
France with Patton’s Third Army. For the Battle for the Bulge, Joe’s outfit was
transferred to Hodges’ First Army. That would be home for the 7th until the Americans
met the Russians and “we all celebrated VE Day”.
Home again in 1945, Joe rejoined his wife of two years, the former Marguerite Scudder, and
their baby, Joel. Today Joel is general manager of Village Import Auto Sales in
Williamsville. Their youngest son, Jon, is in charge of customer support services for
PaperClip, a software company in New Jersey. There are five grandchildren...D.J., who is
in film production in California, Aaron, a musician in Pennsylvania, Nicole, who teaches
in Virginia, Alysia, a senior at SUNY Plattsburgh and Matthew who is in the fifth grade at
the Meeting House Hill School in Connecticut.
After the war, Joe Radder planned to go back to work at Hengerer’s, but a better
opportunity presented itself at an advertising agency called Baldwin, Bowers and Strachan.
There he became a radio writer, writing program scripts as well as commercials for
Iroquois Beer, Sattler’s, Kenmore Motors and the Lincoln-Mercury dealers. Later he
would help the agency pioneer TV writing and production for clients like Trico and Milk
for Health.
In 1957, BB&S was purchased by the Rumrill Company and they made Joe creative director
for print as well as broadcast media. At Rumrill he worked on the Dunlop Tire, Keebler
Biscuit and Graphic Controls accounts.
In 1962, Joe left Rumrill to join Comstock & Company as creative director. There he
would produce award-winning campaigns for M&T Bank, Carborundum, Fisher-Price Toys and
Pratt & Lambert Paints. In the early ‘70s he and three other Comstock executives
bought a minority interest in the firm. In 1974, they bought out the company’s
founder and Joe became executive VP and later president and CEO. Under his direction, the
agency grew to be one of Buffalo’s largest, serving clients like McDonald’s
restaurants, Columbus-McKinnon and the Erie County Savings Bank.
In 1980, Joe Radder and his partners sold the agency to Healy-Schutte, Inc., and after
two-years, Joe retired to spend as much time as possible with his wife, who was dying of
cancer. They purchased a condo in Florida, and even there Joe worked part-time, writing a
weekly restaurant review which appeared in the Ft. Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, called
“Dining Out with Josef”.
When Marguerite died in 1982, Joe returned to Buffalo. “I knew I had to go back to
work,” he said, “and my best opportunities were in Buffalo where people knew
me.”
In 1983 he opened his own small advertising agency. Joseph H. Radder Marketing, and
operated it for eleven years. His clients included the John Bunn Company, the Xorbox
Corporation, Keyser Cadillac, Horizon Human Services, Skill Buick, the Pharmacists
Association of Western New York and several of its member pharmacies. He still produces a
quarterly newsletter and weekly ads for Snyder Pharmacy.
Since retiring a second time in 1994, Joe has been working as a freelance writer for
several publications including Living Prime Time. “I like the work for Living Prime
Time best,” he said, “because I get to meet so many great people when I’m
doing the research for the biographical pieces assigned to me.”
Joe Radder has also written a full-length novel, and is currently working to get it
published.
Plans for the future? At age 81, Joe Radder says, “As long as my pacemaker keeps on
ticking I plan to keep on working, at least until the Good Lord finds some work for me to
do up there.”
Sixty years, a quadruple by-pass and millions of words later, Joe Radder is still going
strong.
John Binder is a freelance writer.