McKees Rocks' Billy Mays has a 'pahrful' career as a pitchman
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TV pitchman Billy Mays poses with some of the products that have made him famous.
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If you watch TV, you've seen pitchman Billy Mays with his trademark blue-collar shirt, jet-black beard and mustache.
More to the point, you've heard him hawking gadgets and cleaning products with the high-decibel enthusiasm that has made him rich and famous and brought in billions in sales for OxiClean, Orange Glo, Steam Buddy and a raft of other products.
But have you ever noticed his Pittsburghese?
"Tahrd of wrestling with ahrning boards and ahrns?" he booms in one of his infomercials.
"Everyone says they hear the accent," Mays said with a laugh during a phone interview from his home in Tampa, Fla. "I've been away awhile, but people say they can still pick it up. Like I say 'tohl' instead of 'tool.' "
Born and raised in McKees Rocks, Mays has been a star seller for quite some time. Now, at 50, he's also star of his own reality show. The new 13-week series, "Pitchmen," began airing on the Discovery Channel earlier this month (Wednesdays at 10 p.m.). The show follows Mays and fellow informercial star Anthony Sullivan as they search the world for inventions they can take to the big money.
Mays also is featured in the CNBC documentary "As Seen on TV," which said he was "ready to be crowned king" of all pitchmen now that Ron Popeil of Ronco fame is easing off. Unlike Popeil, however, Mays does not invent his own products. Others do the inventing and then seek him out -- he says he gets six or seven new offers a week, but he screens them carefully.
"There is a process of finding products that have mass appeal, are demonstrable, solve a common problem and are easy to use," he said. "If you can do all that you might have the next million-dollar invention, and I have a good eye for the ones that do.
"I test it all first," he added. "You don't stay in this business as long as I have unless the products work. When I say 'Billy Mays here for Mighty Putty,' all I have is my name and the trust of the audience. I would never let the consumer down."
Mays says he never knew he'd go this route.
"Nobody aspires to be a pitchman. You aspire to be an astronaut or a doctor, but you get to where I did by fate. I took the hard road to make an easy living."
After graduating from Sto-Rox High School, where he played football, he joined the semi-pro Sto-Rox Rangers for a while, playing other teams in the league and, once a year, the inmates at Western Penitentiary.
As he was about to turn 24, he went to Atlantic City with a football buddy who'd been working at the McKees Rocks flea market selling Ginsu knives. Soon Mays was hawking products on the boardwalk, learning his chops from the old-timers who took a liking to him.
"I don't know why they did it, but they told me their secrets," he said. "I soaked it all up -- how to get the crowd in, handle and control them, how to get them to pull out $10 or $20 on the spot. It was like they were passing me the baton."
The "new" Atlantic City, with its gleaming casinos and hotels, soon pushed the old boardwalk out of business. Mays spent the next 16 years on the road, traveling the country doing state fairs and home shows -- he says he did the Pittsburgh Home Show every year and loved it.
At a fair in 1993, he met the owner of Orange Glo, who'd lost his microphone. Mays loaned him a spare. They became friends, and in 1996 the businessman called Mays to pitch the product on the Home Shopping Network. He says he sold 6,000 units right out of the gate. The same company put out OxiClean nine months later, and Mays' first TV pitch sold out. Within a few years he'd crossed the bridge to TV full time.
Both those cleaning products are owned now by Arm & Hammer, and Mays is employed by the company as an official spokesman. But he still pitches countless other products through his own company, Mays Promotions. He also acts as his own agent, striking the deals that bring him a pitchman's fee and percentage of sales.
"I have a vested interest in most of the products," he said.
Mays drives a black 2007 Bentley these days and has a more-than-comfortable life in Florida with his wife, Deborah, their daughter, Elizabeth, 3 1/2, and his son by a previous marriage, Billy Mays III, 22. He comes back to Pittsburgh five or six times a year.
"I've done everything I wanted," he said. "Now I want to give back with this new show and help other people take their product to the next level. It's the American dream, and I'm helping them achieve it. I'm proud of that."
First Published April 28, 2009 12:00 am
