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ROWELL GORMON

V O I C E O V E R S

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Everyone Should Have an “Uncle Willie” (part two)

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One of the biggest reasons I hit it off so well in the studio with producers and directors is my Imagination.  I’ve even had writers create something with one of my voice characters in mind.  I sometimes wonder why that sense of imagination isn’t commonplace.  And then I wonder where kids get their imaginations now…if they have any.

My parents fostered mine and gave it plenty of room to grow.  But it was my mom’s younger brother (he let us call him “Willie” instead of Bill) who gave it a sharper focus, and made it the launchpad into a career, even before he knew he was doing it for me.

Treasures From an Accidental Time Capsule

It was there in a stack of battered comic books left behind in grandma’s house, including the original Captain Marvel.  It was there in the old 78rpm records of Spike Jones & His City Slickers he must’ve listened to as well.

Mom and dad would take the family to the drive-in movies once in awhile, but I think Willie was the only one brave enough to take me to a Kiddie Matinee at the local theatre.  We were probably the only ones there who actually came to see the picture (“The Lone Ranger“), and I can still remember my usually cheerful uncle’s sour reaction as we went home: “That’s the LAST time I go to an indoor movie!”

Can’t Find One?  Can’t Afford One?  Make One!

Aside from the boost into Radio and Production, Willie (and Joyce) always seemed to be able to create something fun out of practically nothing.  This was no more evident than in their annual Halloween decorations.  Inspired by our mutual fascination with the Disney parks and audio animatronics, he’d rig up simple effects like a piece of fishing line running from a hidden motor to the base of a rocking chair, or use an old 4-track tape cartridge to feature my thunderstorm sound effects loop, with inaudible pulses on an alternate track to make a light fixture flash just before the sound of the thunder.  He rigged up a dummy in a “coffin” to rise up on cue (thanks to an old motor and armature from a washing machine), and had Joyce out front scouting the neighborhood kids as they came up. She’d quietly feed him their names so that the dummy could greet them by name, his spooky voice coming from an old speaker in the thing’s chest, while Willie and his microphone hid just out of sight.

In our worlds, cardboard and string, magic markers and paint, masking tape and makeshift electronics were literally the “stuff that dreams were made of”.

The Family That PLAYS Together…

And the creativity didn’t end with Willie and Joyce.  Their kids shared with me as well.  Debbie and her little brother Richie let me use their voices as little kids in an ill-fated six part audio series I did on Old Time Radio called “The Radio Museum“.  Both Deb and Richie have families of their own now.

Of course, I didn’t get to visit much after I moved to North Carolina, but that never affected the “fan club” treatment I got from Willie and Joyce (my brother Lee and I almost ran their names together when we talked about them, as if they were one person).  They’d sit and listen to tapes of my best radio commercials, or watch my clips from local tv, even when the immediate family had lost interest.

I’m so grateful Willie was still around when I landed those movie gigs with Jim Henson’s Muppets as a literal “hired hand”.  I think he and Joyce were even more proud of me than my parents or my wife…at least they showed it more openly.

 

Final Act

I’m pretty sure Willie knew how much I appreciated everything he did for me and my eventual career in radio, tv, film, and voiceovers.  But he also gave me one last thing…my hatred of cigarettes.  See, Willie was a Marlboro Man, and I can’t ever remember him without a cigarette in his hand unless he was playing guitar or handling a soldering gun.  Those things put him in the ground, many years ago – way too early.  And I was too far away and too broke to make it back for his funeral.

Joyce has continued their legacy of love, laughs and imagination with her own offspring, their kids, and is the youngest grandmother (or is that great-grandmother) I know.

Fortunately, Willie left me with a lot of his creative spirit to remember him by, plus his ability to make something cool out of practically nothing.  It never occurred to me until later in life that not everyone is as lucky as I was.  Really…if you didn’t get an “Uncle Willie” in your family…you wuz robbed!

–over and out–

 

Everybody Should Have an “Uncle Willie” (part one)

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The Man of Multiple Names Could Hear My Multiple Voices

To his wife Joyce, his co-workers and other friends he was “Bill”.  His mom, my grandma,  always referred to him as William Thomas (I always wondered who that “William Thomas” guy she kept talking about was).  But to me and my younger brother Lee (pictured above), he was Willie.  Not even “Uncle” Willie…just Willie.  It was what my mom and his other siblings called him, and he graciously allowed us to keep using that name for the rest of his life.  Willie was probably the person most responsible for developing my creative talents and imagination.

