Most people remember Hal Smith as Otis Campbell, the lovable town drunk who regularly let himself into the jail on The Andy Griffith Show. But years before Mayberry, Smith was entertaining people right here in Utica.
Born Harold John Smith in Michigan in 1916, Smith grew up in northern New York and graduated from Massena High School in 1936. He was already interested in performing and music, and not long after graduation he came to Utica with a band.
That eventually led him to WIBX radio in Utica, where Smith worked during the late 1930s and early 1940s. He started as a singer and went on to work as an announcer, newsman, disc jockey and voice talent. By his own account, he did a little bit of everything at the station. One of his programs was called The Yawn Patrol, where he sang and accompanied himself on piano.
World War II interrupted his radio career. Smith joined the Army Air Forces and served in the Pacific, where his duties included entertaining servicemen. After the war, he eventually headed west and began finding work in Hollywood.
And he found plenty of it.
Smith became one of those character actors whose face — and especially his voice — seemed to turn up everywhere. His most famous on-screen role came in the 1960s as Otis Campbell on The Andy Griffith Show. Otis was the friendly Mayberry drunk who would wander into the courthouse, grab the key and lock himself in a cell to sleep it off.
Ironically, Smith reportedly didn’t drink himself.
But even people who don’t recognize Hal Smith’s face may have heard his voice. He had a remarkably long career in animation and voice acting, including work on The Flintstones, The Jetsons, Scooby-Doo, DuckTales and numerous other cartoons.
Perhaps his most familiar voice was Owl in Disney’s Winnie the Pooh productions, beginning with Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree in 1966.
Smith continued acting and doing voice work for decades and accumulated hundreds of film and television credits before his death in 1994.
It’s a fun bit of Utica broadcasting history: long before Hal Smith was making millions of television viewers laugh in Mayberry — and long before generations of children knew his voice from cartoons — he was working behind a microphone at WIBX. For another local entertainment connection, read about Utica-born Disney star Annette Funicello.
