"Waddie" you know!

[Wilmer Rivers]

Back in early September, Don Rosa replied to Mattias:
----------------
	Why did I shift the camera over to crop out that extra "waddie"
in my copy of the old Barks' panel in "Lo$"#4? Again, I have trouble
recalling stuff from over 2 1/2 years ago. I guess I had no need of two
extra cowboys in my sequence, just one? I guess. By the way, don't try
to work the word "waddie" into conversations with Americans. I have
searched long and hard searching for any reference anywhere to something
called a "waddie" and have found none. I went so far as to write and ask
Barks himself once a few years back (pre-Weasel) and he said he couldn't
recall what it meant and that it must have just been a word from his
youth.
----------------

Well, I just found a reference to a "waddie"!  There's a local public
radio station here that has several programs of old Country and Western
music, some with emphasis on the country and some on the western.  On
Saturday one of these programs was playing some "classic" records by
the one and only Gene Autrey (the immortal, absolutely definitive
guitar-strumming "singing cowboy" star of a long-running radio show
and of more kiddie-matinee Western movies than you can shake a 6-gun
at).  One of these records (unfortunately, I didn't hear the title!)
was a typical heartbroken lament of the lonely cowboy bemoaning his
solitary life on the prairie.  I paid no particular attention to this
song until Autrey crooned the following lyric [as best I remember]:
"My gal rode off with a waddie from San Antone."  I still don't know
what a "waddie" is, but clearly it's a dirty rotten scoundrel of some
sort!  I also don't know from what era the song dates (but Autrey's
record was probably produced sometime between the mid-1940's and
1950's, so the song is at least as old as that).  The significant
thing is that "waddie" is apparently cowboy slang, so Scrooge was
using it in the proper context!

Wilmer Rivers

"You are the one I have chosa / To toss me a rosa!" - Donald Duck,
although Gene Autrey could probably have sold a million copies of that
or any other of Donald's plaintive ballads  (Does anyone know how many
copies Autrey sold of the original recording of "Rudolph, the Red-Nosed
Reindeer"?!?!)