Jimmy Weldon

Jimmy Weldon with Webster Webfoot in 2004, more than fifty years after the duck's television debut. Photo: John "J-Cat" Griffith, via Find A Grave.

Jimmy Weldon lived to ninety-nine, and he packed enough into those years for three careers.^[1] Before Hollywood ever heard of him, he was a combat engineer building pontoon bridges and clearing minefields across France in the last push of the Second World War, and he was there when American troops opened the gates of the Buchenwald concentration camp.^[2] He came home, picked up a microphone at a small radio station in Texas, and started talking back to himself in a duck's voice.^[3] That duck, Webster Webfoot, carried him onto local television, then onto national cartoons, then into a stage career that outran most men's whole working lives.^[5] Pull up a chair. This one runs a long way.

A soldier before he was a duck

Jimmy Weldon was a stage name. The birth certificate said Ivy Laverne Shinn, born in Dale, Texas, on September 23, 1923.^[5] He trained with the 146th Engineer Combat Battalion at Camp Swift and had qualified for pilot training when the Battle of the Bulge broke out and the Army needed men who could build bridges under fire more than it needed new pilots. He went back to the engineers.^[2] He shipped to England, then to France in March 1945, and spent the war's last months with the 1270th Engineer Combat Battalion, building pontoon bridges and clearing minefields.^[2] Then came Buchenwald. Weldon's outfit was part of the force that opened the camp in April 1945, and decades later he still had the words for what he found there: survivors "laying on these wooden slabs, reaching out under there trying to say 'Thank you.'"^[2] A man carries that. Whatever Jimmy Weldon became after the war, he became it as someone who had already seen the worst that people do to each other.

A duck learns to talk

He had been doing the duck voice since he was twelve years old, long before anyone paid him for it.^[2] The paying part started in 1946, when he came home from the war and got hired as an announcer at KWCO, a small radio station in Texas. He put the duck voice on the air, taking calls as Webster Webfoot, and Texas radio audiences took to talking with a duck.^[3] In 1948 he moved to a 250-watt station in Duncan, Oklahoma, and kept building the character.^[5] On April 4, 1950, Webster Webfoot became a real person on television, on WFAA-TV in Dallas.^[5] Two years later, Weldon and his duck moved to KCOP-TV, Channel 13, in Hollywood, and from there out to the San Joaquin Valley circuit: Fresno, Salinas, Bakersfield, wherever a local station needed a kids' show and a duck who could carry it.^[5]

By January 1955, Webster Webfoot (billed on the page simply as "Talking Duck") had Weldon booked on NBC's Saturday morning schedule at eleven o'clock, right after Paul Winchell's ten-thirty slot.^[7] In November 1958, Weldon and Webster Webfoot, by then broadcasting out of KFRE in Fresno, turned up for the ceremonial opening of a new bridge on the Nut Tree Railroad in Vacaville, California, sharing the bill with Dr. Horatio Q. Birdbath and his figure Johnny, and Stewart Scott with George the Crow, out of KVIQ Eureka.^[8] That is this trade in miniature: local kids' vents, criss-crossing California for a toy railroad's bridge opening, because that's where the kids were.

From a duck puppet to a cartoon duck

Webster Webfoot's "quacky" voice did something no ordinary duck manages: it got promoted. In 1961, Hanna-Barbera built a new character around that same voice, a small yellow duckling named Yakky Doodle, and Jimmy Weldon voiced him through the original Yogi Bear Show segments and the Hanna-Barbera reruns and revivals that followed.^[1] The duck outlived the show that made him. Weldon went on to voice Solomon Grundy on Challenge of the Superfriends in 1978, and picked up further Hanna-Barbera credits on Popeye and Son and The Tom and Jerry Kids Show.^[4] He also worked in front of the camera: guest spots on Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Dragnet, The Waltons, Dallas, S.W.A.T., B.J. and the Bear, The Rockford Files, and Diff'rent Strokes, plus a role in the 1979 film Americathon.^[4] Back on children's television, producer Ralph Edwards built a show called Funny Boners around him, a kids' version of Truth or Consequences.^[3] His last credited voice role came in 2015, on Disney's The 7D. He was well past ninety and still in the booth.^[5]

He kept one piece of advice in his pocket for the rest of his life, and repeated it in talk after talk.^[2]

The second act: paid to believe

Somewhere along the way, Jimmy Weldon picked up a second career: getting paid to tell rooms full of grown-ups what he had already proven twice, in a war and in show business, that belief is a decision, not a feeling. He joined the Premiere Speakers Bureau and worked corporate audiences at Boeing, Century 21, Coldwell Banker, AT&T, and Rockwell, among others.^[6] His book, Go Get 'em Tiger, sold more than thirty thousand copies.^[6] In November 2012, a Republican women's club in Los Alamitos booked him for their monthly meeting after an earlier appearance had gone over so well that the organizer called him "just the right tonic" for a group worn down by a rough election season.^[6] He kept at it into his nineties, speaking for the Center for Youth Patriotism at age ninety-two in 2016.^[2] Near the end, he started a YouTube channel, Jimmy's Lecture, and used it to put his own war stories on the record himself.^[9]

A ninety-nine-year run

Jimmy Weldon died on July 6, 2023, in Paso Robles, California, about two months shy of turning one hundred.^[4] He had outlived his wife Muriel, whom he married in 1947, by thirty-five years.^[5] By the time he went, the duck voice he had started using at twelve years old had done more traveling than most men manage in a lifetime: through a war, onto a 250-watt radio station, into local television in three states, across a national cartoon lineup, and finally onto corporate stages telling people what he had learned the hard way. This trade usually remembers a person for one thing. Jimmy Weldon earned three.

Ninety-nine years and he started at twelve, quacking away for free. I've been in this business a fraction of that and I still charge for rehearsal.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy