For forty years Bob Van Camp was also Atlanta's most recognizable radio voice, as senior announcer for WSB radio; the voice of Rich's tree lighting for thirty-two, MC for the Atlanta Pops, nineteen; board member of the Pops, Atlanta Theatre Guild, and ATOS; and the celebrity who gave his name and talent to save the Fox Theatre (below) as the spokesman for Atlanta Landmarks, Inc.
For a voice recording-----
Above all his other talents was innate musical ability of total musical recall, and he never played from a score. "I've always been able to play by ear, but I'm not restricted to that-- I read music," he said in interview. "The man of a thousand tunes" and Musical Director at WSB, he likely knew nearer a hundred thousand, the number contained in their vast library of records.
He was born in the coal mining valley town of Scranton PA in 1917, only child of a housewife and a delivery man for Williams Bakery.
There was a lot of movies and vaudeville in Scranton when Van Camp was a child.
"I'd go the movies every Saturday," recalled Van Camp, "but I never looked at the screen-- I only looked at the organist. Then one day she noticed me and said, 'Little boy, would you like to come stand beside me?'"
He was then given piano lessons by a Mrs. Cyril John and Miss Bertha Sylvester, who advertised.
By the time he was a teenager, Bob Van Camp was payed to play the organ, despite the fact that he'd never had a lesson. "There was a German Methodist Church [Adams Avenue] in town whose services were all in German. I didn't speak a word of German, but they needed a cheap organist, so I got the job, making a $1.50 a week."
When Van Camp graduated from Scranton's Central High School in 1934, he was "the first graduate of Central to play the piano at his own graduation exercises."
That fall, Van Camp entered Duke, and how his family could afford such an expense is lost to time. To the left of Duke Chapel can be seen Page Auditorium, the campus theatre with a real stage house.
If Van Camp had wanted a career as theatre organist and radio announcer, he hit the jackpot at Duke, the only college with a Movie Palace Training School. Known as "Quadrangle Pictures," they installed a Wurlitzer in Page Auditorium and freshman Bob was made organist because no one else showed any interest. "I had the job before I knew what I was doing," he recalled.
Van Camp "had never been within reaching distance of a theater organ like the three-manual instrument he presides over" wrote the Scranton Tribune, but that was no deterrence to Quadrangle Pictures who sent this full-time student to New York to study under Lew White (below, left) and to Richmond, Virginia to study under Walton Dalton (right). All the while, Van Camp "helped pay his tuition by acting as stage hand and specialist in lighting effects."
At Christmas vacation,
A month before his graduation, Van Camp as a radio announcer was "discovered" by none other than celebrity bandleader Paul Whiteman, whom Quadrangle Pictures had snagged to play five shows in May 1938, two of them broadcast over the CBS network. According to Van Camp's radio bio, when the transmission was delayed, "he was chosen to explain to the impatient audience. The Duke student's ad lib monologue was so well-voiced that Whiteman suggested the physics major seek a career in radio."
"That was mighty white of Whiteman," Van Camp later quipped, and a month later Bob was talking over the air for money in the small time, at Winston-Salem's 100-watt WSJS.
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