What Kind of Voice Career Is This? G-rr-r-r--e-a--a-at!

The climb to the top was easy in 1933. It was just a matter of the word spilling out around Hollywood about the new kid from Nebraska with the big bass singing voice. No, that wasn’t even a climb; it was more like a glide. He came West without a job and has hardly been out of work since, thanks in large part to a certain legendary TV tiger.

Nowadays, however, the climb to the top means hiking up those infernal steps every night to the broadcast booth at the Irvine Bowl so you can narrate the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach.

But because you’re a guy who cut his show business teeth with people like Benny and Crosby and Disney, you try to forget that you’re 77 years old and that you’ve got arthritis and legs weakened by longstanding nerve damage.

The way you were trained, the show must go on.

And on and on it goes for Thurl Ravenscroft, for 28 years now the Pageant’s voice. Even though the body may waver, the voice is still deeper than a Reagan budget cut and smooth as sherry.

That voice. It’s what separated Ravenscroft from the pack in the early ‘30s and landed him jobs singing for the movies and radio. After RKO and Universal and Paramount kept dialing his number, he realized that his art career could wait. Music would be the meal ticket.

“To me, that’s when music was music,” the 6-foot, 5-inch Ravenscroft said, sitting at a table with his wife, June, in their San Juan Capistrano home. “Every studio had a full symphonic orchestra and a whole bunch of singers they used on every picture. Every radio show had singers on it, and NBC and CBS had their own staff orchestras. Music was everything. And it was good music; it wasn’t based on three chords. It was fantastic. What a racket, having fun and making money.”

Along the way, Walt Disney came calling. “You never knew what Walt was going to ask you to do.”

While planning “Lady and the Tramp,” Disney told Ravenscroft and the other members of his quartet that every B movie he’d ever seen had a prison scene where four cellmates were singing lullabies. Disney explained that Lady and Tramp were to be in a dog pound and that he wanted four crooning dogs in another cell. “He said it can’t sound like humans; it’s got to sound like dogs.”

And that’s how Ravenscroft became the voice of Boris the Russian Wolfhound.

But it was in the early ‘50s that Ravenscroft etched his name in pop culture, however anonymously. His quartet had already been singing jingles for other Kellogg’s cereals when an ad agency told them of a new cereal, Sugar Frosted Flakes, and its wise-guy pitchman named Tony the Tiger. The fledgling script called for Tony to say the cereal wasn’t just good, but great.

Someone in the ad agency suggested sending the script to Ravenscroft, who started playing around with the word great. He began stretching the word out. Soon, he was saying “G-rr-r-r--e-a--a-at!” in his rolling basso profundo growl. As he went up the scale a bit, an engineer kicked in a reverberating sound.

Just like that, Tony the Tiger had his signature voice and Thurl Ravenscroft a lifetime job.

“We sent the tape back to Chicago and 40 years later, I’m still doing it,” said Ravenscroft, who tapes about 15 new Tony commercials a year. “All I have to do is walk into any crowd in the United States, I’ll bet you, and say, ‘G-rr-r-r--e-a--a-at!” and everyone would turn around and say, ‘Tony!’ ”

I wish I had more space to tell you about the guy who was the singing mouse in “Cinderella” and the parrot in the old Gillette Blue Blades commercials; or Captain the Horse in “101 Dalmatians” or about his days singing on the Kraft Music Hall on radio.

You’d learn about a guy with a natural gift of voice and who then developed it. Or of an unpretentious, religious man who, when people used to ask how he made a living, would tell them, “Well, today I sang like a mouse, I was a horse out in the barn, I was the voice of a coyote.”

But, nope. I can’t squeeze Ravenscroft’s 58-year show biz career into this sardine can. I probably couldn’t extract a week from a career like this.

But if you’re like me, a sucker for hearing tales of the good old days, you’d pay money to listen to Ravenscroft’s stories or hear him do, as he will graciously for the umpteenth time, another “G-rr-r-r--e-a--a-at!”

He is a page from another book--a book written about the era of Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies, when mice could sing and dogs howled in four-part harmony.

It would make for a poignant tale to write today of this white-haired mustachioed man who lived all that and who now has to make do with being the voice of a local arts pageant.

But Ravenscroft won’t let you write that story because it isn’t true.

“I enjoy the pageant as much as anything I’ve ever done in show business,” he said. “The pageant is unique. It’s all wrong, show business-wise. It’s totally wrong. You’re looking at a totally static show, 70% of the time you’re listening to a guy talk who you can’t see, and it’s all wrong.

“But it works like a charm. It’s a joy to be a part of it.”

For some reason, it makes me very happy to hear him say that.