Former soap announcer Ken Roberts dead at 99

[Scotty]

Ken Roberts - announcer of TV, radio dies at 99

Bruce Weber, New York Times

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Ken Roberts' voice was so comforting, it was said he had a golden throat. Welcome in millions of American homes, its resonant urbanity helped housewives and their families while away many an afternoon and evening.

He was a good-looking man, too: tall and dark, with a resemblance to Errol Flynn - according to his son, anyway. But not many people knew of him, and even fewer would have recognized him if he had knocked on the front door.

In the 1930s and '40s, the heyday of radio, this was the lot of the announcer, the man who introduced serials and other narrative shows - always live on the air - and read advertisements and moderated game show panels. And like few others, Mr. Roberts was ubiquitous, the voice of dozens of shows, a star without a name or a face.

He died of pneumonia on June 19 in New York at 99, having had a stroke five years ago, his son, the actor Tony Roberts, said.

TV legacy

In the 1950s, Ken Roberts made the transition to television, appearing on game shows, serving as the original announcer for "Candid Camera" and lending his voice to a popular program starring Jan Murray, "Dollar a Second," for which he also did on-air commercials for the show's sponsor, Mogen David wine.

But his most enduring television legacy was as the announcer for two long-running daytime soap operas, "The Secret Storm" and "Love of Life."

Mr. Roberts' radio credits include comedies, dramas, game shows and variety shows. It was not unusual for him to be on the air half a dozen times a day. He announced several seasons of "The Shadow," including 1937-38, when Orson Welles played the title character. He was the host and announcer for the game show "Quick as a Flash," in which historical events or current events were dramatized, and contestants were asked to identify them.

He was the announcer for the comedy "Easy Aces"; the soap opera "This Is Nora Drake," about a young woman with a surfeit of suitors; the hospital drama "Joyce Jordan, Girl Intern"; the quiz show "What's My Name?"; and the quiz show parody "It Pays to Be Ignorant."

He did stints on "The Milton Berle Show," "The Victor Borge Show," "The Sophie Tucker Show" and "The Fred Allen Show." He could be heard on weekly drama presentations like "The Philip Morris Playhouse" and "The Mercury Summer Theater" and mystery series, like "The Adventures of Ellery Queen."

"I saw him as one of the leading lights of radio," said Jim Cox, the author of several books on radio history. What was remarkable about Mr. Roberts' voice, Cox said, was that it was without any regional accent and yet distinctive, authoritative yet reassuring.

"It didn't sound Yankee, Southern, Western or anything else," Cox said. "There was nothing in it to irritate anybody. It was one of those voices you just naturally liked to hear."

Mr. Roberts' voice might not have sounded ethnic, but his roots were. Born Saul Trochman in Manhattan on Feb. 22, 1910, he was the son of Jewish immigrants. His mother, the former Fanny Naft, came from what is now Ukraine; his father, Nathaniel Trochman, an insurance salesman and an English tutor for other Eastern European immigrants, hailed from Latvia.

Saul, who grew up in the Bronx, went to law school for a year and worked briefly as an unpaid intern in the law office of Fiorello La Guardia. He left, according to family lore, because he couldn't afford the bus fare and the firm wouldn't give it to him. But he wasn't interested in law, anyway; he wanted to be an actor.

Leaving home

And apparently he wanted to get out from under his parents' roof; he wed twice before he was 23. The first marriage, which lasted two weeks, was annulled; the second ended in divorce after a few months.

"We jokingly said he did it to get out of the house," Tony Roberts said in an interview last week. "In those days you needed a reason."

A subsequent marriage lasted nearly 50 years, until the death of his third wife, Norma. In the late 1990s he married again. Besides his son, Tony, of Manhattan, he is survived by his wife, Sydell; a daughter, Nancy Roberts, of Fire Island, N.Y.; a granddaughter, two stepchildren and four step-grandchildren.

His son and most printed sources say Mr. Roberts got his start in radio with a New Jersey station in the late 1920s. But in an interview with Leonard Maltin for the book "The Great American Broadcast," Mr. Roberts said his first job was in 1930 at WLTH in Brooklyn, where in addition to announcing, he played piano and read poetry on the air, answered the telephone and swept the floor. He changed his name, his son said, so it wouldn't sound so Jewish.

Mr. Roberts was also a labor leader. In 1935 he founded the American Guild of Radio Announcers and Producers, which eventually became part of the American Federation of Radio Artists, a forerunner of the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists, known as AFTRA.

"My father's voice did sound to me as though it came from God," Tony Roberts said. "He had no accent; he spoke in perfect tones and complete sentences."

This article appeared on page D - 5 of the San Francisco Chronicle

Link: http://www.sfgate.co.../BAGU18J9SL.DTL

[All My Shadows]

RIP!

I heard about this last week.