Bill Hume

Bill and Rosita, the partner he carved out of salvaged wood in three weeks. Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog.

Picture the problem first. The year is 1943. You are stationed at the Coco Solo Naval Base in the Panama Canal Zone, a USO talent tryout is a few weeks off, and you are a ventriloquist with no dummy: your figures are a thousand miles away in Missouri, and there is no time to send for one.^[1] So you build one, out of whatever wood a shipmate can scrounge for you, in three weeks flat.^[2] That is exactly what Bill Hume did, and the figure he built to survive a jungle gun post ended up surviving him too: donated to a museum in 1992, seventeen years before he died.^[3] Pull up a chair. This one is a maker's story and a performer's story at the same time, because with Bill Hume you never get to pick just one.

A head start on everything

Bill Hume was born William Stanton Hume on March 16, 1916, near Hinton, Missouri, and the man got a head start on nearly everything he tried.^[3] He graduated Searcy Elementary at ten years old and Hickman High School in 1931 at fifteen.^[3] He worked as a stage magician all through high school and into the University of Missouri, where he earned a degree in journalism in 1936.^[3] The next year, one of his own one-act plays, called "The Oracle," was judged one of the thirteen best one-act plays written in the country that year.^[3] From there he went to Stephens College, where the actress Maude Adams, who had introduced Peter Pan to the American stage back in 1905, put him in charge of costume and scenery design for her productions.^[3] Commercial artist, playwright, magician, set designer, all before he ever built a ventriloquist figure of his own for the world to see. Ventriloquism was already in him too. He had built his first dummy at thirteen and four more after that, years before the Navy ever heard of Rosita.^[4]

Three weeks, no shop, no springs

The Navy had other plans for him at first. Bill wanted to be a sonar technician, but "tonal difficulties" and a lost set of paperwork ended that, and he became a damage control painter first class instead, stationed at Coco Solo.^[3] He revived his art there anyway, working as a ventriloquist and a cartoonist, running USO shows and writing for Stars and Stripes.^[3] Then came the tryout with no dummy. A shipmate procured him some balsa wood, salvaged, by one telling, from a torpedoed cargo ship, and Bill built Rosita himself in three weeks flat, just in time to audition.^[2][4] He built in a design philosophy of his own that he liked to call "loose mechanics": no springs anywhere in her, nothing that could wear out or need replacing a thousand miles from the nearest repair bench.^[4] Rosita herself carried the idea further: no springs, no cords anywhere, a mouth that opened on a lever and closed on a lead weight, and a head built so it could not come loose from the body.^[1] She traveled, at first, in a parachute bag.^[2]

The Panamanian beauty with the sharp tongue

Rosita's costume, a theatrical cabaret number, came from a retired teacher living in Bogotá, Colombia, a woman Bill knew only as Mrs. Robinson.^[2] And when the American troops who made up most of Bill's audience got transferred out, leaving him with a mostly Spanish-speaking crowd, a Miss Lizardi of Puerto Rico translated his whole routine into Spanish so the act could keep running.^[2] Rosita worked in both languages after that, and picked up a reputation among servicemen for an exceptionally sharp tongue.^[4] The way Ray Roseberry told it in a 1948 Grapevine News profile, retelling an item that had run in Yank, the Army's own weekly, a correspondent wandered into a Panamanian night spot and overheard Bill and Rosita mid-routine: a sailor asked her if she had ever been to the United States, and she shot back, "I was made in Panama." "You mean you were born in Panama," the sailor corrected. "Brother, you don't know Panama," Rosita cracked, and kept needling him for ten straight minutes until he finally got up and carried her out under one arm while the whole room cheered.^[4] Somewhere in there the act picked up a tagline, printed in Yank itself: "the Navy's most-talented service man."^[3][5] When Bill left the military in 1945, Rosita came home with him.^[3] Her first civilian performance was the 1947 Boone County Fair, where Bill happened to be running the entertainment division that year.^[3] That same November, he married Mary Mason Clark.^[3][5]

The cartoonist's second act

The Navy called him back in 1951, for the Korean-era buildup, and stationed him at Yokosuka, Japan, a petty officer with Fleet Airforce Service Squadron 120, editing the base paper, The Oppaman.^[5] There, with a writer named John Annarino supplying the dialogue, Bill created Babysan, a cartoon about a sharp, stylish Japanese girl and the American sailors circling her, and it ran in Stars and Stripes and Yank and turned into one of four books he eventually published about military life in occupied Japan.^[3][5] By January 1953 the IBV's own bulletin, The Oracle, had him back home in Columbia, Missouri, released from the Japan assignment and finishing that Babysan collection for a spring release. He had also built a new figure in the meantime, a farmer boy named Orville, "not the hick type," he was careful to specify, and Orville was already competing with Rosita for stage time.^[6] But the second tour had changed something. Bill and Rosita tried the act again a few times after he got back from Japan, and it did not take. In the letter he sent along with his 1992 donation to Vent Haven, he put it plainly: "After returning to the States from Japan, Rosita and I did try the act again a few times. It just did not work. Thirty-nine years ago Rosita retired to her case."^[2] The cartoonist career, meanwhile, kept building. At the Missouri Farmers Association, later Shelter Insurance, Bill was among the first admen in the country to use animation to sell insurance, on a stand he designed and built himself with a photographer named Andy Tau, and his traffic safety film "Fair Game" won a 1964 Best-in-Class Award from Industrial Photography Magazine.^[3][5]

Babysan

The cartoon collection Bill built out of his Yokosuka posting, with John Annarino writing the dialogue. It carried his name in a lot more houses than the ventriloquism ever did.

Photo via Find a Grave, contributed by THR

Building Two

Rosita went into Vent Haven Museum's collection in 1992, Bill's own gift, and she is on display in Building Two.^[2] Bill Hume died on June 27, 2009, at the Bluffs care facility in Columbia, Missouri, at ninety-three.^[3][7] His friend Gene Baumann broke the news to the community: Bill had just come back from lunch and lay down for a nap, and that was that. "His life was long," Gene wrote, "and he set a standard for creativity that few could match."^[7] Sculptor, artist, actor, playwright, ventriloquist, author, clown, newspaper man, photographer, animator, art director, cartoonist: that is the obituary's own list of what the man was, and every word of it is true.^[3]

Five dummies by thirteen, then one built in three weeks flat with no springs and no cords to snap a thousand miles from the nearest workbench. I've met humans less structurally sound than Rosita.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy