R.I.P.: Voice-Talent Agent Don Pitts Dies

Don Pitts

Don Pitts, longtime voice-talent agent and radio personality, died on April 7.

He was 90, according to Variety.

Pitts represented a who’s-who of classic voice talent, including Orson Welles, Casey Kasem, June Foray, Wolfman Jack, Mel Blanc, Paul Winchell, Janet Waldo, Gary Owens, and many more. He was well-known for his kind and friendly personality, and was much loved by his clients.

“His clients treasured him and he treasured his clients,” says Cindy Kazarian, CEO of Kazarian/Measures/Ruskin & Associates, who worked with Pitts when it was the JHR Agency in the early 1980s. Kazarian, Pammela Spencer, and Pitts purchased JHR in 1988 and renamed it Kazarian/Spencer and Associates. It later became KMR.

“The client always knew he’d be their No. 1 advocate, which is key for an agent. This is not about you. This is about your client, and he had a good sense of that,” says Paul Doherty, a partner in CESD Talent Agency who worked with Pitts at JHR Agency from late 1985 until spring of 1989.

According to Doherty, Pitts didn’t become an agent until 1965, when he was almost 40. “He already had a family. He’d been on the radio, KGO in San Francisco, in the late 1940s and early ’50s. He was involved in promotional work. He even worked as a car salesman in the late ’50s or early ’60s,” explained Doherty. “I always thought his car salesman background gave him a very personal touch, and he also a very earthy quality. He was a very real, earthy guy.”

Pitts started out as a radio and television personality at various stations in the San Francisco area: KYA-AM, KSFO-AM, ABC-owned KPIX-TV, KGO-AM and FM, and KGO Channel 7.

He started out as an agent in 1965 with the Charles H. Stern Agency, moving to the Abrams Rubaloff Agency in 1977, before joining JHR.