Don’t get me wrong.  Mom always read stories to me (shifting her voice with the characters), and she and Dad always made sure I had imaginative toys, books, records, crayons & paper,  and  (of course) plenty of cardboard boxes.  Dad had plans to go into drafting (before the government beat him to it and drafted him for a little assignment in 1940s Germany), so my drawing and cartooning abilities doubtless came from him.  Mom and Joyce both made puppets for me over the years and if they ever thought I was weird for doing the voices of my stuffed toys as I played, they never let on.  But it was Willie who actively joined in the play, and invited me to join in his own, right thru adulthood.

The Electric and the Eclectic  

It was Willie who fostered my interest in things electronic.  He built me a crystal radio set and showed me how to string antennae wire all over grandma’s spare room and listen to voices and music over the headphones.  It was Willie who put me on the air for the very first time…even if it was just a quick “hello” over his custom-built ham radio set-up.

It was Willie who took me over to visit his friend Don Scales, who built hi-fi systems and had this funny contraption called a tape recorder.  He let us kids not only record our voices, but play around with tape echo effects.  And some years later it was Willie, through his connection with Don (also chief engineer at the home town radio station), who got me my first part time job as a radio announcer/dj  while I was still in high school.  It’s no false modesty when I say it was Willie’s doing  and not my own talents — I still have the original audition reel and it’s cringeworthy!

When I got a tape recorder of my own and started messing around with character voices and the sound effects I could pull off my cartoon kiddie records, Willie not only encouraged me, he wrote some silly “radio serial” scripts about the guys he worked with in the radio/tv repair shop at Sears – “The Adventures of Picture Tube Charlie”, and did some of the voices alongside mine.  I’m told the gang at work kept bugging him for new “episodes”.

Expanding the Circuit

While I never learned any electrical engineering, Willie did provide for the advancement of my on air style, creating a makeshift “portable consolette” for me out of old record players, a recycled cart machine, basic microphone and a small mixing board which he built himself.  I even used it at a few of my high school dances…the only time you’d find an un-datable square like me at such an event.

Willie , who worked as a TV Repair man at Sears, salvaged an old b&w tv from the shop and got it working so I could have it in my basement lair at home (another blog for another time).  That was the one I remember watching the first moon landing on.  During college, he repaired another set for my first apartment, and it was the first color tv in our immediate family.  Willie and Joyce had a big RCA color console at their house, of course, with sound that could be rigged through his custom stereo.  As kids, we were thrilled when a Saturday family gathering or a rare overnight stay gave us a treasured glimpse into this magical new world of color.  Promos for the upcoming week’s “Batman” almost gave me a sensory overload!  On more than a few Sunday nights, mom and dad grudgingly let our visit go into overtime so we could watch Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color before heading  home.

Still later, during the Betamax years, Willie could always be counted upon to faithfully watch the tapes  I’d bring home of a tv commercial or promo I’d directed or appeared in, or the few clips I was able to snag when my puppet characters and I appeared on the local kiddie show, “Time for Uncle Paul” (again…another blog for another time).

Even when the rest of the family wasn’t really that interested, Willie (and Joyce) served as my enthusiastic and encouraging audience.  And Joyce actually contributed one of the makeshift puppets I used on the show, Malcom, who was built from a teddy bear body and a ‘cookie monster’ style head that could “eat” cookies through a slot in the back of his mouth.  On the show, though, he quickly developed into a sweet, slow-witted soul not unlike Edgar Bergen‘s bumpkin, “Mortimer Snerd“.  The puppets couldn’t actually do much, physically.  But they really came alive as characters.

But Willie’s influence, and Joyce’s, didn’t stop at local radio and local tv.  It’s literally gone around the world thanks to all those years of creative nurturing.  More on that in the next post.

— over and out —

Do You Know Where You Came From? No, I Don’t Mean That Way…

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I consider myself pretty knowledgable in things involving voice recording over the years…especially in Radio, film and animation.

But voice talent Scott Reynes just boosted my knowledge by leaps and bounds with a chart he created, which chronicles the history of the voiceover.

You’ll find it at http://scottreyns.com/history-of-voice-over.php   Once you get there, click on the thumbnail that looks like the picture here, and you’ll get the full-size graphic.

Thanks, too, to the BillyBlog over at http://www.billyvoice.com/blog/.  If I hadn’t seen it mentioned there, I might have missed it.

— over and out —