A cheerful, happy soul.
Jackie Vernon, the voice actor behind the 1969 holiday classic “Frosty the Snowman,” reportedly had several secret families before starting a life with his wife Hazel and their children.
David Vernon, one of the couple’s three children, revealed the surprising news while remembering his late father during the “Nostalgia tonight with Joe Sibilia” radio program on November 30.
According to David, he first learned that his famous father had “at least three” secret families when an unknown woman and her son showed up at the Vernon home sometime before Jackie’s death at age 63 in November 1987.
“There was a woman there with a child older than me,” David recalled. “He was probably in his late teens and looked a bit rough.”
“The woman asked if I wanted to speak to my father, and I said my father is on his way and not home,” he continued. “Then I remember her being very firm, she said, ‘Well, I want to talk to your mother.’”
After David’s mother came to the door, the unidentified woman dropped the surprising revelation about Jackie’s other marriages and families.
“So my mom came, and I think she immediately assessed what the situation was, but my mom told me to go up and talk to her,” David said. “But I heard a somewhat heated conversation going on, and a few minutes later they left.”
“So I had to know, I asked my mom, ‘Who was that?’ And eventually it came out that my father had been married at least three times before our family, which I was quite shocked to find out,” he admitted.
That wasn’t the only surprise David learned about his father, though, as it also turned out that the “Frosy the Snowman” star had other sons before his marriage to Hazel — and they all had the same name.
“From these marriages he had sons, and he named them all Ralph, after himself, after his original name, Ralph Verrone,” David said. “But he also abandoned all these families and moved on.”
“My mother wasn’t even sure if he had divorced one of the women or if he had married another woman, but when my parents got married, they had a deal,” he noted.
That agreement, David explained, was that Hazel would “name the boys” and Jackie would “name the girls.”
“She kind of got the idea that Ralph was an unloved child, a child left behind, and she wanted to make sure I never became a Ralph,” he said. “Then I realized my mother’s plan was to stay with our family and not abandon us.”
Elsewhere during his interview with Joe Sibilia, David opened up about his father’s “demons with depression and addiction.”
“His addiction was actually tranquilizers, Quaaludes and Valium,” said the son of the late comedian and voice actor. “It really took a toll on him, and he had to work really hard to get out of that depression.”
“It was a tough battle for him, and it was hard for us to see him go through that,” David added.
But despite his battles with depression and drug addiction, Jackie reportedly came to both accept and appreciate his fame as the voice of Frosty in both “Frosty the Snowman” and its 1976 sequel “Frosty’s Winter Wonderland.”
“One of the last Christmases my dad was there, we all watched it together and he was so proud of it,” David recalled. “He enjoyed it, he laughed about it. He was so happy that he had done it, and it became a very warm place in his heart that I enjoyed seeing that for him.”
“Even though my dad did so many other things – he worked with Judy Garland, Bette Midler, Frank Sinatra – that was the only thing people really remembered him for,” Jackie’s son concluded. “Newer generations found it and he really embraced it. He accepted that this was something he would be remembered for, and he loved it.”
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