Homeless Man With a Golden Radio Voice: 'I'll Announce for Food'

Jan. 5, 2010— -- WNCI-FM radio in Columbus, Ohio, wasted little time putting the down-and-out Ted Williams to work on the air this morning, even if it was a tongue-in-cheek proposition.

But the plug for AT&T by the homeless YouTube sensation with the self-described "God Given Gift of Voice" was just the beginning. Shortly after, a Cleveland Cavaliers representative was live on the "Dave and Jimmy Radio Show" offering Williams a full-time job doing voiceovers and mortgage payments on a house.

The organization was inspired "by the power of your voice, the power of your dreams," she told the recovering alcoholic nearly two hours into the show, which was inundated with e-mails, including more than 100 job offers.

The dizzying path from street corners to overnight sensation has left Williams a little short of breath.

"It's making me a nervous wreck," he admitted to the Columbus audience a day after he finished panhandling and a day before his scheduled "Today" show appearance in New York City.

Indeed, his new year is shaping up to be happy one, after so many hard times.

As drivers exited Interstate 71 on Hudson Street in Columbus recently, they may have noticed Williams with a unique appeal for help. It was hard not to listen.

"When you're listening to the best of oldies, you're listening to Magic 98.9," he would bellow with his deep pipes, in a delivery as smooth as any you've heard on the radio.

But on the side of the road, Williams held a cardboard sign that explained that he would announce for food.

"We'll be back with more right after these words," he said recently, as a reporter handed him a buck.

Unshaven, disheveled and wearing a camouflage jacket, this announcer -- a former radio disc jockey -- now speaks to just one driver at a time.

Williams said he became fascinated with radio when he was only 14 years old, growing up in Brooklyn, N.Y. He had visited a station once, and the DJ behind the mic, who looked nothing like what Williams had imagined, told him that radio was "theater of mind."

"I said, 'Well, hey, I can't be an actor, I can't be an on-air personality,' but the voice just became something of a development over the years," he explained to a web producer for the Columbus Dispatch, who put video of Williams on the newspaper's website this week.

Williams had gone to school to be a broadcaster and worked his way from town to town, up and down the dial, eventually ending up at a now-defunct AM station in Columbus.

"And then alcohol and drugs and a few other things became a part of my life," Williams recounts, sounding as if what comes out of his mouth came straight from the bottom of his belly, in a web video that has quickly gone viral.