Augustus Rapp

Rapp and Shorty Jones, the wooden partner Theodore Mack & Son built for him around 1908. The two worked together for the next fifty years. Photo: Ventriloquist Central

Augustus Rapp built a sixty-year career that almost nobody in the magic press ever wrote a word about, and that suited him fine. He played town halls, granges, and lodge meetings in villages most performers of his day wouldn't have found on a map, carrying an old-time magic act and a ventriloquist act with a wooden partner named Shorty. By one account, his route never once turned up in the pages of The Sphinx, the trade's own magazine.^[1] Pull up a chair. This is the story of a man who was famous almost nowhere, and built a life he was proud of anyway.

A boy in Milwaukee, a box, and a stranger's voice

Rapp was born in 1871 in Jeffersonville, Indiana, and grew up to call Milwaukee his hometown.^[2] Sometime around 1880, still a boy, he saw something at Litt's Museum in Milwaukee that he spent the rest of his life measuring every other ventriloquist against. A young Black man stood no more than three feet from the crowd, working from a black box about the size of an unabridged dictionary, with no figures at all and no visible movement in his face or throat. Out of that box came an old man and woman arguing, a crying baby, a cat and dog fight, a canary, a barnyard's worth of animals, and a conversation between someone inside the box and someone standing under the platform.^[3] Decades later, going strictly by the dictionary definition of the word, Rapp wrote that this unnamed performer was the only true ventriloquist he had ever seen in his life.^[3] He never learned to do what that man did with a box and no figures at all. He built his own career on figures instead. But he never forgot the standard, and he was honest enough, decades on, to admit he hadn't matched it.

Buying a start

By the early 1900s Rapp had bought two figures from W. H. J. Shaw, the Chicago magical manufacturer of the 1890s, and he was carrying magic and ventriloquism together into towns at the far edge of the map, places where nobody in the crowd had ever seen a ventriloquist work before.^[3] He wasn't shy, later in life, about what that stretch of the trade actually taught him. "I found out that it takes a lot more than a dummy, some bad jokes and an overstuffed ego to be a ventriloquist," he said. "After sixty years at it I still consider myself just a Vent."^[3] Six decades in, that was his own verdict on himself, not humility performed for an audience. Just the plain arithmetic of a long career, told straight.

"Come out of the sticks"

Rapp counted Harry Houdini and Howard Thurston among his friends, and Houdini's own Conjurers' Monthly Magazine gave him a piece of advice more than once: come out of the sticks.^[2] Rapp never really did. Robert Parrish, who wrote the introduction to Rapp's memoir decades later, put it plainly: Rapp worked the rural hinterlands well past where the established towns ended, and stayed largely unknown to the broader magic world for fifty years.^[1] Rapp's own accounting of his progress matches that modesty exactly. After five years on the road he judged he was "beginning to do his tricks in a satisfactory manner." After fifty years he allowed himself one verdict: he had built "a good show." He never claimed more than that.^[1]

Fifty years with Shorty Jones

Shorty Jones came out of the Theodore Mack & Son shop in Chicago around 1908, and Rapp put his own hands into the figure, literally: he carved Shorty's wooden hands himself.^[4] Rapp had a sense of humor about his partner, and it shows on paper. He wrote Shorty a mock birth certificate listing 1908 as the figure's birth year and naming a godfather: a young Chicago carver's apprentice named Frank Marshall, who would have been about eight years old that year and was still decades away from becoming one of the busiest figure makers of his era.^[5] The joke could only have been written well after the fact. An eight-year-old wasn't signing anybody's paperwork in 1908. But Rapp counted from Shorty's "birthday" just the same. When he finally sent the figure off to Vent Haven Museum in 1957, forty-nine years after Shorty was made, he wrote a short note to travel with him: "He was a good boy for 50 years. If he ever talked back to me, it must have been my own fault. Give him a nice, warm place near the bathroom."^[5][6]

The last chapter

He'd already been a familiar face at the big gatherings for most of a decade. Rapp turns up in the group photograph from the IBV's first combined convention with the magic fraternities, held in Chicago in May 1950.^[7] By 1956 he was eighty-five and living at 714 South Burdick Street in Kalamazoo, Michigan, his eyesight failing and a surgery ahead of him. That year the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists made him an honorary member.^[8] He kept working on his memoir anyway. In January 1958, freshly recovered from a cataract operation at eighty-six, he had a finished manuscript sitting in New York, looking for a publisher.^[9] It found one. The Life and Times of Augustus Rapp, the Small Town Showman came out in 1959 from the Ireland-Marshall Magic Company in Chicago, Jay Marshall's shop, for five dollars a copy, with a foreword by Dr. Joseph French and an introduction by Robert Parrish.^[10] Rapp came to that year's Chicago convention to see the book in print. A fellow member wrote that he was "moving about nicely for a person in his 89th year."^[10] The book ran nine chapters, from "Horse and Buggy Days" through "My Finish," with an appendix chapter of its own devoted to the ventriloquist act with Shorty.^[11]

In September 1960 Rapp was in a Milwaukee hospital, ninety years old, recovering from the amputation of one foot.^[12] He died there the following July, on the 30th, at ninety.^[2] Sixty years after he bought two figures from a Chicago supply house because he'd never forgotten a stranger's voice coming out of a box, he'd played more small towns than anyone in this trade ever bothered to count, and he'd earned the right to call the whole thing, in his own words, a good show.^[1]

The circle

No small-town showman works entirely alone. Here is Rapp's world: the friends who told him to leave it, the shop that built his partner, and the people who kept his memory after he was gone.

Rapp never got the big rooms, and by every account he'd made peace with that long before he sat down to write his own story. What he had instead was sixty years of work, a wooden partner who outlived his own joke birth certificate by half a century, and a shelf of small towns nobody else in this hobby thought to visit. Read his own words and you'll notice he never once asked for more credit than the work itself earned him.

Fifty years with one wooden partner and he still called himself 'just a Vent' - Shorty Jones put in half a century of loyal service and never once got top billing out of it.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy