Hi! Enjoyed your site on Walter Tetley and thought I’d add my liitle bits of info to your knowledge. I posted this on some OTR forums in the past so you may have seen it already. I had the privilege to have dinner with the late Willard Waterman in 1990. At the time, I was working on a sadly unpublished book on cartoon voice actors and had taken a seminar with June Foray a year or so earlier. Mr Waterman spoke quite kindly of Mr Tetley and referred to him as “one of the little people”. Around the same time, I had lunch with author Charles Stumpf who had done a book on FIBBER MCGEE AND MOLLY and was working on a book on GILDERSLEEVE. He told me that in later years, Walter finally had a growth spurt and, in spite of his health problems, finally grew taller! I have never seen this corroborated anywhere else, however. He said that Walter’s family had been very cooperative with his research and, in fact, passed on a lot of Walter’s papers and photographs to him (Stumpf).
The book never came out and I don’t even know if Stumpf is still with us. Walter, by the way, appears frequently on Stan Freberg’s boxed set of CD’s, usually in 1 minute commercials from the late 60s and early 70’s. In case you weren’t aware of it, Walter Tetley’s earliest claim to fame, circa 1932, was as “Wee Sir Harry Lauder”, a mini spoof version of the great Scottish entertainer of the same name. I have a radio book from 1932 which has a drawing of Walter in Scottish costume with bagpipes. Enjoyed your site. I’ll be back.
I was kind of looking for the date of his first radio work. I read somewhere that Fred Allen brought him from New York to California. I wonder if that 1932 show was from his work in the Big Apple or in Hollywood?
I heard about that physical growth that you mention……….though I had thought that I read that he did that growing in the 1940s, after he saw a urologist then………not later in life.
You didn’t by chance attend one of June Foray’s seminars in Hawaii, did you? I saw a news article, on the internet, that she did give some seminars at the University of Hawaii, not too long ago.
Brian
Actually, my seminar with Ms Foray was in San Diego in 1988. I was able to provide her with tapes of the Stan Freberg Show (NOW you can buy em at Best Buy. THEN, they were hard to find!)that she was on but hadn’t heard in years. She sent me a marvellous thank you letter in character as Natasha Fatalle from Bullwinkle! In doublechecking that 1932 book, RADIO ROUNDUPS, it says that Walter had already been a radio star for three years! I could easily be misremembering WHEN Mr. Stumpf said Walter’s growth spurt hit so I’m sure your version is probably correct.
Hey, what a coincidence! I JUST now read a posting on an Old Time Radio board that Charles Stumpf’s book on GILDERSLEEVE is coming out next month and Stumpf is looking to set up radio interviews to publicize it! I know I’m buying one!