She Worked for Cod Liver Oil

June Foray made more people laugh than any other woman in animated cartoons.

The title of her autobiography—Did You Grow Up With Me, Too?—couldn’t have been more appropriate. She was far from being the first voice actress in animation, but she’s probably the best known, thanks to the constant exposure of her Warner Bros. cartoons of the 1950s and ‘60s, and the great joy she and her comrades freelancing for the Jay Ward studio gave to people for years.

And that’s just a teeny sampling of her work, but it’s the work you probably remember best and love.

There was once a late-night TV host named Steve Allen. He had a gang of stooges—Don Knotts, Tom Poston, Louis Nye. Before television, Allen had a radio show. He had a gang of stooges. It was a gang of one—June Foray. Radio is where all the great cartoon voice people came from.

June spoke with the Los Angeles-area magazine Radio Life several times. This story dates from her time with Allen and his co-host, Wendell Noble, on a show called “Smile Time” on the Mutual network. It was written on March 17, 1946. In honour of what should have been June’s 100th birthday, allow us to reprint it. The fuzzy photos accompanied the article.

JUNE FORAY, “Mighty Midget”
She’s Just as Proficient with a Needle As She is at the Mike — Just as Clever Under a Car Hood as with a Paint Brush
Monday-Friday, 2 p.m.
MBS-KHJ-KGB

RADIO’S “mighty midget”—that’s June Foray, four feet eleven inches of as many different radio voices as ever came out of a mike. June runs the gamut of all of them on KHJ-Mutual Don Lee’s “It’s Smile Time” show heard Mondays through Fridays at 2:00 p.m.—even to the dog that always barks at the end of each show.
Every feminine voice that’s heard on the show is June’s. She can do anything from ingenues to grandmothers, through and including lady wrestlers. She’s one of the best boy juveniles in radio, and she’s played so many of these parts that Hollywood’s younger masculine radio contingent has threatened to form a union to keep Foray out. On a recent “Murder Is My Hobby” program, for instance, June played the lead supporting role—that of a little boy aged eleven.
Foray’s talent doesn’t confine itself to radio alone. She’s just as proficient with a needle as she is at a mike; just as able underneath a car hood as she is with a sewing machine; just as efficient with a paint brush as she is with a wrench.
She’s been sewing ever since she can remember . . . makes many of her own clothes, designs her own hats to add to her height. She loves wacky bonnets, and nothing pleases her better than to walk along Vine street with a new “stopper.”

Learned Accidentally
She got into the automotive repair business by the sheerest accident. June used to drive an old Model A, whose choke kept getting disconnected from the carburetor. One night on Serrano avenue (she’ll never forget it), she couldn’t get the thing to start. It was during the war and service-station attendants were being distinctly ungallant to lady motorists in distress. At least, the only one June could find didn’t care whether she got home or not. So June poked around under the hood herself and after about thirty minutes of fiddling, found out where the trouble was and got her car started. After that, she kept right on doing her own repair work, and she’s one girl who knows the difference between a piston ring and a set of spark plugs.
June’s pint size necessitates the use of a riser on most of the shows she works. On “It’s Smile Time,” she uses a riser AND a high stool, sharing her mike with Wendell Noble’s vocal numbers. When she plays on “Red Ryder,” however, it’s a cinch; Little Beaver’s mike is just the right height. Usually she does half-caste Indians on the Western show.
She's been working in radio since 1930; groomed for it ever since she was a little girl. When she was six, her mother thought her voice was too low, marched her off to a dramatic school to bring it up to a nice ladylike pitch. It was that early training in throwing her voice all over the scale that gave her the ability to imitate anything and everything. Famed as the best dialectician in Hollywood, June is the voice behind “Sniffles,” “Oswald,” and many another favorite cartoon character. She was the parrot in Spike Jones’ “Chloe” when the song was filmed; the hiccough of Paulette Goddard and Veronica Lake . . . the sneeze of Carole Thurston . . . and all kinds of animals. Her hardest imitation was of whooping cough for “Shepherd of the Hills.” She spent an entire day in the contagious wards of the County hospital, learning how.
Pill Pay

Hard work has never bothered June. Her post as a regular on the “Smile Time” show came because she had no objections to getting up at 5:30 a.m. when the show was aired at 7:15 a.m.
Her first radio appearance in Boston was on a program sponsored by a cod liver oil pill company. For three hours of rehearsal and a half hour dramatic show, the cast was paid $5 apiece and all the cod liver oil pills they could eat.
“The sponsor used to come to the show regularly and make us take the pills,” June remembers. “I usually managed to get down two.”
At home, she likes to tinker with a paint brush and a hammer and saw. She does a wonderful trick with coffee jars—paints the tops and bottoms, puts a decal on the clear glass between, and uses them as canisters in her kitchen. Not just decorative . . . you can see what’s in which!
Finally, she has a mad passion for politics—writes letters to her congressman, spends her time during elections doing house to house campaigns—and reads every book she can find on a discussed subject.
But unfortunately, even though she has learned just about everything else, she’s never learned not to take Wendell Noble and Steve Allen seriously. Her one complaint is that she’s a perfect foil for every gag they pull. She never knows what to expect next, and even when they dress up an old routine into something new, she still falls for it, hook, line and sinker.
“I’ve been with the show so long I should learn . . . I should learn,” she sadly shakes her head. “But I’m always the straight woman . . . always!”

Entertainer and voice expert Keith Scott says June was Oswald in the rabbit’s final cartoon, The Egg Cracker Suite (1943) and had completely forgotten about it until he reminded her. She then recalled how Lantz had to hire someone else to sing for Oswald. Her Sniffles cartoon was The Unbearable Bear (released April 1943), but she played the annoyed bear wife. Keith dug through the Warner studio archives and found Miss Foray was paid a whopping $25 to cut a couple of lines.

One of June’s most famous lines from cartoons was as Rocky saying “Now, here’s something we hope you’ll really like.”

June Foray gave us a lot to really like.