"Stump the Yankee"

[Jim Page]

Laurie, when I was a kid, having grown up in most of the states bordering the Gulf of Mexico, I had the worst "Southern" accent you can imagine. I made Gomer Pyle sound like William F. Buckley.

It became an issue when we moved to Naples, Florida, where most of the kids in school were from "up North." One day when I had to read aloud in class, the whole room went nuts when I said, "Dawg" for dog. I was so embarrassed.

I went to the librarian at the Naples Public Library, who was a wonderful person, and asked her if there was a book about how to lose an accent. She referred me to an autobiography of Walter Cronkite, where he had updated Demosthenes' trick of speaking with pebbles in his mouth by using marbles when speaking. I did that 15 minutes a day for a month and it worked!

Many years later, I worked briefly on a PR job with Gary Burghoff (Radar on M.A.S.H.) who had a side business with accent and dialect coaching for other actors. He swore he could place my accent within 50 miles. I said, "Okay, go for it." He thought I had grown up in Denver, Colorado!

So the marbles worked!

--Jim