Lee Aubrey "Speed" Riggs

Lee Aubrey “Speed” Riggs (February 18, 1907 – February 1, 1987) was an American tobacco auctioneer in Durham, North Carolina, United States. For more than three decades Riggs appeared on the radio show Your Lucky Strike Hit Parade for the American Tobacco Company as the voice of Lucky Strike cigarettes. Riggs' career came to an end in 1969, when the United States Federal Trade Commission banned tobacco advertising over all forms of broadcast media.

Later in life, Riggs moved to California and started “Your Community Fund,” a nonprofit with the mission to teach handicapped children various labor skills. Riggs is remembered today as a public figure and star performer of the 1940s and 1950s, having gained fame as part of the last generation of mass media tobacco advertisers.

Lee Aubrey Riggs was born on February 18, 1907 in Silverdale, North Carolina — a small community in rural Onslow County. His father, Mark, worked as a tobacco farmer, and in 1921 the entire family moved to Goldsboro, North Carolina, where Mark planted his own tobacco patch and established a truck farming business. Riggs attended school until the sixth grade, when assisting his father in the fields forced him to drop out.

Riggs, however, never gained the same satisfaction growing crops as his father. Riggs discovered his passion while visiting the Faison Produce Auction in Sampson County, North Carolina, where he was awed by the antics and rapid-fire chants of the auctioneers. At just 14 years old, Riggs remembered mimicking the “staccato style…humming Yankee Doodle.” By practicing at such a young age, he trained himself to speak at the staggering pace of 469 words per minute, which was thought to be a world record at the time.

Riggs fondly recalled his years between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, when he would practice his chant daily, slowly edging toward mastery of the craft:

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