WOKQ Loses a Member of the Family

It is with great sadness we share the news that Stan Edwards, a former WOKQ on-air personality has passed away.

We send our love, thoughts and prayers to Stan's family and friends during this difficult time.

Below, Mark Ericson who worked with Stan for many years, reflects on their time together:

May 30^th, 1996. I drove to WOKQ in Dover for what I was told was my third interview for the job of WOKQ Program Director to replace Cliff Blake who was moving on to work for some of the biggest country music record labels in the business. The interview was quick, some numbers were tossed about and then the station General Manager tossed me a ring of keys and told me my new office was the first door on the right.

Ted Garland and the great Mikey Martel did mornings in those days, followed by what they used to call ‘the Program Director shift’ which ran 9am to 11am. That’s what I started out doing here. I was followed for years by Stan Edwards from 11am to 3pm. A shift Stan worked from 1990 to 2007. Stanley fit nicely into the OKQ family of the day. A nice guy with a lot of talent and one of the steadiest dispositions you’ve ever seen. Nothing seemed to throw off Stan’s course as he made it through the day. Need extra commercials produced? No problem. Somebody’s not where they are supposed to be so we need you on the air for an extra hour. No problem. That was Stanley. In all of his years here he only lost his temper a couple of times. When he did, it would be the talk of the building. It really upset the rest of the staff that something happened to upset Stan. I don’t remember what precipitated those rare blow ups… But I’m sure Stan was justified.

Mike Martel takes great delight in poking fun at people, but because Stan was such a nice guy it just didn’t seem right. Mike would only go as far as calling Stan ‘follically challenged.’ Stanley always considered his baldness to be ‘distinguished.’ Stan also had two unique ways to sign memos, notes and later, e mails. There was the mandatory ‘TU2M’ which stood for ‘Thank You Too Much.’ The second thing that would occasionally show up in a signature was ‘##IAP.’ I suspect that this was the secret to Stan’s consistent good nature. With only a select few knowing it, this second signature item was his own form of stress release. You see, the ‘##’ would always be the initials of one of our salespeople. For most people who asked about it, Stan would just pass it off as ‘a production code we use.’ But a few of us knew what the ‘IAP’ really meant. A random example would be ‘JDIAP’ which meant ‘John Doe Is A Putz!’

We lost Stan Edwards this week after a long battle with illness that started with the throat cancer that took much of his voice in 2008. If there’s a Wikipedia entry for ‘Nice Guy’… A picture of Stan Edwards is all you need for a definition.