L.A. Speed Riggs

[Yhtapmys]

In his day, Lee Aubrey Riggs was just as well-known as anyone else on the Jack Benny show. In the ‘40s, he was in demand to do all kinds of charity auctions. His call was parodied on the Benny show, on other radio shows and in cartoons (to George W. Hill’s delight, no doubt, they all ended with the words you could understand: “Sold to American!”).

The Newspaper Enterprise Association did a feature piece on him many years after the height of his fame. It’s not quite accurate—Del Sharbutt and others did the sell lines for Lucky Strikes—and, fascinatingly omits any reference to the Benny show.

Riggs was heard by Hill in the Satterfield Warehouse in Durham, instantly offered a job, was on a train for New York on Friday and did his first commercial the following day. He’d never been in a radio studio before.

There were several very nice newspaper feature stories on him in the early ’80s. Besides the NEA story, I’m going to post his L.A. Times obit, as well as another little piece from when Riggs was named one of the honorary mayors the L.A. area was famous for. He moved back to North Carolina in January 1986.

Riggs was born February 18, 1904 and died February 1, 1987.

Fast tongue was auctioneer’s ticket to fame
Speed Riggs was the voice of Lucky Strike for more than three decades
ANAHEIM, Calif. (NEA) — Those who lived through the Golden Years of Radio probably recall the rhythmic but unintelligible chant he delivered on numerous star-studded programs.
The television generation will remember him as a familiar figure delivering catchy cigarette commercials.
Those who may have forgotten the name A. L. “Speed” Riggs — always mentioned at the close of each program on which he appeared — have surely never forgotten his auctioneer’s spiel that sounded like gibberish to the untrained ear but was actually a rapid litany of tobacco prices and phrases:
“Thirrrrty-one, 31, one, one, one, one, grab it, grab it, grab it, 32, 32, two, two, two, two, wheeler, wheeler, wheeler, 33, 33, three, three, three, three, turn aloo, turn aloo, loo, loo, loo and a B-F two and a B-F three and a L-C three and a K-L five, 34, 34, four, four, four, roll it, roll it, no, no, no, 35, 35, five, five, five, Soooooold to American.”
Although the words lose something in the translation, Riggs can still deliver them in that rough, guttural, rapid-fire staccato that made him famous as the voice of Lucky Strike for
more than three decades.
Now 63 and retired, Riggs looks back on a lifetime of rich experiences that took him from a Goldsboro, N.C., tobacco farm to fame as the world’s auctioneer and later to a long association with the American Tobacco Co.
A boy with only a fifth-grade education — he quit school because his father was ill — Riggs became interested in auctioneering when he began accompanying his father to the tobacco markets.
“I began mimicking the auctioneers at 12,” he says in the soothingly resonant tones of that part of the country where the British left their distinguishing mark on speech patterns.
“At 16, I had the chant down pat, but it was just like every other auctioneer’s spiel,” he recalls. “Then, one day I was walking down a tobacco row and the melody and rhythm of ‘Yankee Doodle Dandy’ popped into my head.
“I started putting the tobacco spiel to the tune and rhythm of the song and my dad said, ‘Son, that's great! If you can perfect that, you’ll really have something.”
By the time he was 18, Riggs had perfected his routine to the point he felt he was ready to enter the man’s world of tobacco auctioneering.
But when he made his job bid at a local tobacco warehouse, no one took the tall, skinny youth seriously. After all, professional auctioneering required not only a polished spiel but an authoritative knowledge of tobacco.
Riggs proved he had both.
He was hired over older and more experienced applicants who auditioned for the job. He went on to work during the depression at the almost unheard of salary of $250 a week at a time when a $20 wage was enviable.
At 20, Riggs won the record as the world’s fastest auctioneer by being clocked electronically at 460 words per minute.
His reputation as an auctioneer with rapid and unusual delivery spread. One day in 1938, three “New York types” unexpectedly showed up to hear him at an auction in Durham, N.C.
One of them was George Washington Hill, an advertising genius and president of American Tobacco. Hill told the young man that he wanted him to come to New York to become the voice of Lucky Strike.
The country boy accepted and for the next 32 years he represented the tobacco company. As “the famous tobacco auctioneer from Goldsboro, North Carolina” he appeared on such radio shows as “Lucky Strike Hit Parade,” “Kay Kaiser’s College of Musical Knowledge,” “The Buddy Clark Show” and “The Frank Sinatra Show.”
Until cigarette commercials were banned from the airwaves in 1969, Riggs delivered some of the catchiest, best-remembered phrases in American advertising:
“With men who know tobacco best, it’s Luckys two-to-one,” “LS MFT (Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco),” “Show me a cigarette milder than Lucky Strike and I’ll eat my hat,” and “Lucky Strike green has gone to war.”
Riggs’ association with show people left him with many friends in the business, among them Dinah Shore, Glenn Ford, Joseph Cotton, Dale Robertson and Frank Sinatra.
“Frank (Sinatra) always took his job seriously but, like me, could sometimes be a great prankster,” Riggs recalls. “He was always trying to break me up, trying to make me laugh, but could never do it.”
These days, Riggs is promoting his favorite charity: a center he hopes to start in California’s Orange County for training physically handicapped and educationally underprivileged youngsters in manual arts.

