If I told you part of the job of today's honoree was to spit chewed-up carrot into a spittoon, you wouldn't believe me.
If I told you this man altered a letter in his last name in high school because of a teacher's insensitivity, you might look at me, puzzled.
If I said you wouldn't know this man's face if you saw it, but you would be able to pick his voice out of a lineup, you might start seeing the picture (but not of his face).
If I told you he was doing radio work as a voice actor when he was 19, and that about 10 years later he was earning his keep sounding like a broken-down car, you'd wonder what in tarrrnation I was talking about.
Now, if I said "Suffering succotash!" or "What's up, doc?" you'd start to think of some of the hundreds and hundreds of characters voiced by Mel Blanc, who was born on this date in 1908.
In memory of transsexual pioneer Christine Jorgensen, who was born on this date in 1926, died about two months before Blanc, and was in many ways a pioneer for gender and gender-expression rights.
I have been sitting here at my desk for the last several minutes trying to think of who would not have heard a Mel Blanc voice. Other than those with no radio or TV access from the 1920s on, I'm drawing a blank — so to speak.
That is how influential Mel Blanc was. Take Johnny Carson, Jackie Gleason, Lucille Balle and Desi Arnaz, all of those TV pioneers, and add Jack Benny and a handful of other people to the list.
And then you begin to approach the reach of Mel Blanc. Then you begin to get an idea for how pervasive he was.
Seven years after Blanc died, one of his most famous characters appeared in a movie poster opposite Michael Jordan.
Nineteen years after Blanc died, the characters he made famous remain iconic, the voices inseparable from the cartoons.
Seventy years after Blanc debuted the voices of Porky Pig and Daffy Duck, and more than 60 years after he introduced so many other voices to American children (and their parents, and anyone who happened to be visiting), they're still staples of Americana. Those children are adults, and those adults raised their children on those cartoons, and those children became adults and did the same thing.
And there you have common ground for three generations of people.
While people change, while mores, values and traditions adapt with them, while presidents come and go and a nation reinvents itself in spite of — then because of — its power structure, the cartoons keep coming, providing at once a benchmark against which that change can be measured and ... something reminding us that in the midst of our troubles, in the midst of the ignominy and the injustice, the riots and rancor and the disbelief and destruction, there is that stability to come home to.
That at the end of the day, we can become children again.
That, home from college, home from a bad day at work, home from a good day at work, home from whatever or in someone else's home, we can relax, remove our adult personas and laugh again.
The radio becomes a TV, the screen goes from black-and-white to color, and the time and day change, but you know exactly what you're getting with each Mel Blanc character.
That stability, as Mel's son Noel discussed in a radio interview (how entirely fitting), might well have saved the elder Blanc's life (six minutes into the interview):
Paul Harris: I heard that your dad got into a car accident, I think it was some time in the early '60s, and was actually in a coma for a while, and when he came out of the coma, he didn't speak as Mel Blanc, he spoke as Bugs Bunny.
Noel Blanc: Yes, and that was a very interesting — I was there when that happened —
Paul Harris: Is that true?
Noel: Yes. You know, he got in a car accident on Dead Man's Curve, the, ah, you know, Dan and Jean ::stammers::
Paul Harris: Jan and Dean.
Noel: Yeah.
Paul Harris: You almost pulled a Porky Pig there!
Noel: P-p-p-Porky Pig! Jan and Dean! Anyway, on the Dead Man's Curve, around UCLA, and they didn't think he was going to live, he broke virtually every bone in his body and was in a coma for about 12 days. And the one doctor, who was a brain surgeon, said he had an idea because he always had the television on in Mel's room in case he would become alert to the television, and that particular day he saw the Looney Tunes. So he tried something after about, I think it was about nine days of coma, I've got it all written down. But he said, "Bugs, can you hear me? Bugs, can you hear me?" And the first words that [Mel] says is "Yeah. What's up, doc?" And [the doctor] says, "Porky, can you hear me?" So he went through the whole bunch of characters and brought my dad out of the coma that way with the characters. It was pretty amazing.
Paul: That's unbelievable.
Noel: And that's a true story.
Mel Blanc was in this case not hoisted by his own petard but saved by it.
Psychologists have written volumes upon volumes on the necessity of stability — on the sanity imparted to and maintained by a child and an adult, when in the middle of a culture on fire, or a status quo being destabilized, there is something for both sides to agree on. As we have seen recently with President Bush and talks of appeasing foreign powers, you need a middle ground before you can venture out from it.
And Mel Blanc gave it a voice.