McVey hailed from Bay City, Michigan, where he was born on Valentine’s Day in 1912. His mother died at 23 of pulmonary tuberculosis at her parents’ home on Nov. 13, 1913, when McVey was 21 months old. His father was unable to care for a baby, so the boy was raised by his grandparents, aunt and uncle.
McVey joined the AFRA L.A. Local in 1938, the year after arriving in Los Angeles, and worked in radio, During World War II, he was part of “singing cowboy” movie star Gene Autry’s troupe of players, performing at military bases and bond rallies. He began his first AFRA board service in 1945, after the war ended.
He was elected president of the Los Angeles local in February 1961 and almost immediately found himself in Sacramento with an AFTRA delegation in a picket line, supporting the 42 union members on strike against their station, KXTV. McVey sited the obstacles as “…an adamant management that refuses to bargain in good faith; a governor [Edmund G. “Pat” Brown] who not only crosses their picket lines, but grants [an] exclusive interview to the scab newsmen; a court injunction to get sponsors off the station; and a general apathy of the local citizenry towards their strike.”
In late 1962, he speculated on things to come in the entertainment industry via the L.A. local’s Dial-Log newsletter, writing, “What’s in the future? Pay television? Closed-circuit television? Global television? Interplanetary television? Live robot actors? Taped robot actors? Automated announcers? How do you arrive at a proper fee to be paid to a Univac Automaton for a five-line-or-less program written and directed by a Remington Rand Typewriter and beamed to a regional network of only five planets?” By the time of his death in 2003, McVey had lived long enough to see something he never could have predicted in ’62: the internet.
In 1965, during the end of McVey’s L.A. Local presidency, AFTRA and IBEW members went on strike against L.A. radio station KPOL. The most dramatic challenge came two years later in 1967, during his national presidency: AFTRA’s first national strike against the broadcast network giants — ABC, CBS and NBC — which lasted 13 days, from March 29 — April 10. A real cliffhanger, a settlement was reached at 5:05 p.m. on April 10, just an hour and 55 minutes before that night’s Academy Awards were to air on ABC.
By the end of his career, he was a veteran of over 1,000 radio broadcasts and character roles in more than 300 episodes of TV shows and more than two dozen feature films. As a founder and president of the AFTRA Credit Union, McVey saw it evolve into the AFTRA/SAG Credit Union, known today as the SAG-AFTRA Credit Union. McVey was also a long-serving trustee of the AFTRA Health and Retirement Funds. In 1979, he was presented with George Heller Memorial Gold Card No. 23 at the AFTRA National Convention in Nashville.