Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, April 26, 1994 TAG: 9404270007
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
He took it to heart.
``I think everybody ought to try to do more than one thing with their lives,'' Gladden said.
Thus, the soft-spoken, bookish-looking, middle-aging gentleman who recently strolled with a visitor down bookstore aisles lined with first editions.
This is Christopher Gladden, Bookseller.
With his paisley shirt, his comfortable belly, his white tennis shoes, he is the very image of the slightly eccentric college professor.
Gladden was a movie critic for this newspaper for more than a dozen years. His career as a Roanoke journalist spanned a generation, beginning at the World-News in the days before the merger, and ending in 1993.
Readers wondering what became of one of the newspaper's best-known staffers can find him most afternoons at his Salem bookstore - which also does duty as an antique map shop and art gallery - at 211 S. College Ave.
As reinventions go, the change from newspaper reporter to antiquarian bookseller is impressive enough.
But if you happened to know the Gladden who cruised the Salem streets of 20 years ago - the slightly ferocious-looking young man of the long hair, wild beard and dark shades - the transition seems miraculous. Proof positive life is a mysterious business. Evidence guardian angels hover about the hairpin turns of life.
That was the Gladden of legend - the one his friends still tell stories about. The honky-tonk hero who drank his way through the columns of equally hard-living Roanoke World-News columnist Mike Ives, under the name of Wild Lyle DeWilde.
Wild Lyle, antiquarian readers will recall, was a connoisseur of sawdust bars, striptease shows and M.D. ``Mad Dawg'' 20-20 wine. His appearance in an Ives column in the 1970s - in the days before Ives got fired, and Gladden got a job - was usually a precursor of sentences like this one:
``Halfway through the jug of Mad Dawg, Lyle begins acting strangely. He strips off his shirt and boots and plunges shrieking into the ocean.''
Jug? Shrieking?
In his 45 years, clearly, Wild Lyle has traveled far. ``I tell people I've gone from being `Wild Lyle'' to `Mild Lyle,''' Gladden jokes.
Ives, contacted recently on his Florida houseboat, remembered the young Gladden of those days as a wild child of the '60s, with a precocious love of books.
``He was sort of like a redneck hippie,'' said Ives, whose own long-haired, pool-playing, bar-closing lifestyle of those days fits the description about as well. ``He liked to get real crazy. Our idea of a good time was to take off in the middle of the day with a six pack of beer.''
But Ives also described the young Gladden as ``real bright and real well-read. ``
``He was a sort of a cross between a local old-time family and a member of The Grateful Dead,'' recalled another former World-News writer, John Pancake, now state editor at the Miami Herald. ``He [Gladden] always had a sort of fractured view of the world. He didn't see things the way other people did, which I guess is what made him such an interesting fellow. He saw things in absurdities.''
Still, some things are hard to laugh away. At age 24, Gladden was a veteran of several colleges and honky-tonk bands, but his pockets were empty and his future a blank.
``I had no plans,'' he recalled.
It was Ives who finally helped him get a newspaper job.
Jimmy Thacker, who was World-News city editor at the time - and who obviously could spot potential in unlikely places - agreed to take a look at Gladden as a possible copy boy. He eventually promised to hire him if Gladden would first master the intricacies of the typewriter. ``He did, and we did,'' Thacker said.
Even Thacker remembers the early Gladden as ``sort of a free-wheeler.''
In any case, Gladden stayed 18 years, through the merger of the Times and the World-News in 1977 - rising from copy boy to movie reviewer and finally, movie reviewer and full-time feature writer.
``The paper gave me a home,'' Gladden said.
It was the executive editor, Ben Bowers, who insisted that Gladden review movies. The part of Gladden that had spent hours at the old Salem Theater watching Audie Murphy westerns as a boy, and much of the rest of his young life at the drive-in movie, wasn't about to disagree.
His first review - of ``The Big Sleep'' - netted him $7.
The Roanoke Times library, alas, has no copy of that review. The earliest Gladden review a reporter was able to find was of Mel Brooks' ``Silent Movie,'' which the reviewer summed up with this sentence:
``I like to cry at comedies, and this had tears running down my face.''
His movie reviews were soon a regular feature. As columnist Ives recalled, ``He just sort of worked his way into that little niche.''
Gladden's picture - which shaded from Wild Lyle toward neck-tie respectability over the years - appeared over it, which won him local fame. People often stopped him on the street to talk movies.
His last column column as a RT&WN staffer ran on April 30, 1993.
As one bereaved reader wrote soon afterward:
``Chris Gladden's movie reviews had become a landmark in the Roanoke Times & World-News. ... I didn't always agree with them, but I always read them. ... I can only thank him for being so diligent and discerning through the years.''
Somewhere up in life's dusty attic, Wild Lyle was surely proud.
Among the highlights at Christopher Gladden Bookseller are a ballot with Jefferson Davis' name on it, an 1810 map from Zebulon Pike's exploration of the New River and paintings by home-grown Salem artist Walter Biggs. The bookstore's shelves, meanwhile, are packed with special editions of the classics and with first editions.
Although most rare books are not worth a fortune, Gladden said, there are still treasures here for the lover of books: first editions of Raymond Chandler's ``Red Wind,'' of John LeCarre's ``The Little Drummer Girl'' and Ray Bradbury's ``The Illustrated Man,'' among others.
There are signed copies of playwright Eugene O'Neill's ``Strange Interlude,'' and W.C. Handy's ``Father of the Blues.'' There is an 1852 edition of ``Uncle Tom's Cabin.''
Gladden was already moved in when he discovered the building was the one from which his grandfather had once run the Salem Times-Register. ``I just liked the building,'' Gladden said. ``I guess synchronicity is at work in the universe.''
He still writes. His column on the antiquarian book trade, ``The Bookman,'' appears regularly in Collector magazine.
In a recent column, Gladden explained his decision to leave journalism:
``I needed a change of pace and direction. I wanted more time to spend with my children. [Gladden and his wife, Nancy, have two children : Sean, 11, and Will, 7.] And I wanted the freedom to pursue other interests that didn't fit into my crazy newspaper schedule.''
For the record, he misses newspapers - a little.
``In a way, you want to regain your privacy. You want to be able to deal with people without seeing them as a source for a story.''
Since leaving the newspaper, Gladden also has returned to school at Roanoke College, just down the street from his bookshop.
If his schedule is any less crazy, it doesn't show.
``The irony is, I haven't seen many movies,'' Gladden said. ``I haven't had time.''
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