Bill Boley

Boley in the tuxedo he worked in for forty years, surrounded by four of his figures. From the Jimmy Vee Collection.

Bill Boley was a real Kentucky Colonel. Not a stage name and not a bit: an actual commission from the Commonwealth, and he wore it on his own advertising for the rest of his life.^[1] For thirty years he ran a five-state circuit out of Hopkinsville, Kentucky: something like 250 school shows a year, another hundred birthdays and private parties on top of that, and he never once had to leave the state to stay busy.^[2] Pull up a chair. This one has a talking crow, a gallon of flesh-colored paint, twenty-four books, and a grave with a dummy keeping watch over it.

The boy who wanted a special throat

He grew up in Christian County, Kentucky, and got hooked on ventriloquism the ordinary way: by radio. Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy came through the speaker, and in third grade a school-assembly magician sealed it. He decided right there he'd learn to do what the man on stage did. He told his father. His father talked him out of it the way fathers do: "You have to be born with a special throat to do that."^[2] Bill Boley did not have a special throat. He had a mirror, a year of practice, and enough stubbornness to make up the difference.

At sixteen he bought his first figure and spent that year in front of the mirror teaching himself to work it. He named it Oscar. He saved up and bought a real professional figure next: Freddy, who stayed in the act from 1953 on.^[2] A year later a local country-western band hired him to fill time between sets on their weekly radio show. He kept the gig two years and wrote new material every week, because the audience never changed but the calendar always did.^[2] By 1955 he'd added fast, practiced magic and balloon work built for a room full of Kentucky kids, and that combination of magic and ventriloquism stuck with him for the next forty-five years.^[2] The Oracle picked him up by name that same decade: a program on WKOA radio out of Hopkinsville, and shows for the soldiers at Fort Campbell.^[3] Two years after that, the Oracle picked him up again on WSIX television out of Nashville.^[4]

He never lost the accent either. Friends who knew him for decades said Bill Boley spoke like a Kentuckian on stage and off, his whole life.^[6] And he understood promotion as well as any performer in this record: one of his own advertising pieces was a postcard built around local pride, "Famous Men of Christian County," Boley's own face right there in the lineup, billed as "the most famous ventriloquist in the South."^[7] He didn't write the county's other famous names. He just made sure his own showed up on the card.

Four hundred miles from home, never further

Add it up and Bill Boley worked something like 350 paid shows a year for three decades without leaving the region. He visited thirty of the fifty states over his career and never had to. Kentucky kept him fed.^[2] National television found him more than once: Good Morning America, PM Magazine, Hee Haw, Real People, Nashville Now. And the trade elected him president of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists.^[2]

By his own count he crossed four thousand performances inside twenty years, and he said something in print every performer should tape to a mirror: "I have performed over 4,000 times in the past 20 years and I still feel some apprehension before every performance. The main secret of reducing such feelings is to get your mind off yourself and direct your energies to your performance."^[8] His rule on mistakes was just as plain: "Nobody is born full grown. You had to fall a few times before you learned to walk."^[9]

The Vent-O-Rama

In 1959, Boley visited Vent Haven's new room in Kentucky and came home and built a room of his own: twenty-four feet by fourteen, finished by the end of the year, built to house his own growing collection of figures.^[10] W.S. Berger, the man who built Vent Haven itself, took the news the way you'd hope a founder would: "Glad that I have a follower, and I will help him in his search for material and figures. Even among the vent collectors we must have competition. It's healthy."^[10] Berger even coined the name. The Vent-O-Rama opened the next year, Boley's own diversified characters seated in metal chairs, with a workshop section set aside for repairs and new figures.^[11]

Decades later, friends who visited what Boley himself called the Dummy Den described shelf after shelf of figures crowded in together, and a hand-lettered DO NOT TOUCH sign propped right in the middle of them, because a room like that draws hands.^[12]

Twenty-four books and a bird nobody's matched

Performing was only half of it. Boley built figures too, birds especially: at least five different models of a crow character over the years, evolving a little with every one the way any maker's work does.^[13] He built one called Quack for fellow performer Johnny Main back in the 1960s: wood, papier-mache, and fur, with a spitter and flapping wings worked by the performer's own hand hidden inside.^[14] But the character everybody actually remembers is Heidi the Crow, and Boley wrote her material himself. Ventriloquist Dale Brown put it plainly years later: "Some of my routine includes some of Bill Boley's bird jokes, like just about everyone else who uses a bird puppet. I think Bill's legacy will live forever through his bird routine. I just hope people never forget whose material they're using." Clinton Detweiler agreed and named the source outright: most vents working a bird puppet were using at least one joke from Bill's dialogue with Heidi the Crow.^[15]

He built other things too. A purse that opened into a whole character, the handle doubling as the puppet's own hands.^[16] A rubber half-mask that turned an audience volunteer into a talking figure for the length of one bit, sold with the whole routine printed right on the instruction sheet.^[17]

