By Wade Coggeshall
BROWNSBURG — Steve “Papaw” Pyatte wears many professional hats: website developer, motivational speaker, author, actor, filmmaker. Add voice-over artist to that list.
Pyatte’s booming pipes were used last month during the College Football Hall of Fame’s annual enshrinement dinner. He recorded 21 scripts and other announcements for the event. Inductees included Troy Aikman and Thurman Thomas.
Pyatte, 53, has worked as a voice artist for years.
“As a child, I was always told that I have a big mouth,” he said. “As I got older, I was continuously told that.”
That morphed into being told he had a voice for radio.
“I decided, after being told that so often, I would do it and make some money off of it,” Pyatte said.
He started recording public service announcements for charity. That snowballed into commercials. In June a representative from the College Football Hall of Fame’s marketing department discovered his website, www.papawinc.com, and called. Pyatte’s work for the museum can now be heard on his website.
“It was a blast,” he said of the experience. “It worked out well. I was very excited to get the phone call. To hear I was going to announce Troy Aikman into the College Football Hall of Fame was a treat — one of those things a voice artist always looks for.”
Despite the gig’s eminence, Pyatte doesn’t look at it as superior over anything else he’s done.
“I look at everything I do equally,” said Pyatte, who just recorded voice-overs for XRB Radio Brownsburg. “I really don’t put one above another. It’s just what I love to do. The ones that pay, of course you like that. But I just love having the big mouth and being able to use it properly.”
He uses his other talents just as much. A documentary Pyatte made on former children’s TV host Harlow Hickenlooper is being transferred to DVD now. He’s also in post-production on a documentary he made with Brownsburg native and filmmaker Daniel Risk about the police department here and its annual Night Out Against Crime. The two were asked by Police Chief Stephen Carroll to film the event. The result is being entered in a national competition and will be available to the public.
“It’s been an amazing journey with them,” Pyatte said. “Their goal is to be more community-oriented and have the community know more about what they do. During the making of this documentary, I’ve gotten to know so many of the officers and how things do operate.”
In addition, a movie that Pyatte has a bit part in, “Fire From Below,” is supposed to air next month on the Syfy Channel.
Also an avid motorcyclist (and safety instructor), he’s coordinating a ride Sept. 19 with the Plainfield Eagle Riders to benefit the Spinal Cord Injury Hope Fund. All this has temporarily put the three motivational books Pyatte is writing on the back burner.
It’s quite a schedule for a man who claims to go to bed by 9:30 p.m. But when it involves giving back to your community, Pyatte says it’s worth it.
“It’s one of the most satisfying things you can do — whether it be a monetary donation or volunteering,” he said. “There’s nothing like it. If everybody would think that way — instead of ‘what am I going to get today?’ but rather ‘what can I give today?’ — you get back tenfold what you give.”
wade.coggeshall@flyergroup.com
