FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. (WHTM) — Unlike the local TV news personalities whose names he announces in his deep, booming voice, Bob Tracey can walk down any street in America without being recognized — even though more people hear him each day than almost any of those anchors, meteorologists and sportscasters.

Tracey recalls checking into a hotel years ago in Chicago. He told man behind the front desk his name.

“And suddenly a lady behind me says, ‘Wait a second. Wait a second. Why do I know your voice?'” Tracey recalled. “And I said, ‘Where do you live?’ And she says, ‘I live in Detroit.’ And I said [telling the next part of the story in booming Bob Tracey announcer voice], ‘This is WXYZ…'”

WXYZ-Channel 7 is the ABC affiliate in Detroit.

“She’s like, ‘Oh my goodness, that’s you!'” Tracey said, at which point the man behind the desk realized he knew Tracey’s voice too, in his case from WGN-Channel 9 in Chicago.

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Tracey says the most precise name his craft is “voice actor.” For years, voice actors — or “voiceover artists” or announcers — were limited to stations whose microphones they could reach in person each day.

But by the 1970s, a voice actor Tracey calls the “O.G.” of the craft — Charlie Van Dyke, who began as a disc jockey — began taking advantage of what was then an innovation — overnight package delivery — to serve stations around the country by rushing tapes of his voice work to them.

Tracey began in radio too — in his case in South Florida — then began doing voiceover work at NBC’s WTVJ — then channel 4, now channel 6. By the late 1990s, electronic technology made nearly instant delivery of voice work possible to anywhere, and a WTVJ colleague encouraged Tracey to follow the league of Van Dyke and others who were becoming announcers at TV stations across the country, simultanously.

Tracey’s first TV station outside South Florida (and second overall) was in Rockford, Illinois. Next came WHTM-Channel 27, now known most commonly as abc27.

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A quarter-century tenure at one station outside an voice artist’s home market is extraordinarily rare: either the artist gets a better offer at a competing station, or ever-changing ownership and management groups decide to switch artists.

Then again, a station with three main evening anchors’ tenures all dating to the early 1990s is rare too — but is the case for Alicia Richards, Dennis Owens and Valerie Pritchett. (Two behind-the-scenes newsroom employees have been at the station since the 1970s; the station’s chief engineer first joined in the 1980s.)

Having credibility with viewers means knowing an area well, even if Tracey hasn’t physically spent a lot of time there. He remembers in pre-GPS navigation days asking someone in Philadelphia for directions to the highway to Lancaster — Tracey, of course, pronounces his local place-names correctly.

“And he says, ‘Don’t fool with me. If you know how to say it, you must be from there!'” Tracey recalled. “I said ‘Oh, because I didn’t say Lan-caster [roughly rhyming with “van blaster.”] ‘He says, ‘Yeah!'”

Tracey explained he was an announcer for a Harrisburg-based station, which serves Lancaster, but lived out of town; the man gave him directions.

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