And he wrote. Twenty-four books on ventriloquism and magic by the time he was through, more than almost anyone else in the trade ever published. Maher Studios sold eleven of his titles by stock number alone: gag files, a yearbook series that ran nearly every year through the 1990s, Letters to Freddy (a hundred fan questions answered by the dummy himself), and Fractured Nursery Rhymes, which Maher named its best-selling dialogue book, full stop.^[18] Clinton Detweiler summed up the style in his own words: "Boley's comedy style: use the minimum amount of words to achieve the maximum amount of laughs." Timeless jokes, laugh line after laugh line, no filler.^[19] His baby cry bit got imitated so widely that fellow performer Joe Gandelman said it straight: "emulated and virtually lifted word by word by many vents." Gandelman's advice for anyone tempted to do the same thing is worth keeping regardless of the bit: watch what a man does, figure out what makes it work, and go match that to yourself. People can copy the words. Nobody duplicates the charm.^[20]

He was just as particular, and just as stubborn, about color. He mixed a gallon of flesh-colored paint for figures, decided six months later he didn't like the shade, and mixed a second gallon rather than touch the first.^[21]

The partners

Freddy

The professional figure a teenage Boley saved up for, and kept working in front of audiences from 1953 until the day he stopped touring. His other figures included Aunt Fanny, Willie, Jose the crow, and Timex the dog.

Photo: Rick Morse, via Find A Grave

The road card

Boley's own advertising photo, street address and phone number printed right on it. For a working vent covering five states a year, the booking department was whatever fit on one card.

From the Jimmy Vee Collection

The Talking Mask

Boley's own invention: a soft rubber half-mask and a printed instruction sheet, turning any audience volunteer into a figure for the length of one bit. No headstick, no knee, no body required.

Photo via Cybervent

The circle

No performer works entirely alone, and Boley's circle ran deep: friends who admired him, students he taught for free, and a collector who kept his work from disappearing after he was gone.

The most generous man in the business

Ask around and you keep hearing the same word about Bill Boley: generous. Dale Brown wrote him letters as a young performer thinking about quitting his day job to go pro full time. Boley wrote back: "I don't think that's a very good idea. I think you should combine your corporate work with ventriloquism. You'll still have a paycheck, but you'll be able to still do ventriloquism." Brown took the advice, and later said Boley was the man who convinced him he could do this at all, and the same man who talked him out of doing it the reckless way.^[22] Bob Abdou called him one of his own mentors outright, always open with sharing his material, right up until the one time it cost him: another performer did Boley's own routine word for word on the same bill, right before he went on, and Boley walked onstage white as a ghost.^[23] That is the whole trade-off of being generous with your material, and Boley kept doing it anyway.

In 1997, that generosity came back around. Boley was recovering from serious health trouble when more than fifty ventriloquists organized themselves on the early internet vent list and mailed him cards, letters, and checks in a single coordinated "Let's Do Something for Bill Boley Day." Boley wrote back to Dialogue magazine himself: "The mailman knocked on my door... he handed me this large stack of mail, many times more mail than we usually receive. Each of the envelopes contained a card or letter along with a check or some cash money... I sat opening and reading all of those letters and the tears began to flow. I cried for over an hour. I was crying when Charlene came home from work and she thought that something was wrong. I told her I was crying because I was so happy."^[24] Mark Wade, who knew him personally, put the whole man in one line: "My good friend, a tremendous talent. He could do the baby cry, the echo voice, all the fine points. A personable guy, a really good friend."^[25]

The last show

By 1998 the diabetes he'd lived with for years had turned serious. Charlene caught the first sign of trouble in his feet on a trip to St. Louis, and emergency surgery saved most of both. Doctors found his heart needed a quadruple bypass in the same stretch, done without a pacemaker.^[2] He kept working anyway. That summer, at the 1998 Las Vegas Ventriloquist Convention's adult show, Boley surprised the whole room by resurrecting an old, slightly risque routine from a decade or two back, working a borrowed figure because he hadn't brought his own.^[26] He was sixty-three years old and back on a stage anyway.

Bill Boley died December 17, 2000, at St. Thomas Hospital in Nashville. He was sixty-five.^[27] Bill DeMar organized a small memorial convention in his honor afterward, and by every account it ran for several years.^[28] Collector Dan Willinger bought a number of Boley's figures directly from his widow, Charlene, and by 2009 they were part of the Ventriloquist Central collection.^[5]

And out at his grave in Kentucky, Charlene keeps something going that no other figure in this whole archive gets. A figure from Bill's own collection sits on a memorial bench beside his headstone, held upright with a shepherd's hook, wearing a hat because, in her words, the birds love him. She repaints him and dresses him in new clothes twice a year, every year, because that is what upkeep on a Boley figure has always required.^[29] Clinton Detweiler said it as plainly as anyone could: Bill Boley was dearly loved by young and old in his small town, so maybe a vent figure keeping watch over his own grave isn't so strange after all.^[29]

He named his first one Oscar but bought a real professional figure next and called him Freddy, so I like to think he had good taste in dummies as well as good sense to leave that mirror-work to us wooden types.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy