Former Opelousas Resident
Remembers George Wendt
BOBBY ARDOIN
St. Landry Now.com Editor
Robert Voitier, a former St. Landry Parish assistant district attorney and Opelousas resident, recalls that George Wendt, who played “Norm,” the affable and popular barstool character during an 11-year run of the popular Cheers sitcom, displayed an identical personality in real life.
“(Wendt) was really just a great guy to know. The character you saw (on Cheers) was absolutely perfect if you want to describe how he really was,” Voitier said on Tuesday after it was announced by family members that Wendt, 76, had died earlier that morning.
The death of Wendt, was somewhat personal for Voitier, who now lives in Broussard.
Voitier first met Wendt nearly 60 years ago, when the two lived close together in the same wing of a University of Notre Dame on-campus freshman dormitory.
Wendt, Voitier recalled, arrived at Notre Dame in South Bend with two of his friends from the southside of Chicago and the three “amigos” as they were then called, usually added an animated and enlightened atmosphere to what might have been considered a mundane dormitory existence.
“George was funny, always popular. Everybody liked him. After all these years,I really didn’t stay in tight contact with him. I last saw him in 1990, when my wife Vicki and I flew out to Studio City for a Notre Dame reunion,” said Voitier who played three years of varsity baseball as an outfielder.
Wendt, Voitier said, arrived with Joe Keegan and Raymond “Mac” Crane at Notre Dame after they graduated from a Jesuit-operated boarding school in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.
Voitier remembered one dorm incident in 1966 when his attempt at studious concentration was interrupted by a ruckus nearby.
“Just outside my door, George, Mac and Joe were bouncing off the walls, having a furious hockey game with golf clubs and a tennis ball,” in a Wendt memoir Voitier wrote for St. Landry Now.
The trip to California in 1990 was a memorable moment in his relationship with Wendt, wrote Voitier.
“We attended a pre-game party at (Wendt’s) house for the Notre Dame-USC game. George rented a bus for all of us that took the partygoers from his house to the L.A Coliseum. As we got near the stadium, the bus would stop for barricades. George would get out of the bus and the cops would let the bus through all the way to the stadium,” Voitier wrote.
Voitier described Wendt’s house then as a modest, small wood frame structure, with a white fence.
“It was a house that would have been at home on Market or Court Street in old Opelousas. He did have a two-story guest house with a swimming pool in the backyard, where we hung out while waiting for the bus to arrive,” Voitier added.
Voitier and his wife were invited back to the Wendt residence in 1992 for another Notre Dame-USC reunion event, but the couple could not attend due to Voitier’s medical reasons.
Wendt, who grew up in a southside neighborhood, was an avid Chicago sports fan who idolized the Bears, White Sox and NHL Blackhawks.
Voitier remembered going back to Chicago with Wendt and his friends to a White Sox game in old Comiskey Park.
The neighborhood around the ballpark had begun to deteriorate and Voitier recalled paying some of the people who lived there a dollar to “watch the car” while they attended the game.
Keegan sent Voitier a Wendt memorial card on Tuesday, which portrays Wendt’s Norm character entering heaven to a Cheers-style welcome.
Wendt’s affinity for the Bears was portrayed later in Saturday Night Live episodes where he appeared in sequences that saluted Mike Ditika as the coach of the Bears.
In a story published Tuesday in The Hollywood Reporter, a family statement described Wendt as a doting family man, a well-loved friend and confidant to all that were lucky to know him.”
“George was always warm and funny. He had that comedic, John Belushi thing about him that made you laugh just by looking at him,” wrote Voitier.
