Harold L. Wade, PhD, PE—ISA Fellow, Life Member of IEEE, book author, and all-around Renaissance man—died on 24 May 2021. He was 91. Wade possessed more than 50 years of experience designing, applying, and installing process control systems in such industries as petroleum refining, chemical processing, textiles, and water treatment. He was the author of ISA’s best-selling book, Basic and Advanced Regulatory Control: System Design and Application, Third Edition, which explains the application of basic and advanced regulatory control strategies.
He also developed the process control training program, PC-ControLAB. Wade received a BS in mechanical engineering from Oklahoma State University and earned both master’s and doctorate degrees in systems engineering from Case Western Reserve University. Wade held technical positions at Honeywell, Foxboro, and his own consulting engineering firm, Wade Associates, Inc. in Houston, Texas. Wade was a course instructor, a Donald P.
Eckman award recipient for 2008, a long-time member of ISA’s Automation Controls and Robotics Division (ACARD), and a member of the American Theatre Organ Society. ISA member Brad Carlberg called him “ISA ACARD’s Renaissance Man” and noted, “We lost a truly great man with his passing.” On ISA Connect, Carlberg shared a YouTube link to Wade’s 2020 Christmas piano program, as well as a story in Wade’s own words: My first year in college I was a music major at Texas Christian University, Ft. Worth. Toward the end of the year, I decided I’m not going to make it as a professional musician, so I should change to my other choice, engineering.
So, I transferred to Oklahoma A & M (now Oklahoma State University) as a mechanical engineering major. At that time, few engineering students graduated in four years, but I felt bad that I had wasted my parents’ money on a now-useless first year of college, so I was anxious to graduate as quickly as possible. After three years I only needed 24 semester hours of classes to graduate, so I signed up for all 24. At the end of the previous semester, one of the instructors had asked me to be his teaching assistant in the hydraulics lab. Should provide a little bit of $$, I thought, so I accepted.
(His assistant? I never saw him. I was the lab instructor, teaching my fellow students.) This was the days of the “big bands” and fraternity and sorority dances every Friday and Saturday night. There were two dance bands on campus, and at the start of my final semester, the leader of the “excellent” band said, “Harold, we just lost our piano player. Could you play the piano for us?” That was a dream come true for me, so I said yes.
Now I had 24 semester hours of coursework and two part-time jobs. My grade-point average took somewhat of a nose-dive, but I paid all of my college expenses for the semester and still had a few $$ left over. This article was originally published in InTech's July/August issue.
