While Easton remained busy acting in films and on television series throughout the 1950s, by the early 1960s he had become frustrated playing what he described as "shiftless sharecroppers and half-witted hayseeds". He wanted to diversify his career, and he believed he could do so by improving his speaking and language skills in order to perform different types of characters. That belief, coupled with his longtime interest in the cultural and physiological aspects of speech, created a vocational sideline for Easton, one that later became a full-time second career for him.