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Cords of plenty

Advertisers love the rich voice of baritone Rege Cordic

by Cristina Rouvalis - Post-Gazette Staff Writer

April 4, 1993

LOS ANGELES - Rege Cordic is sitting in his elegant house, his voice booming in that familiar baritone that once nudged people out of bed in the morning.

   He begins laughing as he recalls a story about Louie Adamchevitz, the fictional Slavic garbage-man on his morning radio show on KDKA in the 1950s and 60s. He's laughing so hard that he can scarcely get the words out.

   Long after he moved to Hollywood Hills and got rich as an anonymous voice on radio commercials, Cordic still can laugh about zany skits he dreamed up 25 years ago.

But he has no regrets about switching to an other side of radio - voice acting in commercials ranging from Plymouth to Roy Rogers.

   Cordic has done well with that deep. authoritative voice. On days when the haze isn't too thick here, Cordic can look over his flower-strewn deck to the spectacular view of the sprawling city below.

   The 66-year-old Cordic is trim, relaxed and friendly. Ee has taken up painting. And he has scaled back to a few days a week as a free-lance commercial announcer, a field that is attracting more stars such as Jack Lemmon. But many o the announcers, including Cordic, go unnoticed on the streets.

   "There are millionaires sitting in the Hollywood Hills and nobody knows their names," Cordic said.

   Like most jobs in Hollywood, there are too many people chasing too little work. "You audition 20 times and you get one out of 20 jobs and you get rich." he said. "But you have to do those 19 auditions."

   In the past 23 years, Cordic has landed more than a thousand jobs - Pennzoil, Quantas Airlines. Plymouth, Hires Root Beer. Spray 'N Wash commercials to name a few. He's paid on a complex formula which takes into account how many weeks the commercial runs, what cities it airs in and whether it runs nationally on a network.

His voice is gymnastic, booming on Roy Rogers ads, sounding deep and soothing on commercials for Heartland Natural Cereal.

   Cordic also does promos on newscasts and other programs. which is steadier but less lucrative work. He did all the promotions for "Death of a Salesman" on CBS.

The anonymous voice behind the commercials was once the well-known straight guy who played off of a zany cast of characters on Cordic & Co. He began the show on WWSW in the mid-1940s and then moved to KDKA in 1954.

   Cordic and two co-workers, Karl Hardman and Bob Trow, invented the characters who would drop by the studio to harass the host. Omicron the bureaucrat from Venus; Carmen Monoxide, the atrocious punster; and the ever popular Louie Adamchevitz, the Slav garbageman, were regulars.

   Cordic was reluctant to put Adamchevitz's voice on at first "because I was afraid I would be picketed by the Polish Falcons. Once the character hit, it was an instant success. The Croatians always thought there was a funny Polish person on your show and the Polish always thought there was a funny Serb on your show. Nobody accepted responsibility for him but ever body loved him."

   Cordic still howls when he remembers how Louie announced his house was on the cover of the trade magazine - "Better homes and Garbage." Cordic asked him why it was on the cover, and Louie answered that he had planted a pretty vine around the house. "What was the name of the vine?" Cordic asked. "Creeping Slovak," Louie replied.

   A native of Squirrel Hill and the son of a railroad worker, Cordic said the humor worked because it was Pittsburghers poking fun at Pittsburgh.

   "They loved Pittsburgh-putdown jokes," he said. "They knew we were all from Pittsburgh. If we made jokes about it, it was because we loved it."

One old routine, called "What the Outside World Thinks of Pittsburgh When and If They Do," went like this:

   This is Pittsburgh in the eyes of the New Yorker, the Bostonian, the San Franciscan, the Buffalo, the Deer, the Antelope. Here, where the mighty Susquehanna and the Ohio form In make the Mississippi, thousands of miles beyond the mountains in the east lies a grimy little town untouched by progress. This is Pittsburgh. known far and wide for its chief export, pickles. Here it is. too, in this Birmingham of the North, that some steel is occasionally made, when the pickle harvest is poor.

   And on and on.

   Cordic & Co. made up a routine about a pothole on Carson Street so big that it swallowed an entire Volkswagen. A family started living in the pothole and rather liked it.

   After 15 years, Cordic began burning out. "I had a bit of deja vu, like didn't we do that last week? It was time to move on."

   So he jumped at the chance at doing a similar show at a CBS affiliate, KNX, in Los Angeles in 1966. He was on the air a year and a half before the station switched to an all-news format.

   "I didn't enjoy it," Cordic said. "It was a different market, different attitudes. L.A. is so saturated with entertainment. Pittsburgh wasn't."

   Cordic tried regular acting for about 10 years, getting small roles in the TV show "Gunsmoke," the Woody Allen movie 'Sleeper" and others. "I enjoyed it but I didn't think I was getting anywhere."

   "Usually, I died before the first commercial," he said with a laugh.

So Cordic switched to voice acting, using his famous baritone once again.

"I could not go back to radio," he said. "It was so different then. It was more fun. It was less rigid.

   "It's too formatted now," he said. "If something works in St. Louis, you can bet that in six weeks every station in the country is going to be doing it. Back then, you could plant bizarre ideas in people's heads and they would accept it."