RIP: Elwood Edwards, a day short of 75

[thewayne]

Elwood was a camera operator and jack of all trades at WKYC TV channel 3 in Cleveland, Ohio and a fanatic at catching typos.

A pretty anonymous guy. Except for one thing.

Years ago, he was paid $200 to record a few phrases.

"You've got mail!"

He was the voice of AOL's recorded phrases.

A little piece of computer trivia and history has left the planet.

If you scroll down the page, he appeared on The Tonight Show With Jimmy Fallon and did several phrases for them.

https://www.wkyc.com/article/life/people/elwood-edwards-wkyc-employee-voice-aol-youve-got-mail-greeting-dies-74/95-940b6ed4-b90b-4c4c-b0d5-6c57fddb6546

Comments

[captainsblog]

Back in the days of AOL chatrooms, in addition to Elwood's prerecorded standards, members could exchange wav files that would play on the computers of anyone who had a file of that name loaded in their AOL directory. The code to activate was a {S in front of the filename.

For years, I was a trivia player and, eventually, a Community Leader in the games area of the service, and we had dozens of wav files that would routinely get played during games. Someone got hold of a few that Elwood recorded which made the rounds; "Oy Gevalt!" and "You've Got Credit Card Debt!" are the two I can remember. Those rooms are long gone, as are whatever computers I stored those wav files on, but somewhere on a CD-R backup drive I think I kept many of them.

My trivial pursuits these days are in an online organization known as Learned League, an invite-only group of over 30,000 active nerds (I have invites if you want to try it for free for a season). Many Jeopardy players and some well known champions including the current host and the annoying James are former LLamas. But I was reminded of my earlier trivia days a few years back and wrote this memoir of how it all went back then:

https://captainsblog.dreamwidth.org/1696686.html

[disneydream06]

WOW, just $200 for that phrase?
He was ripped off. :o
Hugs, Jon

[silveradept]

A phrase that's seared into the minds of many. Too bad we no longer have the person there who we could politely ask to do all kinds of other relevant phrases.