dumbstruck / a cultural history of ventriloquism

Above The dust jacket of my favorite book about the history of ventriloquism—Steven Connor, Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. UK: Oxford University Press, 2001—and below my childhood attempt at the same.

Howard's End

Chain carved from a single piece of wood

Growing up in the Midwest in the 1950s, when I was in elementary school I spent a lot of hours, especially in the summer, sitting outside in the shade on a concrete slab, carving shapes out of wood with my aging next door neighbor, Howard Steele (he looked like J.C. Penney to me). Recently, when I found the above photograph in a turn-of-the-century issue of the Strand Magazine (c1890s), it reminded me of Howard's specialty: He was good at "whittling" wooden chains out of a single scrap of pine, a trick that was pretty amazing to me at that age. He gave me my first pocket knife, which I used when I was whittling with him. Later, when I was in fifth grade, I took up ventriloquism. My sister gave me the head of a discarded doll, which I modified so that the mouth would open and close. One day when I came home from school, I was surprised and delighted to find that Howard had carved an entire wooden body for my makeshift sidekick, and my mother and a seamstress friend had made an appropriate miniature suit. I named him Mitch Mahoney, because he was supposed to resemble television bandleader Mitch Miller. It must have been the following year that, as I again walked home from school, I noticed as I neared my home that perhaps a dozen neighborhood women (my mother among them) were gathered on the lawn in front of Howard's house. As I approached, it became apparent that Howard, lifeless and propped up on a chair in the grass in the yard, was having a terrible hemorrhage, and the women were frantically trying to stop the bleeding with towels. After Howard died that day, I was given his pocket knife, which I still have, along with the one that he'd given to me. Oddly, now that all the years have passed, I can no longer remember which pocket knife was his—and which was mine.

Ventriloquism for Dummies

Howdy Doody Patent No 156,687 (1950)

In the late 18th century, a British entertainer named James Burns, known as "Shelford Tommy," persuaded a freight carrier to empty his wagon in order to search for a child whose cries for help seemed to be coming from inside the load he was hauling.

During the same period, when a York shoemaker was accused by fifty witnesses of having tossed a crying baby into the river, he defined himself in court by producing a second crying baby, which he then shockingly beheaded—but which, upon closer inspection, was shown to be only an inanimate doll.

Both Burns and the shoemaker were experts at ventriloquism, the act of making it seem that a voice or other sound has emanated not from ones own larynx, but from some other adjacent entity. A person who does this professionally is called a ventriloquist or "belly speaker," a coinage that comes from the merger of two Latin words, venter (belly) and loqui (to speak). More

Can't Stand On An Apple

Carl Sandburg, recalling a childhood incident in his autobiography, Always the Young Strangers. NY: Harcourt Brace, 1953, p. 191—

I had a dime and a nickel in my pocket. With the dime, the tenth part of a dollar, I bought a ticket. I went in and heard the ventriloquist and his dummy: "Will you spell a word for me, Danny?" "I'll try, what's the word?" "Constantinople." "Why do you tell me you can't stand on an apple?"