The Western Creative Blog

McKees Rocks buried Billy Mays Friday — a native son who reigned as the black-bearded king of infomercials, proclaiming the wonders of lotions, potions, gadgets and gizmos to insomniacs who picked up the phone and made him rich.

“God bless him, he had that voice,” said Jerry Spanola, who was along Mays’ side in the early years as they hawked ginsu knives and cleaning utensils on the boardwalks and strip malls of New Jersey, the original pitchman state.

The voice — booming, slightly frantic, as penetrating as those wonder oils and all-purpose rust removers available only on TV — fell silent a week ago when his heart failed as he slept at his home in Tampa, Fla. He was 50.

“He totally shut down the business when it happened,” said Spanola. “Pitchmen are always talking. The morning Billy died, he rendered that business speechless.”

Friday morning Mays’ body, clad in the signature blue button-down shirt and khaki trousers he made as recognizable as his voice and beard, lay in a bronze casket beneath the vaulted ceiling of St. John of God Catholic Church in McKees Rocks. It was in that river town, a place of corner stores, working families, the occasional gaming parlor tucked behind the cover of a legitimate shop, that Mays was raised.

“So this is what he came from?” wondered Gregg Wolf, whose lighting company worked in “Pitchmen,” the television show that told his story and that of partner, Anthony Sullivan.

The hardscrabble ethic of the town was, perhaps, captured by the Rev. Regis Ryan, who spoke of Mr. Mays and of his hometown, “this old mill town, the struggling community that continues to put its best face forward.”

Fellow pitchmen who gathered outside the church to await the arrival of the hearse, said Mays put his best face forward, never pausing, even when it seemed out-of-step.

Jeremy Parker, a young pitchman from Venice, Calif., recalled working with Mays five years before he broke through on television. They were working a county fair in San Diego. Mays, his belly large in those days, would lean over the microphone at the start of the day and splutter into his microphone like a motorcycle engine — the soundtrack to each opening day of hawking wares.

“Billy could eat and eat and eat and then eat some more,” said Parker who recalled his record of downing ten spicy tuna rolls in one sitting.

In later years, he thinned down. He also rose on TV, where his booming voice sometimes caused co-workers to tell him to not speak so loudly into the microphone, only to be told he wasn’t wearing one.

When Parker moved to the shopping channel QVC, trainees were shown a tape instructing them what not to do.

“They showed Billy Mays. They actually used that at QVC,” Parker laughed.

Like many a virtuoso, Parker said, Billy Mays made new rules by breaking the old ones.

“If there was a Jimi Hendrix of the guitar, there was a Billy Mays of the pitchmen,” he said.

Source - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette