You may not have known Elwood Edwards, but you've certainly heard his voice. He was the man behind AOL's iconic "You've Got Mail" greeting. Sadly, Edwards passed away recently, just a day shy of his birthday.
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He was 74 years old. His former employer, WKYC-TV Studios, announced his passing. They said that Edwards had been suffering from a long-term illness. So how did Edwards end up as the voice of AOL's mail? You can thank his wife.
"My wife worked for a company called Quantum Computer Services that became AOL," Edwards told CNBC, "and in 1989 she volunteered my voice to [future CEO] Steve Case. And on a cassette deck in my living room, I recorded [the iconic phrases], it was digitized into the software as a test and has continued to the day."
Edwards ultimately recorded four different messages for AOL including the now iconic "You've Got Mail" line. "I did that on a cassette deck in my living room," he told Inside Edition in 2016.
Elwood Edwards Dies
Unfortunately, Edwards never received any residuals for his AOL voice. But he did say he had "a good relationship with AOL." Edwards never predicted that he would become famous.
"I had no idea it would become what it did, I don't think anybody did," Edwards said in a 2019 interview on podcast "Silent Giants with Corey Cambridge." "Suddenly, AOL took off... I remember standing in line at CompUSA and seeing (stacks of AOL CDs) and thinking, 'my voice is on every one of those, and nobody has a clue.'"
As for his day-to-day life, Edwards worked for years at the Cleveland, Ohio television station WKYC. His colleague mourned his loss. Frank Macek, senior broadcast director at WKYC, said he was friends with Edwards for 15 years.
"Every time someone would come to visit at WKYC, he'd introduce himself and they'd recognize him," Macek said. "There was such an association between his voice and AOL for such a long period of time that he became an instant celebrity as a result."
As far as the spotlight, Edwards certainly wouldn't have liked it.
"I didn't enjoy being on camera as much as I enjoyed being behind the scenes," Edwards said on the podcast.
