This only runs ten seconds but folks who lived on the West Coast in the sixties will have their memories jogged. We had an airline out here called Western Airlines. It went away in 1986 when Delta absorbed it and did away with the name, which has since been adopted by an unrelated carrier. The old Western had low cost fares all around this half of the United States…and if the two or three times I flew it were indicative, a pretty terrible on-time record. They were especially good at overselling flights and not offering compensation or alternatives if you got bumped.
What kept them solvent for a while was a very friendly ad campaign. They blanketed the airwaves with short spots featuring a bird character reclining on the tail of one of their planes. The character's voice was not done by Jim Backus, as was occasionally reported. It was supplied by an actor named Shepard Menken, whose name for some reasons is often spelled "Menkin." Shep was heard on a ridiculous number of radio and TV commercials and also dabbled in TV animation, most notably speaking for that great inventor, Clyde Crashcup of The Alvin Show.
He was also a cast member on the greatest comedy album ever made, Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Volume One. I hired him once for Garfield and Friends and at the session, he told me he was prouder of being part of that record than he was of anything else he'd done in a very full career. In 1995 when I helped Stan assemble Volume Two, he wanted to bring back everyone who was on the first album who was still alive…and I tried but was unable to locate Shep. His agent couldn't find him. The Screen Actors Guild couldn't find him. It finally turned out he'd dropped out of sight due to illness. He passed away in 1995.
Obits noted he'd voiced some of the most-heard commercials of all time and one cited some staggering sum he'd made voicing the Western Airlines bird. He probably did make a lot off them. These spots ran for years and there were an awful lot of them of varying lengths. Here's one that's just long enough to let you hear Shep's voice as he delivers the Western Airlines catch-phrase…one of the most successful in the history of advertising…