Ron McCroby

Ron Mccroby was a master of the rarely practiced art of jazz whistling, blessed with amazingly sure intonation and technical control that allowed him to mimic bebop players' lines with a clarity that made it sound as though he were playing a piccolo. In fact, Mccroby delighted in describing his "instrument" as a "puccolo" (a conflation of "piccolo" and "pucker"). He was born in 1934 and grew up in Morgantown, WV, where he played clarinet in the high-school marching band. It was there that he made his musical whistling debut, filling in the piccolo part in "Stars and Stripes Forever" when the regular player was out sick. Mccroby studied music at West Virginia University, but subsequently got married and moved to Cincinnati to pursue advertising as his vocation. In his spare time, he performed locally as a clarinetist with various large and small jazz groups, sometimes doubling on flute or saxophone. Eventually, he became the advertising director for the Little Tykes toy company, and also moved into cartoon voice-over work, portraying a whistling penguin on Scooby-Doo.

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