Radio and television announcer and actor Ken Roberts died 19 June 2009 of pneumonia (he suffered a stroke five years ago). Born Saul Trochman on 22 February 1910 in Manhattan, New York, Roberts was briefly an unpaid intern in Fiorello La Guardia’s law office, but left because he wanted to be an actor. Sources vary as to his first job in radio: either in New Jersey in the late 1920s, or at Brooklyn’s WLTH in 1930, but what is clear is that he had a long, distinguished career as an unknown person. As a radio announcer, his voice was heard (sometimes on many shows in one day), but he was an unknown.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Roberts introduced serials, read advertisements, moderated game show panels, and more. Within the sf community, he’ll be remembered for announcing several seasons of The Shadow, including 1937-38 (when Orson Welles starred as Lamont Cranston).
In the 1950s, he transitioned to television, and was the original announcer for Candid Camera. But he may be longest remembered as the announcer for two long-running soap operas: The Secret Storm and Love of Life.
Roberts’s genre film and television appearances include: The Dead Zone (2004), Taken (2002), three episodes of Millennium (1997-99), The Crow: Stairway to Heaven (1998), The Night Flier (1997), Poltergeist: The Legacy (1997), two episodes of The X-Files (1995), Exquisite Tenderness (1995), Deadlocked: Escape from Zone 14 (1995), Highlander (1994), Fatal Pulse (1988), The Great Land of Small (1987), and The Vindicator (1986).
In addition to his acting, Roberts was a labor leader. In 1935, he founded the American Guild of Radio Announcers and Producers, which later became part of the American Federation of Radio Artists (which itself became the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists, or AFTRA).
In a New York Times obituary, radio historian Jim Cox called Roberts “one of the leading lights of radio,” noting that Roberts’s voice had no regional accent, but was still distinctive, authoritative, and reassuring. The Times goes on to say “Roberts’s voice might not have sounded ethnic, but his roots were.” Roberts was “the son of Jewish immigrants. His mother, the former Fanny Naft, came from what is now Ukraine; his father, Nathaniel Trochman, an insurance salesman and an English tutor for other Eastern European immigrants, hailed from Latvia.”
Roberts were married and divorced twice before the age of 23, but then found the woman he wanted to be with, and was married to Norma for nearly fifty years (until her death). He is survived by his fourth wife, Sydell, whom he married in the late 1990s, his son, actor Tony Roberts, his daughter Nancy, one granddaughter, two stepchildren, and four step-grandchildren.