A Vocal Presence

The line “Please, stand back from the closing doors!” hasn’t exactly made KZPS- FM disc jockey Pamela Steele famous,
but it does keep her in parity hose.

Steele, who recently celebrated an unusual milestone in her business-nine years on the air with the same
station-intones that warning, along with numerous directions for passengers, on the American Airlines TrAAm at the
Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.

Getting into character for taped voice acting is a challenge, says the 32-year-old Steele, and requires a departure
from her friendly, mellow air persona on the classic rock station. For the American Airlines job, she just tried to
imagine that she was “a very authoritative, mean teacher.”

Steele began this successful side business about seven years ago, and through word of mouth (she doesn’t use an agent)
has accumulated a varied group of clients. For Telephone Audio Productions, a Dallas-based on-hold telephone service,
Steele tapes on-hold ad copy for clients, including REMCO, Firestone and John Roberts BMW. If you call someone with a
Metrocel car phone, you may hear Steele say, “The number you have dialed is not a working number.”

And Steele’s voice work is not limited to Dallas. In San Francisco, you can hear Steele doing station identifiers for
KOIT-FM. Across Europe, it’s Steele’s voice saying, “This is BBC Radio One-FM,” among other things.

Why would the British Broadcasting Company and a San Francisco station come to Dallas for voice work? Steele says it’s
hard to find a good female voice, so there’s a lot of business out there to be had.

Even though she’s been a deejay for most of her career, Steele says she has always enjoyed commercial voice work,
dating back to 1979 and her days at KPAR, an AM Country Station in Granbury where she was production director.
Someday, Steele says, she’ll quit deejay work altogether and do voice work exclusively “from my own mondo studio.”