IT TAKES A BIG MAN TO SOUND SO SMALL

Delightful character voice actor Walter Tetley was born in New York in 1915. He provided juvenile voices in several classic radio shows, and he’s probably best known to the TV generation as the voice of Sherman, the pet boy of the genius dog Mr. Peabody, in the “Peabody’s Improbable History” back segment of “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show”. Other roles included Leroy, the nephew of radio's Great Gildersleeve, and the Walter Lantz toon Andy Panda.

Walter Tetley was unofficially tagged “the world’s tallest midget”, because of his childlike voice, but he wasn’t a little person at all. Tetley was an averaged-sized man with a child-like voice, for reasons that remain mysterious. Officially, he had a hormonal disorder, but there was an urban legend (unproven), that his mother, unwilling to part with the paycheck of a child actor, had Walter “fixed” (castrated), so that he remained in a state of arrested development, permanently pre-pubescent, and destined to sound like a boy forever. Perhaps the truth will never be known.

Walter Tetley died in 1975, at the age of 60.