Thumpety thump thump, thumpety thump thump, look at Frosty go!
Who knew the lyrics to Frosty the Snowman would apply so aptly to Jackie Vernon, the comedian who voiced the magical snowman in the annual Christmas cartoon? According to the late comic’s son, David, the virile Vernon had “at least three” secret families.
Vernon was a troubled dude, David told the Nostalgia Tonight with Joe Sibilia radio show, according to the Independent. As a kid, David found out the hard way when a strange woman appeared at Vernon’s Los Angeles home with his wife, Hazel. The woman had another boy with her, “older than I was,” David said. “He was probably in his late teens and a little rough around the edges looking.”
David answered the door. When the woman asked for Jackie, the boy told her his father was working on the road. “Then, I remember she was very firm, she was like, ‘Well then, I want to speak to your mother.’”
After calling his mother, David was sent upstairs, but he could hear the heated conversation from below. Once the woman and the teen had left, David returned and asked his mother for the cold, hard truth. “And it finally came out that before our family, my dad had been married at least three other times,” David said, “which I was kind of shocked to find out.” Hazel wasn’t even sure Vernon had legally divorced all his exes.
It gets weirder. Jackie Vernon, who began life as Ralph Verrone, sired several namesakes by different women. “From these marriages, he had sons, and he named them all Ralph after himself,” David said. “He also abandoned all these families, moved on.”
The only reason David wasn’t a Ralph himself? Jackie and Hazel had a deal in which she got to name the sons, and he named the daughters. It was part of Hazel’s plan to keep Vernon from abandoning his new family as well.
Vernon battled many demons, David said, including depression and addiction. “His addiction was really kind of tranquilizers, Quaaludes, and Valium. It really took a toll on him and he had to work very hard to kind of break free from that depression. It was a hard struggle for him and it was hard for us, seeing him go through that.”
It’s unclear from David’s account if Vernon ever did right by all those Ralphs, but at least the comic was able to overcome his depression late in life. In his final years, he embraced his Frosty place in holiday history.
“One of the last Christmases that my dad was around, we all watched it together and he was so proud of it. He enjoyed it, he laughed at it. He was so happy he had done it,” David said. “He accepted that that was something he was going to be remembered for and he loved it.”
