Figure maker
Foy Brown
Foy Ernest Brown
A Kansas carver who worked in wood on principle, invented his own body mechanism, and wrote some of the best letters in this whole archive.
Brown was a ventriloquist and figure maker from Kansas, photographed in 1946 with his figures B. O. Baily and Lon Lundy. He came by it honestly: his father was born in 1862 and started out as an entertainer in 1881 at nineteen, and Brown grew up with his father's puppets for toys.
Most of what we know in his own words comes from letters he wrote to George Boosey in the late 1980s, published on Ventriloquist Central with annotation by Boosey and Todd Oliver. They show a man with strong views. He had no time for figures made from a mold, which he thought were about quick money and came out all alike. He estimated eighty-five to a hundred hours in a figure and had no patience with buyers who expected them turned out like loaves of bread. He carved to Bing Crosby, Dean Martin, Jim Reeves and Perry Como on the record player, and said it helped.
He also worked out his own body mechanism, combining a rocking clavicle with a shrugging shoulder in one figure, and believed the shrugging shoulder was his own idea. The rocking clavicle is still referenced by other builders on this site as a Foy Brown feature.
He made hand puppets as well as figures, and kept a stock of finished work dressed and ready so that visitors could see a variety rather than commission blind. His last performing figure was Suzie, a 34-inch cowgirl with mouth movement only, whom he introduced with the song If You Knew Susie.
The mechanics
Slot jaw with side-to-side moving eyes, raising eyebrows and a spitter on the fully equipped figures; self-centering eyes on others. The bodies are the interesting part — the rocking clavicle and shrugging shoulder are his.
The figures
1 photograph across 0 cataloged objects. Each object is one entry in the register — where a character name covers two physical figures, they stay two entries, because the character outlives the object more often than the record admits.
From the collection pages 1 photograph
Photographs on Foy Brown’s index and reference pages rather than on a single figure’s entry — portraits, shop material and close studies of one detail across several figures. They are not counted as objects in the register.
