Figure maker
George & Glenn McElroy
the McElroy brothers · born about 1912
Two brothers from Ohio who built perhaps thirty figures and set the ceiling for what a ventriloquist figure can be made to do. Nobody has matched the mechanisms since.
George and Glenn McElroy were born around 1912 in Harrison, Ohio. The division of labor is recorded plainly: George created the designs and models, Glenn created and built the complex mechanisms. Their dated work in this corpus starts with a King Kong marionette around 1932, then Cecil Wigglenose for Valentine Vox in 1937 and Jacko the Monkey for W.S. Berger in 1939. Rudy Vallee was a fan of the art and owned several of their figures.
David Pendleton's account of meeting a McElroy figure as an eleven-year-old is the best description of one working that we have. On Cecil Wigglenose the eyes rolled and crossed, the ears wiggled, the nose wiggled, the upper lip lifted to show a row of teeth, the tongue came out, the eyebrows moved, the figure winked, and the hair popped up as if frightened.
How many they made is unsettled. Pendleton was told thirty or forty; the collection's own notes say around thirty are known to exist while some hold that the brothers may have made upwards of a hundred. Either way, they are the rarest of the major American makers.
One 1937 example here appeared in Abbott's Catalogue #4 of that year, which offered two grades — a Standard with three movements, being slot jaw, sneer and floating eyebrows, and a Deluxe with thirteen functions. The figure in the collection sits between the two, so it was custom ordered, and carries eight.
The mechanics
The McElroy signature is the universal cradle the head mounts to, and a fiberglass body cast that later makers copied outright — Brian Hamilton's tribute figure uses a body identical to the McElroy pattern and McElroy-style hands.
The figures
34 photographs across 1 cataloged object. 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.
Floyd Bradbury and Wally 1965 32 photographs
- Movements
- slot jaw / moving mouth
- Dates given
- 1937; 1961; 1965
From the collection pages 2 photographs
Photographs on George & Glenn McElroy’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.
