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The Makers
The artists and builders whose work gives ventriloquists someone to argue with. These 27 are documented in full: who they were, how they worked, and the figures themselves, cataloged with mechanics, materials and dimensions.
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Alan Semok
Builder, and more famously the restorer, the man people sent a damaged figure to. Jimmy Vee's records give his death as October 27, 2019.
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Alex Cameron
Frank Marshall's partner in the purchase of the Mack shop, and the man in the room for the year that matters most in this whole argument.
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Art Sieving
An obscure name and a very good carver. He made architectural work, clocks and a handful of figures.
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Arthur Quisto
A Punch and Judy showman who built ventriloquist figures on the side, signed his own work backward where nobody would think to look, and left a name collectors on both sides of the Atlantic…
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Bill Boley
A real Kentucky Colonel who filled a five-state circuit for thirty years, wrote two dozen books of material, and built a bird routine half the trade quietly borrowed.
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Bill Hume
A Navy man with no dummy, no shop, and three weeks before a USO tryout built one anyway, out of scrap wood, engineered so nothing on her could ever break a thousand miles from a repair…
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Bob Isaacson
Performer, collector, historian and carver. He wrote the Frank Marshall biography this site leans on, and he replaced Charlie McCarthy's hands.
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Charles Mack
He ran a tavern around the corner from his father's carving shop and cut figures in the hours he wasn't pouring drinks. When newspapers and his own apprentice reached for one name behind…
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Clinton Detweiler
A Kansas farm kid answered a classified ad in the back of a magazine. Fifteen years later he owned the company that ran it, and he never really put it down again.
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Dick Weston
One act, honed for twenty years, and a flat no to national television. The billing wasn't even his real name.
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Finis Robinson
Waterloo, Iowa's one stop shop for figures, magic and puppetry, run out of a family business under a slogan he actually lived: The End of Gloom.
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Frank Marshall
The most important figure maker of the twentieth century in America, and the one every later maker is measured against. He came into the trade at thirteen as a polio convalescent given a…
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Fred Maher
He built his own first partner by hand, then sold the craft to America by mail for eighteen years out of a Detroit post box.
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George "Pinxy" Larsen
A Punch and Judy showman who built ventriloquist figures on the side, taught two of Chicago's biggest names, and signed his work in the one place nobody thought to check.
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George McAthy
Magician, ventriloquist, and Burbank's own dummy doctor. He built figures, fixed figures, wrote about figures, and kept the record of what to name them.
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George McElroy
His brother Glenn built the machine hidden in the neck. George built the face on top of it. Together the shop earned a nickname the trade never let go of: the Cadillacs of the vent world.
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Grace "Madame Pinxy" Larsen
Billed as the one-armed woman in a circus sideshow, she married the tattooed man beside her, spent thirty years painting and dressing the figures history credits to him alone, then talked…
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Howie Olson
A Madison television host who made figures and taught building on the side, and the son of a performer called The Great Chesterfield.
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Jack Coats
A Chrysler pattern maker who carved forty figures a year in his evenings, supplied the top of the profession, and died at forty-one.
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Joe Boley
Bill Boley's son picked up the puppets, worked Kentucky's roadside Western tourist towns for three decades, and gave the Hopkinsville community as much as his father ever did.
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Johnny Main
A first-rank performer who also carved. Voted the best ventriloquist in the world in 1981, and a television regular through the 1970s and 1980s.
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Lee Miller Dean
Twelve years old when Kentucky first wrote him up, trained in a sleeper car by The Great Lester, gone from the art for thirty-eight years, and back at the workbench in his sixties to build…
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Madeleine Maher
The builder behind the earliest Maher Studios figures, and one of very few women documented as a maker in this field.
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Ray Guyll
The Pacific Northwest master, and the maker most responsible for teaching other people to build. He wrote the manual a generation learned from.
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Steve Hurst
The webmaster who spent seven years publishing the largest ventriloquist figure collection in America before he ever laid eyes on it. A ventriloquist first, a builder second, and the guy…
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Theodore Mack
A Chicago wood carver took on one favor for a broke vaudeville act around the turn of the century, and built the bench where Frank Marshall and Ken Spencer both learned to hold a chisel…
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William Henry James Shaw
No photograph of the man survives, only his figures. And a remarkable number of careers, famous and forgotten, started on one.
The register is larger than this page.
34 makers have a gallery on this site, and the cleaned register names hundreds more with no publishable photograph yet. The ones above are the ones whose story is written out. If you own a figure, know a maker, or hold shop records, that is how the rest get filled in.