When directing Bill in sessions, I always felt that he and I were on the same wavelength. After a take, I could start to make a suggestion, and Bill would frequently complete my sentence, somehow knowing exactly what I was looking for. We would hear things the same way. Subtle things like points of emphasis that could change the meaning of a sentence. I could ask Bill to “shave a half second,” and he could literally shave a half second. Or I could say, “Go faster but don’t sound like it.” While clients would chuckle at that direction, Bill could really do it. Directing him was like steering an expensive sports car. He responded so well to whatever was asked of him.

Clients almost always raved about Bill’s talent. But I loved one of Bill’s comebacks when a client would give him a less than stellar comment following a read. The client might say, “That’s pretty good, Bill. At least we’re getting there.” To which Bill would reply, “Damned again by faint praise.”

We discovered Bill in 1989. In those pre-Internet, pre-ISDN days, we often added new voices to the roster by phoning studios in the region and swapping names of recently discovered talent. Our office manager at the time was Barbara Gray. She had been talking to Grace Cantrell who worked for Sundown Sound in Greenville, SC, about an hour from ProComm. Barbara gave Grace a couple of names, and Grace did likewise. Then, as an afterthought, Grace added, “Oh, there is another guy you MIGHT be able to use. His name is Bill Thomas. But he doesn’t have a demo. Here’s his number.”

Barbara called and told Bill we’d like to hear what he could do. So he agreed to drive up to ProComm and do a live audition for us. He arrived the next day, a bit scruffy looking, in an old Crown Vic. We handed him three or four scripts to read on mic. Our jaws dropped as Barbara and I turned to each other in disbelief. Grace had said that we MIGHT want to use this guy. Really? He was incredible!

I used those reads to create Bill’s first ProComm demo which got him a tremendous amount of work. We started booking him that very day. Bill drove up from Greenville daily for the next five days. Then he called me aside and asked, “Is this volume of work normal? Can I expect this to continue?” Bill Thomas rapidly became one of our most popular voices, a distinction he maintained for 22 years.

Bill loved cars. Especially Ford Crown Victoria’s and VWs. Unfortunately, he didn’t always have one in good working order in the early days. He repeatedly explained that he was “building a car” in his front yard. I occasionally suggested he might want to just buy a good used car instead so he could have reliable transportation. Somehow that would set him off, and he’d respond, “John, don’t be ridiculous!!”

Once, when Bill’s car was on the blink, he called a cab to drive him from Greenville to Asheville. When I arrived at the studio that morning, I spotted a yellow taxi sitting in the grass of the park across the street. The driver was squatting by the cab having a smoke while Bill was inside voicing commercials. Turns out that Bill had asked the driver to wait there for four hours as he completed his sessions. Hey, you had to appreciate Bill’s determination to come through for us. No matter how quirky he was, I believe he was on time for almost every session.

In those days, we had a studio cat. One that had wandered up to the back door and never left. For a couple years, we just called him, “Kitty”. One day, I got the idea to name Kitty, and gave him the rather formal name, “Mike Burke” (inspired by one of our corporate clients). We wrote the name Mike Burke on Kitty’s food dish. Bill had become quite close to the cat by then and was furious that we had changed its name. And he let me know it. Seeing the new name on the dish only made Bill madder. One of the engineers said, “Bill, you can take the letters off the dish, but you can’t take the name off the cat.” Bill slowly accepted Kitty’s new name, and his relationship with Mike Burke became legendary at ProComm.

When I first met Bill, ProComm had several pieces of studio gear that had been modified by Lee Furr, a renowned engineer in Tucson. But as Bill learned our ambitions for growing the company, he told me something that was crucial to accomplishing our vision. “John, if you want to have  several studios and crank out lots of jobs, you need to standardize your equipment. Everything must be ‘off the shelf’ with redundancy from room to room.” I think he had learned this when working at TM Productions in Dallas, the revered jingle and music company known for their assembly line productions for hundreds of radio station clients. Bill introduced us to David Rochester and Alan Brooks, two outstanding technical guys, who totally transformed the wiring and acoustics of our early operation. (Alan is now our full time technical director, and David continues to keep in touch with ProComm from his base in Nashville.) I’ll always be grateful to Bill for connecting us with those guys.

If you ever worked with Bill in a session, you’ll remember how, in between takes, he’d switch into his spot-on impersonation of Harry Morgan as Colonel Potter on MASH. Not sure why, but it was a Bill Thomas trademark. Sometimes I thought I heard a faint trace of Colonel Potter on subsequent reads, and I’d ask him to quit impersonating Harry for the rest of the session. Strangely, I don’t think he was ever asked by a client to do that particular voice on a spot. But it would have been perfect if he had.

A first-time female client once told Bill after her session, “You just sound so ‘huggable’.” And he did. Although a bit of a curmudgeon outside of sessions, he was also gracious and kind. He ended every job with honest, sincere appreciation to all involved. Bill was a freelance voice talent, but he came across as a member of the ProComm family telling clients things like, “That’s how we do it here at ProComm.” And I like to think that “how we do it here” is to aspire to the professionalism and grace of Bill Thomas for every client. Actually, Bill once said to me that “our clients know that ProComm’s worst job will at least be acceptable.” Uh, ok. I know what he meant.

Bill, we’ll miss you and think of you often. Thanks for being a part of our lives.

Tagged as: Bill Thomas, Grace Cantrell