Nelson Olmsted

Nelson Olmsted, born Leroy Nelson Olmsted Jr., was a veteran character actor on scores of radio, television, and motion pictures. His screen credits include over a dozen movies, including "Lover Come Back," "That Touch of Mink," "Fitzwilly," and "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." The son of Leroy Nelson Olmsted and Jane Hurford Long Olmsted, he was born on January 28, 1914, in Minneapolis, MN. He grew up in Texas and began his career as a radio announcer for WBAP in Fort Worth, where he launched a late-night 30-minute horror series, "Black Night," on November 5, 1937. Olmsted starred in the series and played a variety of different roles. The impact of "Black Night" catapulted Olmsted to New York in 1939, where he became NBC's resident storyteller, a position he held for over a decade. An ability to do multiple character voices won him his own radio shows, beginning with "The World's Greatest Short Stories" (1939, 1944, 1947) and "Dramas by Olmsted" (1940-41). During World War II, he worked for Armed Forces Radio. After the war, Olmsted returned to his network storytelling, becoming an expert on Edgar Allan Poe. He recorded many of Poe's works, including "Tales of Terror" and "The Raven." During the early years of television, he played roles on the Chevrolet "Tele-Theatre" and "Lights Out" in 1950, followed by "The Schlitz Playhouse of Stars" (1951), "The Philco Television Playhouse" (1951-52), "Kraft Television Theatre" (1951-52), "Tales of Tomorrow" (1952), "Hallmark Hall of Fame" (1952), "Goodyear Television Playhouse" (1953), "Robert Montgomery Presents" (1953-54), "Studio One" (1954-55) and "NBC Sunday Showcase" (1959). He played the recurring role of the base psychiatrist in "The Phil Silvers Show." He appeared in many popular TV series, including "Dr. Kildare," "Maverick," "McHale's Navy," "The Twilight Zone," and "Death Valley Days." From 1952 to 1957, he read classic short stories and performed different characters' voices in "Sleep No More," a popular radio series. The series began as a fifteen-minute series, but in November of 1956, it expanded to 30 minutes. From 1952 to 1961, Olmsted was the narrator and star of Ohio Bell Telephone's "Ohio Story radio and TV series." Many of the 1,309 "Ohio Story" radio scripts are held in various library collections. The Hagley Museum and Library is digitizing Olmsted's 175 "Ohio Story" TV programs and scripts as part of a project to preserve the works of Cinecraft Productions, "the country's longest-standing corporate film & video production house." From 1961 to 1977, Olmsted was the distinctive voice of the radio series "Stories of Pacific Powerland." The program aired as many as three times a week on stations all over the Northwest U.S. and parts of Northern California and the Mountain West. During the 16-year run of the show, more than 1,000 episodes were produced, each about five minutes long. The cover of an LP record of "Sleep No More" released by the Vanguard Recording Society features a capsule summary of his life: "Now that I think of it, we had a sort of Golden Age of Drama down in Austin, Texas, during those depressed middle thirties. There was the Curtain Club of the University of Texas and Austin's Little Theatre, and working between them were such aspirants as Zachary Scott, Elaine Anderson Scott, Eli Wallach, Walter Cronkite, Brooks West and Alma Holloway, whom I had sense enough to marry. Most of them came on to New York, fought the actor's battle, and made it one way or another. I stayed behind with the security of a radio announcer's job. By the time I moved to WBAP, in Fort Worth, this security was pulling, and the announcer's life seemed endlessly sterile. What to do about it? Dramatic shows cost money and there were no budgets. The cheapest drama for radio I could think of was good literature, read aloud. Especially the work of that great dramatist who never wrote a play -- Edgar Allan Poe. WBAP gave me some time with which to experiment. That was way back in 1939 -- and it worked. By 1940, the storytelling show was on NBC for a ten-year run. There were a couple of years out for the Army, but even so I managed to tell stories over the Army radio network in Italy. Television brought rough competition to the industry. Rather than fight, I joined by adopting some of the best stories into plays, selling them to Fred Coe, and playing a part in them -- sometimes the lead. So -- in the long run -- I got to New York, too, and made it as an actor, literally by telling stories!" Olmsted died of complications from a stroke on April 8, 1992 in Torrance, California. He was married to Alma Rae Holloway from 1938 until they divorced in 1974. Olmsted's obituary in the Los Angeles Times (April 11, 1992) says they had two sons, Ross and Marc, and a daughter, Lynne Bell.