Eric on The Road

Journeys into the offbeat, off the beaten path, overlooked and forgotten - by Eric Model

Sunday, January 31, 2010

Passing: Shirley Bell Cole, the Voice of Little Orphan Annie (NY Times)

From The New York Times:

By DENNIS HEVESI
Published: January 30, 2010

Annie was Shirley Bell, a brown-haired girl from the South Side of Chicago, who was the primary radio voice of the character from 1930 to 1940. She got the part, adapted from Harold Gray’s popular comic strip, when she was 10 and, managing to maintain that bubbly preteen voice, played Annie until she was 20.

Shirley Bell Cole died on Jan. 12 at 89, her daughter, Lori Cole, said, adding only that her mother had lived in Arizona.

“Orphan Annie was like the keystone of after-school radio during the Depression,” Chuck Schaden, an expert on radio history, said in an interview on Thursday. “It meant a lot to kids because she would save the day, come to the rescue. At Christmas time in those days they were happy to get two pennies.”

Her high-pitched voice exclaimed, “Leapin’ lizards!” at scintillating twists in the serial plot.


http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/arts/30cole.html?ref=obituaries

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