Karl Weber; Longtime Radio Actor

Karl Weber, a mainstay on many of the most popular radio shows of the wartime and postwar years, whose resonant voice later was heard in commercials for the presidential campaigns of Lyndon B. Johnson and Nelson A. Rockefeller, has died in a Boston hospital.

Weber was 74 when he died July 30 of congestive heart failure near his home in Edgartown, Mass., where he had continued to record commercials until his death.

A graduate of the University of Iowa, Weber--possibly best-known as the husband of “The Woman in White,” a medical melodrama of the mid-1940s heard over NBC--began as an actor with Midwestern Shakespearean troupes before settling in Chicago where many of the nation’s top radio shows then originated.

He went to New York in the late 1940s to help found New Stages, an off-Broadway group that helped popularize Jean Paul Sartre’s “The Respectful Prostitute” before it moved to Broadway.

His radio credits over the years included featured roles in “The Strange Romance of Evelyn Winters” and “Dr. Sixgun” and ongoing performances in “The Barton Family,” “Lone Journey,” “The Romance of Helen Trent,” “Stepmother” and “When a Girl Marries.”

He also recorded more than 200 books in the Talking Book program of the American Foundation for the Blind and served as president of the New York chapter of the Screen Actors Guild from 1968-69.

He is survived by a daughter, two sons, four grandchildren, two great-grandchildren, two brothers and a sister.