Walter Tetley was an American actor and voice actor specializing in child impersonation during radio's classic era, with regular roles on The Great Gildersleeve and The Phil Harris-Alice Faye Show, as well as continuing as a voice-over artist in animated cartoons, commercials, and spoken-word record albums. He is perhaps best known as the voice of Sherman in the Jay Ward-Bill Scott Mr. Peabody TV cartoons.
Career
Tetley's foray into voices for theatrical cartoons began in 1936, as the voice of Felix the Cat in three of Van Beuren's Rainbow Parade cartoon shorts: The Goose That Laid the Golden Egg, Neptune Nonsense, and Bold King Cole. The latter short starts with Tetley singing "Nature and Me", showcasing his song styling abilities. For his entire adult life, Tetley had the voice of a preteen boy, which led to him largely taking voice roles for young boys. The exact cause was never confirmed - while co-star Bill Scott half-jokingly claimed that Tetley had been castrated, it is also possible that he had Kallmann syndrome. Whatever the cause, his unusual situation would allow him to hold roles for young boys far longer than actual boys of that age could before their voices would lower due to puberty. 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, 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 . 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 at the age of 60 on September 4, 1975, having never fully recovered from his injuries. His interment was in Chatsworth's Oakwood Memorial Park.
