Walter Tetley

Early career

Tetley was born Walter Campbell Tetzlaff to a Scottish-born mother, Jessie Smith Campbell, and father Frederick Tetzlaff who was born in Manhattan of German parents.

Tetley was a precocious performer even when he really was a child, beginning at age seven performing Harry Lauder imitations. He established himself in radio, usually playing smart-aleck kids. Tetley moved to Hollywood in 1938 and acted in a number of films (he is the wisecracking messenger or pageboy in several Universal Pictures comedies), but radio was his truest metier.

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. Walter Tetley, the world's tallest midget." (Pre-puberty castration as a means to further one's voice career was a tactic not seen in Western society since the castrato phenomenon of 18th century Italy.) 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 childhood and teenage 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 including 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 after they accidentally got locked in 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).

But Tetley might have been an even bigger hit beginning in 1948, when he took on a concurrent continuing role on an equally popular comedy, playing obnoxious grocery boy Julius Abruzzio on The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show until the show's finish in 1954. (Surviving episodes that include pre-air audience warmups by Phil Harris usually included Harris alluding to Tetley as "the kid who steals the show every week"—even though Tetley was almost 40 years old when the Harris-Faye show ended production.) Julius combined an obsession with getting the better of his clumsy elders Phil and Remley to an unconcealed crush on Alice and was as much a fixture on the show as Harris's in-character malapropping vanity and Faye's tart but loving earthiness. He also played minor roles, such as a boy in a drugstore in the radio drama Dr. Christian (1937–1939). An example is in the "Dog Story" episode.

Cartoon voices and later career

Walter's foray into voices for theatrical cartoons began in the 1930s, as the voice of Felix the Cat in Van Beuren's Rainbow Parade cartoons in shorts such as "Neptune Nonsense". In "Bold King Cole", Tetley starts the cartoon short singing "Nature and Me", showcasing his song styling abilities.

In the late 1940s, he was the voice of Andy Panda in the Walter Lantz cartoons distributed by Universal Pictures.

In 1946, Tetley supplied the voice of the electric utility mascot Reddy Kilowatt in the short film Reddy Made Magic, produced by Lantz with Reddy Kilowatt creator Ashton B. Collins, Sr.; Tetley also performed the film's theme song. In 1959 he reprised the role in a John Sutherland-produced remake called The Mighty Atom.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Walter 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 Jay Ward's Rocky and His Friends (also known as The Bullwinkle Show), which made its debut in 1959.

Tetley worked for Capitol Records in the 1950s, providing an array of juvenile voices for the label's spoken-word and comedy albums, including Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America Volume One: The Early Years (1961). His Gildersleeve co-star, Harold Peary, had made three albums for Capitol a decade earlier, telling children's stories Gildersleeve-style.

In 1973 Tetley made an appearance on Rod Serling's radio series The Zero Hour. He can be heard in the "Princess Stakes Murder" episodes beginning the week of November 19.

"The Sheriff of Fetterman's Crossing", an episode of Serling's 1965 TV series The Loner, featured guest star Allan Sherman as a character named Walter Peterson Tetley.

Death

In 1971, after several more years' voiceover work, Tetley was seriously injured in a motorcycle accident and used a wheelchair for the rest of his life. Numerous sources have suggested Tetley may have lost his southern California home in the same period and lived out his days in a trailer. He died in 1975 at age 60, having never fully recovered from his injuries. His interment was in Chatsworth's Oakwood Memorial Park.