Radio’s fast-talking ‘Speed’ Riggs dies at age 79
Lee Aubrey “Speed” Riggs, whose machine-gun like staccato chant become synonymous to radio listeners with Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco, has died in Goldsboro, N.C., of congestive heart failure. He was 79.
For more than three decades he was the voice of Lucky Strike cigarettes, primarily on the old Your Hit Parade show. Interspersed around the top 15 songs of the week as the tension built toward the announcement of the week’s No. 1 tune, Riggs would unleash a rapid-fire refrain that always ended with Sold ... American. The American Tobacco Co. manufactured Lucky Strikes.
Riggs learned his craft while a boy by mimicking some of the chants he heard at the auctions he attended with his tobacco farmer father. He noticed that many of the auctioneers could not keep up with the increasing sales and developed a chant that allowed him to speak at the rate of 469 words a minute.
Lucky Strike paid, Riggs a then astounding $550 a week to do its radio commercials.
He also travelled the country for Lucky Strike, giving interviews and speeches and raising about $218 million in auctions for charity. During the Second World War he auctioned off $17 million in war bonds.
Your Hit Parade went on the air in 1935 and ran through 1959.
What was he actually saying in his sing-song bass voice all those years?
In a 1981 interview with the Los Angeles Times, Riggs offered this sample:
“31 dollar (bid), 31, 1, ah, 1, ah 32, 2, 2, toodle, toodle, toodle 2” — and to break the monotony of the constant chant of numbers, he would intersperse such phrases as “round
it, round it, roll it, roll it, grab it, grab it, wheel it, wheel it . . .”
And, ultimately of course, Sold...American.

GUESS WHAT! ‘SPEED’ RIGGS WILL BECOME ‘HIZZONER’ THURSDAY IN PROGRAM AT RESEDA THEATRE
Reseda’s new honorary mayor, L.A. Speed Riggs, will be inducted in colorful ceremonies at the new Reseda Theatre next Thursday, July 15 [1948] at 9 p m. Riggs, who is tobacco auctioneer on the Jack Benny and Hit Parade programs, moved from New York City to his Tobacco Road Ranch residence in Reseda a year ago.
Howard Petrie, who is Jimmy Durante’s announcer, is to be sworn in as “sheriff” and comedian Jack Kirkwood as “justice of the peace.” The trio will be inducted by Ed Harris, president of the Reseda Chamber of Commerce.
Event will be emceed by Johnny Grant, Radio KGIL announcer, with other honorary mayors of the valley and radio and screen stars participating on the program which will be broadcast from the stage of the Reseda Theatre by KGIL at nine o’clock.

transcribed by Yhtapmys

[PaulWilliam80]

Hey thanks for this one! Really helpful