Medford, Oregon is much better known for pear orchards than showbiz, but that doesn't mean that we in Southern Oregon haven't had our own brushes with the big time.
    Vance DeBar Colvig was just one local product to make an impact on the entertainment industry. Born in nearby Jacksonville in 1892, his schoolboy compatriots, inspired by young Vance's abundant freckles, dubbed him "Pinto, the human leopard." The freckles eventually faded, but the name stuck and helped launch Colvig on a trajectory that would leave an impact on several of the lively arts.

    Leaving Oregon Agricultural College in Corvallis early 1913, Pinto spent six weeks on the vaudeville circuit, leaving it in Seattle when he recognized friends on the band wagon of the Al G. Barnes Circus. This began the association with the circus that Pinto would capitalize on for the rest of his life, but it was much briefer and less stellar than he would portray it to journalists. (Pinto played the clarinet in the circus band for parts of the 1913 and 1915 seasons, but never performed with the circus as a clown.)
    After leaving the Barnes circus Pinto found work as a newspaper cartoonist in Nevada before somehow turning up, married, in San Francisco, working at a pioneer animation studio. In 1915 or 1916, with the Animated Films Corporation, Pinto helped produce the world's first feature-length cartoon, Creation. AFC didn't survive World War I, so Pinto returned to newspaper work as a cartoonist and columnist with the San Francisco Bulletin. After a year and a half Pinto began his own animation studio; Encyclopedia Britannica credits this studio with the world's first color cartoon, 1919's Pinto's Prizma Comedy Review. After moving to Southern California, in 1928 Pinto along with Walter Lantz produced one of the world's first talking cartoons, Blue Notes, with Bolivar the Talking Ostrich. All three cartoons are now apparently lost, though five frames of Creation survive among Pinto's papers at the Southern Oregon Historical Society in Medford, Oregon.
    1924 had brought Pinto to Hollywood and live-action film. Pinto worked in the comedy factories as a gag man, scenarist and title writer for Mack Sennett, Jack White, Harold Lloyd and many others; he also often appeared before the silent camera in small comic roles. Then, as Pinto tells it, Mack Sennett gave the go-ahead to his suggestion for a cartoon gag in one of his short subjects. This introduced animation into live-action comedy and brought Pinto back to pen and ink, hand-drawing explosions or swarms of bees onto frames of celluloid to bedevil the live comedians.
    The advent of sound drove Pinto from silent comedy to Walt Disney Studios, where he continued as a gag man, co-wrote "Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf," and found yet another career in sound effects and character voices. He barked for Pluto and spoke for the Practical Pig, Grumpy and Sleepy, and was the voice of Goofy for the next thirty-five years. Pinto also voiced Popeye's Bluto for Fleischer Studios and for decades produced a broad range of freelance voice work for radio, cartoons and film. At least one Munchkin in "The Wizard of Oz" speaks in Pinto Colvig's voice, certainly the one who sounds exactly like his Gabby from Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels.
    In 1946 Walter Livingston contracted Pinto to write and record the original Bozo the Clown record albums; three years later he starred as the first TV Bozo, on KTTV in Los Angeles. The distinctive voice and delivery used by every Bozo since (including Pinto's son, Vance Jr., who took up the role in 1959) has been in imitation of Pinto Colvig.
    As a side note, in 1906 Pinto's father decided to move the five miles from Jacksonville to the burgeoning boom town of Medford. Pinto was 14 and about to graduate from primary school, so Judge Colvig bought a house across the street from the high school. He hadn't anticipated, though, that his son would fail the required high school entrance exam. So at the age of 14 Pinto was a free man: His father was rich and powerful, he had no responsibilities, and he was living in the largest and liveliest town in the area. Young Pinto became well known in Medford; among the many he befriended was Frank Willeke, the Main Street railroad flagman. Willeke was "slow-minded" and known as the happiest man in town; Pinto later remarked that he "admired his simplicity." Decades later Pinto told Walt Disney of his happy-go-lucky friend and imitated his distinctive laugh, and Medford's Frank Willeke became the inspiration and model for Goofy.
   

Last revised November 21, 2020