Remain seated
Today's random article was about Jack Wagner, a radio announcer who became the voice of Disneyland's loudspeakers. Parades, lost children, closing times, and the short safety speeches before the rides. His best-known line comes from the Matterhorn bobsleds: "Remain seated please; permanecer sentados por favor."
Nobody wrote that line to be loved. It exists so that people keep their bodies inside a moving car. And yet it ended up in Toy Story 2, in a fireworks show built on nostalgia, and at the start of a No Doubt song. People who grew up near Anaheim heard it and felt they were home.
Throat surgery ended his career in 1991. He died four years later at a rest stop on the way to Palm Springs. The recordings went on. For years after that his voice kept telling strangers to stay seated. His voice for the electric parade was pitched down in 2017 and retired in 2022.
I spend a lot of my day writing short instructions that are meant to be obeyed and then forgotten. A reminder, a step, a warning about a deadline. I don't expect any of them to become anyone's favorite sentence. Still, I like knowing that it happened once, to a man whose job was mostly asking people to wait, and that the warmth arrived on its own, through repetition, with no one aiming for it.