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If you want to know what a wonderful life it is, skip “It’s a Wonderful Life” and just talk to Barb Richards.
“I am a joyful person,” she says. “My glass always overflows.”
The longtime WAJI-95.1 program director is one of those northeast Indiana natives who left Fort Wayne to seek her fortune and returned to find herself.
Richards grew up in the Waynedale area and southwestern Allen County. She was a shy child, she says.
When she says it, she holds up her hand to stop the reporter from any scoffing he might have planned to do.
Richards’ mother, Maryamber Bosk, who died recently and was one of Fort Wayne’s most beloved actresses, put Richards in Youtheatre to try to bring her out of her shell.
It worked.
By the time she reached high school age, Richards knew she wanted to be an actress. But friends and family warned her away from it.
“Someone said, ‘It’s a tough life. You’ve got to move to New York or L.A. Why don’t you try radio instead?’ ” Richards recalls.
She saw enough similarities between the two careers to seize the advice. Richards started auditioning at area stations.
She says she was passed over for a job at WOWO, which would have involved a then-revolutionary news pairing: man with woman. Her first job was as WLYV’s high school reporter.
Richards would record her interviews on a cassette tape player, and Larry Bower, who now works for the WBCL Radio Network, would prepare them for broadcast.
Richards says she was sitting in her Datsun in the parking lot of then Southtown Mall when she heard her first segment on the radio. She was 16 or 17, she says.
“It was so huge,” she says. “My girlfriend and I cranked up the radio and after it was done we just screamed.”
Three years later, Richards married Jim Richardson, a “tech geek” she had met at Civic Theatre, and started an on-air position at a Columbia City station now known as WVBB 106.3 “Joe FM.”
Then, as now, the dominant career strategy in radio was to move on to ever bigger markets. And Richards and her husband spent eight years doing just that.
“My husband and I moved around because of my career,” she says, “a pretty cutting-edge thing to do at the time.”
In fact, no amount of explanation could persuade a mortgage broker in Wyoming that the arrangement made any sense, she says.
Women on the air or in the front office of a radio station were almost unheard of back then, Richards says.
“I had to find my own path, figure out how to be a radio personality,” she says. “I wrote a lot of articles for trade publications about being a female broadcaster.”
At the Wyoming station, Richards was the only female employee not doing secretarial work.
In fact, on Secretary’s Day, Richards was given flowers by the station’s male staffers.
“I was so insulted,” she says.
After stints in Wyoming, Utah and South Bend, Richards ended up in Cleveland and became pregnant with her first child, Kent.
The notorious volatility and capriciousness of the radio business has touched Richards only once, but it was at the worst possible moment.
Seven months into her pregnancy, Richards was laid off by the Cleveland station.
“Standing in the unemployment line is always great when you’re pregnant,” she says.
Her sister Jennifer Bosk, then an Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne journalism student, told Richards of openings at WAJI.
So Richards and her husband moved back to Fort Wayne to “regroup.”
Richards got a job at WAJI working the 7 to midnight shift. She says she used to nurse Kent while she was on the air.
Richards’ father had died while she was away and her mother had been left with little money.
Eventually, Richards’ husband suggested that her mother move in with them.
“I was the one who said, ‘Are you nuts?’ ” Richards recalls. “He should be canonized as the first non-Catholic saint.”
The balance of power was delicate in the house, Richards says.
“Normally, a husband and wife make decisions, and the kids abide by them,” she says. “But this was a house with three adults in it.”
Richards says she couldn’t just agree with her mom and apologize to her husband later, as some wives do. But a détente was soon reached and the house began to hum with a new efficiency.
For one thing, Richards and her husband never had to hire a baby sitter.
“Six weeks after I had (my daughter) Kelly, I was back at work,” she says. “It was a perfect scenario.”
There was one dispute that proved resistant to meditation: Fox News host Bill O’Reilly.
Bosk loved him. Richards is not a big fan.
“I would say to her, ‘Either it’s Bill O’Reilly or me,’ ” Richards says. “And she would reach over and turn on the TV.”
