Jack De Golia
Award-winning audiobook narrator, e-learning voice, video game actor, and storyteller
Jack (real name John) is a fifth generation Californian. His great-great-grandfather arrived in San Francisco in June 1850 and headed for the gold fields. One hundred and one years later, Jack was born in San Francisco.
His mom, Eva, and father, John, were both 42 years old. His brother Ron was almost 14. And as Ron would say later, “Jack was the whoops.”
Mom was from Nicaragua, Dad was raised in California after his birth in Oregon. Jack grew up in Millbrae and Orinda, California, in the 50s and 60s, graduating from Campolindo High School in 1969, the same year as Woodstock, and a whole lot of social upheaval.
He went to college 60-some miles away at the University of California, Davis. Jack broke some a family tradition by doing that, as his great-grandfather, grandfather, father, and brother had all attended UC Berkeley. (This first two guys had no choice as there weren’t other campuses to go before 1919.)
At UC Davis, Jack realized midway through his freshman year, that while his goal had been to get into college—which represented The Future—he didn’t know what he wanted to beyond get there. But also freshman year, one of his dorm friends had a very cool water bag backpack that the friend had taken home with him from his job the previous summer as a fire fighter with the US Forest Service. That backpack was very impressive during dorm water fights!
The next year, Jack applied for summer firefighting jobs with both the US Forest Service and the National Park Service, and lo and behold, he was hired in 1971 at Lava Beds National Monument, just south of the Oregon border near Tulelake, California.
He learned later he’d been hired because the previous year’s crew had been fired for smoking weed on the job, and Jack’s application came in at the right time, and spent four summers there, moving to the position of Park Ranger for the last two summers.
That led to a 35-year career with the Park Service, the Forest Service, and the Bureau of Land Management, all over the West, in firefighting at first, then as a park ranger, and finally as a public affairs officer, providing information about wildfires.
MEANTIME…back at UC Davis, the “what will I really do when I grow up” question still needed to be answered. After trying several majors that just did not float the boat, Jack in his fourth of five years at UCD, settled on Dramatic Art. There was acting, there was theater tech—lights, sound, stage management—all of which floated the boat wonderfully. But the outdoor life beckoned, too, and the pay was better.
Then, in the early 80s, midway through his career in federal service, Jack got an itch when he turned 30, that demanded to be scratched. ACTING was still in there, banging around, wanting attention!!
So Jack actually resigned his regular hours and nice pay for a nine-month stint he likened to “Skydiving through my savings” as an actor in Phoenix. He did mime. He was in musicals (and sang and danced)..and acted in Shakespeare, Commedia del’Arte plays, all at Actors Lab Arizona.
His second best pay month as an actor was in January 1983, when he was inside Garfield the Cat at a Mattel Toy convention. Jack made $400 just four days AND got lunch. (“Plus lunch” was a huge benefit to acting gigs.)
His most profitable month was Feb. 1983, where he made $600 by doing 49 performances of 4 different shows, 3 and 4 shows a day—which led to Jack being sick with a cold.
He went over to LA to see if the Bright Lights there would welcome him—and realized thanks to the agent for Cheryl Tiegs at workshop, that brown eyes didn’t sell well on video of the day, that he might always just be “the sidekick” as we sell corn flakes in Iowa.
So he went back to the Park Service at the Grand Canyon (OMG, there was only one costume—the uniform—no makeup, and if there were lines, he wrote them!)
He also met a woman who became his first wife and mother of his children. And since she was at the University of Montana, and 10 years younger than Jack, Jack found a job at Yellowstone National Park working for his former boss from the Everglades where Jack had worked for several winter seasons in the 1970s.
Yellowstone was home through most of the 1980s. Jack directed a couple of community theater plays in Gardiner, Montana, then after a baby came along, and moving up in the NPS was limited, Jack got a job with the US Forest Service in Dillon, Montana.
For the next 20 years worked as the “PAO” of the Beaverhead-Deerlodge National Forest, as well as a volunteer community and university actor. Fire information, a second son, a divorce, online dating, acting at the University of Montana-Western, a second wife, an empty nest, and bibbity bobbity boo, Jack is in Las Vegas, with his new wife Brenda, a UNLV geology professor, looking at the UNLV Continuing Ed Catalog and sees Voice Over.
Fifteen years go by, a granddaughter arrives (100 years after Jack’s dad was born), the Voice Actors Studio is born, and Jack is now on audiobook #202, in a sound booth, Jack gets to ACT and get lunch.
