Here’s a little piece of history that I stumbled across while Facebooking. It’s a big card that a bunch of us signed for June Foray, the First Lady of Cartoon Voicing as some of us called her. She was a dear, sweet lady who was so, so generous with her time and talents. She had way more of both than most people have. She lived to the age of 99 years, 10 months and 8 days. That close to a hundred!
The card, as you can see, is dated 2011. June left us in 2017. The last time I saw her was a month or so before she died. A very wonderful voice actress named Julie Nathanson wanted to meet her and to tell her what an inspiration and pioneer she was. Today, there are an awful lot of women making what are sometimes very good careers in Voiceover…but June worked just about every day back when there weren’t many ladies in that profession. You can see the shaky signature of one of the others on the card: Lucille Bliss, who among other characters was the voice of Smurfette on The Smurfs and way before that, the voice of Crusader Rabbit. Lucille died in 2016.
I knew June for along time and attended so many birthday parties for her that I don’t remember when and where I signed this card…with a pen that was obviously running out of ink. One party for June I remember well was not a birthday celebration, just one of many tributes. It was on June 17, 1994 at the Beverly Garland Hotel out in the valley. Everyone in the animation community was in one big ballroom but almost all of us were ducking over to another room where there was a TV set. On that TV set was live coverage of the L.A. Police Department chasing a white Bronco with O.J. Simpson in it. Even June was more interested in that than in her party.
Getting back to that last visit with June: Julie and I met for lunch out in Woodland Hills, then I drove us to June’s home where she’d lived since, I believe, the fifties. It was like a museum with artifacts of her career. To find a place to sit, you had to move huge stuffed Bullwinkle or Rocky dolls. June was confined to a wheelchair and was getting loving care from her friend/driver/historian Dave Nimitz. She was not working and was very unhappy not to be working but delighted to meet Julie, who said all the right things.
Almost a year to the day after June passed, we filled the Motion Picture Academy Theater with a Who’s Who of the animation business and there, other people said all the right things. She was most beloved and respected and I wrote about that night here. If you click over there, you can see a larger version of the above photo and see a list of all the important ladies now in the voice biz because June kicked open the door for others. I miss her so I was glad to come across the card and be reminded of who she was and all she meant to us. A lot there to think about.
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