Dick Beals - voice of Davey Hansen and Speedy Alka-Seltzer - dead at 85
The legendary Dick Beals — a star of radio, cartoons and more commercials than just about anyone — has died in a Southern California nursing home at the age of 85.
Dick stood 4'7" due to a glandular problem which also gave him his youthful voice. He was playing ten-year-old boys well into his seventies and was often called upon to loop (i.e., dub in the voice of) live-action child actors in movies or on TV programs.
He started in radio dramas in 1949 while attending Michigan State University. Several popular radio programs emanated from Detroit at the time and Dick wound up being heard on all of them but most notably The Lone Ranger, Challenge of the Yukon and The Green Hornet. His later cartoon credits include his being the first voice of Gumby and the first voice of Davey on the Davey & Goliath cartoon series. He was a loyal team member on the Roger Ramjet cartoon show and was heard throughout many Hanna-Barbera shows.
But his main line of work was commercials and he did thousands of them. His best remembered ones were probably the many he did for the Alka-Seltzer people as their mascot, Speedy Alka-Seltzer. Below, I've embedded a film of three of them, all with Buster Keaton. (And by the way: Was there ever a man who looked more like he needed an antacid than Buster Keaton?)
This old atheist loved watching Davey and Goliath as a boy. Cross gently, Dick...
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Walter Tetley's perennially adolescent voice was the result of a medical condition. While this has been cited as a hormonal problem, one of Tetley's employers, Bill Scott, offered a more specific explanation. According to Scott, Tetley's mother was reluctant to give up the revenue generated from her son's busy radio career and, in Scott's words, "She had him fixed [castrated]. Walter Tetley, the world's tallest midget." Whatever the medical reason, the condition arrested Tetley's development, preventing his voice from breaking into maturity as well as preventing his further physical growth. Tetley would sound forever as though he was stranded on the bridge between boyhood and pre-teen adolescence. Combined with his excellent delivery and spot-on comic timing, he parlayed his condition into a radio career that lasted nearly a quarter of a century, with some of radio's biggest stars included Tetley in their shows, including but not limited to Fred Allen, Jack Benny, W.C. Fields and others.
Fans of vintage radio remember Walter Tetley best for two roles. He was cast to play spunky nephew Leroy on The Great Gildersleeve, beginning in 1941. (Leroy's "Ah, you kiddin'?" and "Aw, for corn's sake!" became almost as much of a pair of show catch-phrases as the title character's booming trill, "Leeee-rooooy!"
Tetley stayed with that role for just about the entire life of that show, voicing Leroy in and out of jams from making nitroglycerin with his home chemistry set to helping Uncle Gildersleeve (Harold Peary) break out of the public library into which they got locked accidentally, after hours. The bad news: his unique appearance and true age obstructed him from playing the shorter, younger Leroy in the four Gildersleeve feature films (though he did appear in a speaking role as a bellhop in the third of those films, 1943's Gildersleeve on Broadway)....
Tetley's career was not quite finished when the Harris-Faye show's run ended. He would become familiar to a new generation as the voice of Sherman, the nerdy, freckled, bespectacled boy sidekick of time-traveling dog genius Mr. Peabody, in the "Peabody's Improbable History" segments of The Rocky Show (also known as The Bullwinkle Show), which made its debut in 1959.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Tetley
Not one of my favorites, but I remember it. But I loved Speedy... Godspeed, Mr. Beals. A job well done.