Bosk pursued her acting career with renewed fervor after she moved in with Richards’ family, and Richards says she became her ersatz agent.
People would call Richards at the station to offer her mom work in local TV commercials.
Bosk lived with Richards for 21 years before succumbing to pulmonary fibrosis in October at 88.
Many area residents knew Bosk without knowing they knew Bosk. She often played cheery and indefatigable ladies in commercials for area nursing homes, and she was Mrs. Claus every year at Grand Wayne Center on the day before Thanksgiving.
Her work in regional theater was far more varied and exhilarating.
At the time of her death, Youtheatre director Harvey Cocks – who had a career on Broadway before moving to Fort Wayne to help with his father’s business – called her “one of the best comediennes I have ever worked with in the theater.”
Richards says he organized an atypical funeral for her mom.
It involved a Playbill, glitter on the casket and a mock movie theater where her commercial work could be viewed and popcorn could be consumed.
Bosk’s life could easily have taken a different path from the one it did, Richards says. She was the daughter of a vaudevillian and started performing herself at age 3.
Richards says Bosk could have been another Shirley Temple or another young Judy Garland, but it wasn’t in the cards.
Bosk would sometimes lament that she hadn’t gone down that road. But Richards, a firm believer in the adage “everything happens for a reason,” was able to provide her with some perspective.
Returning to Fort Wayne made Richards realize how much good a “big fish in a little pond” can do, she says.
She decided early on that “you can either wear the white hats or the black hats in life, and we’re going to wear the white hats.”
The station has helped raise three quarters of a million dollars for Riley Children’s Hospital and provided $100,000 in free advertising for the Vera Bradley Foundation for Breast Cancer.
Every September, WAJI essentially relocates to Riley for a few days for a fund- raiser.
“I am grateful that I work for a company that allows me to do that,” Richards says.
But it’s not just big accomplishments that make Richards happy with her lot in life; it’s small ones as well.
“It’s still meaningful to me to do something that counts,” she says, “even if it’s just playing a song or saying something on the radio that matters to someone.”
We live in a corporate age where it is no longer easy or even possible to call up your local radio station and have any influence on it. WAJI is different, Richards says.
The station’s listeners can directly connect with it in numerous ways.
“A smaller market gives you so much more freedom,” Richards says.
In October, Richards celebrated 25 years at WAJI. Mayor Tom Henry declared Oct. 28 “Barb Richards Day.”
Twenty-five years of devoting herself to music in Fort Wayne and yet “I have no rhythm,” Richard says. “I can’t sing a note. I cannot dance a step.”
As an anniversary gift, her co-workers got her a guitar signed by all the members of Bon Jovi.
The wall of Richards’ office is covered with photos of her posing with more than 100 celebrities, including Bill Cosby, Elton John, Carlos Santana, Shania Twain, Harry Connick Jr. and Donny Osmond.
One of her favorites is a photo of Reba McIntyre from 1978.
“I picked her up from the airport, helped her do her hair and makeup, had dinner with her, and welcomed her on stage for a free concert for our listeners,” she says. “She was a brand-new artist with just one hit at that time. I didn’t know how huge she was going to be, but that’s why I take my picture with every artist I can because you never know what they might become.”
Richards says her wall reminds her of how lucky she is to have her job.
“It’s a big perk for all the stuff that can get you down,” she says.
Not that she seems to get down an awful lot.
Richards says she has reconnected with her Christian faith in recent years and it has reinforced an innate optimism and an upbeat worldview.
“You’ve got to grab ahold of life and give it all you got,” she says. “I sleep really well at night. Because I do everything I can do with this life.
“I have always said, ‘If I die young, don’t be sad for me. Because I will have lived every day to the fullest.’ ”
Richards sometimes reflects on what a terrible time she had after losing her job in Cleveland and how different that time looks to her today.
“I was scared to death,” she says. “Nothing like that had ever happened to me before. But it was the biggest blessing that brought me back here.”
