How
many times have you seen this face and really chortled at his comments and antics?
Do you know what his real name is? Vern? Ernest? Actually, It's neither of these. He is
Jim Varney who has a face and a voice that could sell just about anything. and he DOES!
And he has an advertising manager. Wanna know who he is? Perhaps you remember that in the
March/April issue of "The WICK-LINE" I said a future issue would contain some
interesting things about some of Joseph Seifrit Wicklein's descendants? Well, meet Angus
Leroy Lightner, Jr. of Hendersonville, Tennessee. Roy Lightner is one of Joseph and Anna
Maria's great grandsons
I first "met" Roy when he telephoned in the spring of 1993 to
offer additional information about his Wicklein cousins and his ancestor, Hans Adam
Wicklein. Naturally, his offer was readily accepted. Little did I know at that time that
Roy's mother was Grace Darling (Thompson) Lightner, a granddaughter of Anna Maria (Fawkes)
and Joseph S. Wicklein, and that she was a long-time and hard-working member of the
D.A.R., that she had done years and years of research on Adam Wicklein and his descendants
and that she was the very same lady I had been trying to find for a couple of years so
that I could meet her and discuss Wicklein and Wickline genealogy with her. Haplessly,
Grace died that same year, at the age of 100, and before I ever had the chance to meet
her.
Also, little did I know that it would not only be about 15 months before
Mr. Lightner could select and copy the material, but, once done, all of it would be flown
in and personally delivered by Mr. Lightner, himself!
Roy has always been involved in marketing, sales, and/or advertising. He spent most of
his career at N.W. Ayer in Philadelphia, Boston and New York, working with accounts such
as Regal Shoes, Bostich, Nicholson Files, Chrysler-Plymouth, DuPont, Goodyear and Texaco.
With DuPont, he was responsible for introducing Teflon and Silverstone cookware and Lucite
paints in the early 1960's.
After he retired from Ayer in 1980, Mr. Lightner moved to Nashville, TN, as National
Director of the United Methodist Church's Television Ministry Campaign. He is currently
Senior Vice-President / Marketing with Carden and Cherry, Inc. of Nashville... the
"handlers", if you will, of the Ernest P. Worrell character created by Jim
Varney.
Mr. Lightner did the marketing for the Ernest character almost from the beginning with
Coca Cola bottlers, Chex cereals, gas companies, auto dealers, and appliance chains,
following the initial success of the North Carolina Pine State and Purity Dairies
campaigns which placed the "Ernest-has-a-few-words-with-Vern" ads on TV.
First reactions were not good. Viewers' first impressions were that the advertisers
were making fun of their fathers, husbands or sons. However, a second wave of
highly-favorable responses occurred and people began calling TV stations to ask when the
ads would be on again. As Roy says, nearly everyone has an Ernest in their family. When
"Ernest" appeared at a Vanderbilt football game, as Roy put it, "the crowd
went bananas".
Then there were the Shoe Carnival (a chain of shoe stores) commercials where the Ernest
P. Worrell character urges his neighbor Vern to hustle down and buy a pair of shoes, maybe
a pair of loafers: "Speaking of loafers", Ernest says, "how's that
brother-in-law of yours?"
And, yup, Roy is still "selling" Ernest P. Worrell! His trip to the
Washington, DC area last August was not just to deliver some family research material, but
was primarily to attend a conference and also to consult with Luskins, a metropolitan DC
area discount appliance chain, regarding resuming use of Ernest for their TV spots.
Although Mr. Lightner seems to have and to maintain the bulk of his mother's Adam
Wicklein research, It was apparently his sister, Barbara Lightner Whitehouse, who traveled
and helped their mother with the research. Barbara, though, had 11 children to raise and
her research time, of course, was thereby limited. One of Barbara's sons, Paul Lightner
Whitehouse, a physicist with NASA who lives in Madison, AL, is also continuing the
family's genealogical research.
continued...
© Jane Green Volckmann 1995
