Biography

A sound effects man/musician/voice-over artists for Walt Disney Studios, for over 40 yrs. Plus + the 2nd voice of Mickey Mouse.

Sound effects man, voice of 'Mickey Mouse' from 1947-1977.

He once estimated that he created over 28,000 sound effects for 139 feature films and 335 cartoon shorts while he was employed at Disney.

He was a drummer, both before and during his Disney years. In order to increase his musical versatility, be began collecting odd gadgets and instruments to augment his rhythms. These gadgets formed the seeds of his career in creating sound effects for Disney cartoons. Occassionally, his interests in music and crazy sounds would come together, as in the cartoon Symphony Hour (1942)..

He was the oldest actor to voice Mickey Mouse, at the age of 40. Walt Disney, Wayne Allwine, and Bret Iwan were under the age of 40 when each of them voiced Mickey for the first time.

Made one of his few onscreen appearances in Disney's Fantasia (1940), as, presumably, a percussionist for The Philadelphia Orchestra. Actually, the Philadelphia Orchestra was not seen onscreen in the film; Disney voice artists and staff members "portrayed" members of the orchestra in the film (mostly in silhouette).

I worked on many pictures and never knew the names of the things. I'd be down there doing the effects and the name wasn't really important to me, as it was to the animators.

Walt Disney gave us the time to build them and go around and just build things. Anything we wanted we could make.

[on taking over the voice of Mickey Mouse from Walt Disney] Walt called me, I was on the stage here and a girl called me and said, "can you come up? Walt wants to see you." It was in the middle of the Mickey and the Beanstalk (1947) and I went up and he said, "I can't do it anymore. I'm just too busy." So, he asked me if I could do a Mickey voice and I tried it and he said, "Yeah, that sounds pretty good."