Gloucester Alumni

His professional achievements alone were enough to assure the deep, wide maw created in the advertising world when Gloucester-raised Ray Welch left it and the rest of the world two weeks ago.

He was silenced in his 69th year for the first and only time, by cancer.

Welch produced a legacy of inspired, off-center campaigns for clients in print and broadcast. The latter was delivered in a gravelly voice Welch was born with, then roughened up in long nights of poker and pool, smoking and drinking, friends recalled.

At least at the start, the poker and pool, perfected in Gloucester, were entrepreneurial enterprises that helped finance his four scholarship years at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, once out of Gloucester High School in 1957.

The voice, spoken of with reverence, seemed a mix of the bloke next door and Moses, but was award-winning - and as NESN, Wayland Golf, Pizzeria Uno and J.C. Hillary's, among others, would verify, seductively trustable.

His Web site, www.raywelch.com, holds the evidence.

A Boston weekly once described Welch's as "the voice that ate Boston."

"It was an amazing career," said Sally Jackson, a Gloucester resident and public relations executive who helped launch Samuel Adams beer.

Jackson's friendship with Welch formed during his heyday in the 1980s when with Geoff Currier and Tyler Smith he opened an agency, Welch Currier Smith, that became renowned for its risky creativity.

But more than his professional achievements - built on wit, chutzpah, a fascination with human nature and respect for the English language - it was the person of the voice that leaves those he left behind speaking of Welch with affection and awe.

"There were the tangibles," the smarts, the voice, "his gift," and the elegance with words, Currier said. "Ray's writing was crisp, smart, funny; it just naturally flowed from him."

But Currier, as well as Jackson and Geoff Precourt, a business editor from the same time and crowd, seemed even more impressed with Welch's seemingly unquenchable appetite for friendship.

"Ray had time for everybody," Precourt said. "He was a patient man. He had a reputation for being wild and crazy. But the voice also listened."

In friend-making, he never forgot where he came from.

Growing up in a family of modest means on Hodgkins Street - Ray Welch Sr. was a customs officer - young Ray worked briefly as a lumper shoveling fish and hustled pool from a Main Street hall. Invariably, recalled his Gloucester friend Skip Ross, "he made money."

He freelanced for the Gloucester Daily Times, covering the high school football team; won poetry prizes; learned to play the piano, guitar, accordion and harmonica; swam, dove, hunted, fished, skied, climbed mountains; ran track and played junior varsity football; and managed to win scholarships at Dartmouth, Harvard and Bates, according to a resume on file at the Times.

He fast-tracked to encyclopedic literacy, Ross noted, by consuming plot summaries of the great books rather than the books themselves, and specialized in acidic put-downs. This explains why "he got into a lot of fights," Ross said. But "he always made up."

Somehow, he also found time to dictate into a tape recorder an entire dictionary.

At the time, Welch was working at Rockholm Lodge as companion of its proprietor, Danny Carveth. A Korean War veteran who had been blinded in combat, he wanted a dictionary he could hear.

The lodge was the laboratory in which he perfected enunciation and the art of speech as entertainment that would help elevate him to a unique place in advertising - a strategist who was his own copywriter, the copywriter's own talent.

The kid's voice that could make the dictionary sing later could sell anything.

Sally Jackson said Welch told her it was "the teenage job that crafted his life."

When after Dartmouth, he descended on and conquered Boston's advertising world, he earned and enjoyed the right to rub shoulders with its titans, becoming one himself. Most titanic of all was (and remains) Jack Connors, who helped found the city's preeminent shop, Hill Holliday Connors Cosmopulos.

Decades later, Connors finally sold his empire; Welch wrote congratulations. "You probably made thousands of dollars in the transaction," he wrote, according to Jackson.

His standard for friends was demanding but not exclusive.

Currier recalled the countless times he and Welch would pull off the highway for gas only to find his partner rediscovering a friend at the pump or behind the counter.

The power of his affection was such that it didn't require physical presence.

Barry Morrow, the Oscar-winning screenwriter of "Rain Man," called Welch "one of my dearest friends, yet I never met the man. We were old-fashioned pen pals, linked together ... by a mutual friend," Morrow said in a telephone interview.

Morrow said Welch cured him of exclamation points, which Morrow said he tended to use as stage directions. Welch's method was to send e-mails increasingly riven with them.

"Mostly," he said, "we talked about our world of characters, people we'd meet in everyday settings who would somehow add to our understanding of human nature."

Morrow said they resisted phoning each other.

"Why break the mystique?" Morrow said Welch advised. "Over time, our words, like lava, formed mountains of e-mails, some 300 or more pages."

As Welch weakened, Morrow said he decided on a pilgrimage from California to meet the other half of what he described as a "romance of letters."

He was barely two hours from Welch's home in Rhode Island when word came that "Ray was gone. The irony came later as I flew back home," Morrow said.

"From a writer's point of view, my first and last meeting with Ray would have been too predictable an ending; certainly words would have failed us. So Ray, in my mind, took out his editor's pen and, with a nod to O. Henry, gave our tale a final twist.

"We wouldn't meet; we wouldn't need to," Morrow said. "The mystique remains unbroken."

By Richard Gaines
Staff writer, Gloucester Daily Times