Rene Zendejas

The corpus is firmest on the materials. Zendejas figures today are neoprene with a molded head stick; in the late 1960s and early 1970s he used wood for the head stick and plastic wood in the head. His mechanics were made from brass and welding rods, and the welding rods rust, which is eventually why an old Zendejas stops working.

The sculptor Virginia Austin Curtis, who also made Mortimer Snerd and the Effanbee Charlie, made the face that Zendejas and Jerry Layne both use on their standard cheeky boy.

One figure here has a documented life of its own: a 43-inch head taken from the mold of Brooklyn Birch and modified into a senator, made in the 1970s and used by the performer S. Earl Statler as Phillip Buster, in a routine about a dummy running for president.

Ventriloquist Central's maker directory also carries an entry for a professional puppeteer and figure maker listed under the single name Rene, with a long list of television and commercial credits. We have not established in this corpus that the two entries are the same man, so nothing from that entry is repeated here.

The mechanics

Slot jaw with side-to-side eyes, self-centering on some and not on others, on a wooden head stick in the earlier work and a molded one later.

Status Deceased recorded first-hand by Jimmy Vee, which outranks any web source — maker websites in this field routinely outlive the maker

What we can document about Rene Zendejas comes from the objects themselves. There is no biography of him in our sources, and we would rather say so than pad one out. If you know more, tell us.