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Once Homeless, Ted Williams Now Voices Optimism

Mara Gay
AOLnews

05:41:00PM (ET) Thursday,January 6,2011.

This time, Ted Williams is ready for success.

The Ohio homeless man whose "golden radio voice" propelled him off the streets to overnight fame had lost everything because of an addiction to drugs and alcohol. But now, he says he's prepared for his second chance.

"This time around I have God," Williams told NBC's "Today" show this morning, just 48 hours after a video of one of his radio-ready voiceovers -- performed while panhandling on the side of a Columbus road -- went viral. A "new sense of spirituality," he said, would help him handle his sudden success.

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And there's a lot to handle. After spending more than a decade on the streets, the 53-year-old Brooklyn native has job offers pouring in, from Kraft, which apparently wants to use his silky voice to sell macaroni and cheese, to the Cleveland Cavaliers, who have offered him a position as an announcer. "They said they're going to give me LeBron's old house," he joked, referring to former Cavaliers player LeBron James. "This is a dream come true."

But the sweetest part of his success may be making his 92-year-old mother proud again. Williams said he prayed she would live to see him turn his life around. And she has.

"God has answered my prayer," Williams' mother, Julia Williams, said in an interview with CBS' "Early Show" today. "I prayed that I would live to see this time when he would do well."

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Doral Chenoweth, the Columbus Dispatch reporter who filmed the now famous video of Williams
and posted it to the web, said he was hopeful about the man's future. "You hope he has a good life," Chenoweth told the New York Daily News. "There's a chance that he could go back to alcohol and drugs. That would be sad."

Not everyone, however, was tickled by Williams' rise to fame. The longtime homeless man is also a felon, and has a lengthy criminal history of theft, fraud, robbery and drug posession.
One Columbus businessman, who would not be named, told The Smoking Gun.com that Williams has been a thief for the past two years and has hassled customers outside his store. He said he was annoyed by the good press Williams had received. Williams, though, told NBC today that the crimes were all non-violent and were related to his substance abuse.

Julia Williams said she hoped her son's new life would stick. "Maybe this will build him up," she told ABC's "Good Morning America."

Williams had tasted success before and worked in radio as a young man. But in 1993, drugs and alcohol consumed him. Williams -- a father of seven -- lost his job, his home and his family, and he lived in homeless shelters and on the streets of Columbus for years.

Until this week, that is, when a reporter at The Columbus Dispatch videotaped him using that now-famous voice and posted it on the Web. Williams, who says he has been clean for two years now, said he was simply grateful. "There's no way in the world that I could have ever imagined that I would have all of this," he told NBC. "I'll have my own apartment. My kids will have love from me."



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* Following up from yesterday's Hot Topic posted below in this section.
Can't get enough of Ted's story.
Watched the emotional interview this morning on Today Show.
This has to be the

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