Vic Roby
Radio/TV Announcer (1917–2011)
Victor Mills Roby, Jr. (November 9, 1917 – September 22, 2011 ) was an American radio and television announcer, voice-over artist and public affairs show host, and served for years as a staff announcer with NBC.
Early life and career
Born in Tylertown, Mississippi, Roby was an alumnus of Millsaps College ('38) where he had been an Alpha Iota brother. He entered the broadcasting business in 1943, working as a newsreader and announcer at KOA (AM) in Denver, Colorado. After a brief stint with the Mutual Broadcasting System where he announced on the 1950 version of The Rudy Vallee Show, Roby joined the announcing staff of NBC in New York City in 1950.
Network announcer
Roby handled announcing for numerous radio and television programs during his career, including Monitor and working as sub-announcer on Concentration and The Price Is Right in the early 1960s. But his chief claim to fame was announcing on network promos, bumpers and program introductions, most notably a variation of the shortened 1968 version of the "Laramie Peacock" bumper on which he intoned, "The following program is brought to you in living color on NBC," which ran on television specials aired on the network through 1975. In addition, he handled local announcing duties for WNBC-TV, including public service announcements, station identifications, live tags and occasional Emergency Broadcast System tests. He was one of a core group of well-known voices for the NBC network which also included Don Pardo, Howard Reig, Mel Brandt, Bill Wendell, Roger Tuttle, Bill McCord, Arthur Gary, Bill Hanrahan, Wayne Howell and Jerry Damon (whose voice bore some similarities to Roby's, leading to some confusion between the two).
Commercial voice-over
Over the years, Roby did many commercials for various products and services on both radio and television; he was part of a group of New York announcers (also including his NBC colleague Howard Reig and WOR-TV's Phil Tonken) who did so. Roby made headlines in 1969 when he put an advertisement in Variety indicating that he would no longer be available for cigarette commercials, citing "evidence . . .
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Vic Roby” as radio/TV Announcer (1917–2011). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 11, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q7924895. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1917, 2011, 1943 and 1950.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vic Roby” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.