Bob Bradford

Great Lester did not hand out praise for free. In his last column before he died in July of 1956, the man who trained Edgar Bergen straight out of high school wrote that Bob Bradford was "the next best Vent to see… He does stunts that other vents know nothing about."^[1] Six days later Lester was dead, and that sentence was one of the last things he ever put into print about anybody. Bradford had every reason to become a name people in this trade still traded stories about. Instead he walked away from all of it on purpose, and for the better part of four decades almost nobody in the vent world knew where he had gone. Pull up a chair. Here is what it took to find him.

One of Lester's own

Lester ran his teaching out of an apartment above a hardware store on Hollywood Boulevard through the mid-1950s, the same kind of one-on-one studio work where his "most famous student," Edgar Bergen, had trained back in 1922.^[2] A Spokane teenager named Larry Klock spent two summers up there, parked in a nearby motel with his parents while Lester drilled him on distant voice and taped every lesson to reel-to-reel. Klock remembered exactly who else was in the room: a fellow student named Stuart Scott, headed for a Las Vegas career of his own, and Bob Bradford, already working as a professional ventriloquist.^[3] Lester did not throw that kind of company around loosely. By January of 1953 he was naming Bradford, in print, in the same breath as Bergen, Neller, Fred Russell, Paul Winchell, Jimmy Nelson, and Senor Wences, as one of the vents who never copied anybody else's material.^[4] By that July he had Bradford on a shorter list still, one of the ones coming up fast behind Wences, Winchell, and Nelson.^[5] Years later, a teenager Bradford had mentored in Portland got Lester's verdict on him secondhand and never forgot it: "The Great Lester told me that Bob was one of the best ventriloquists he ever coached."^[6]

Jiggers Johnson takes the road

Bradford's own figure was named Jiggers Johnson, and by the 1950s he was traveling with a whole cast alongside him: Leo the Lion, Alfred the Dragon, Snooky Snitzel, Whiskers the Wabbit.^[7] In the summer of 1953 he motored out to Vent Haven with his wife and gave the museum a demonstration of near and distant voice with two of his figures, then kept driving, out to a boys' reform school in Chillicothe, Ohio, to preach and put on his act for kids nobody else was performing for.^[5] That September the Oracle had him working the Society of American Magicians and International Brotherhood of Magicians circuits, playing dates all over the country in a new car he had earned doing it.^[8] By 1956 he had made national television, on the CBS network show Panorama Pacific.^[9] He even cut a record of some of it: an LP called Walking With Jiggers, on his own label, Jiggers Story Hour.^[7] A working vent, by any measure of the word, at the exact moment Lester was telling his readers to go see him.

The kid in Portland

In 1954, Bradford played a Youth for Christ rally in Portland, Oregon, and a thirteen-year-old in the crowd named Dave Miller had just started teaching himself ventriloquism out of whatever scraps of information he could find, which in Portland in 1954 was not much.^[6] Bradford brought out Jiggers Johnson and had him play a trumpet with no facial movement at all, then shut the trumpet back in its case and kept the sound fading out after the lid closed. After the show, Miller's own classmates gave him away as a fellow vent. Bradford could have shaken the kid's hand and moved on. Instead he spent real time with him, telling him about the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists, about W.S. Berger, about Lester himself, the kind of information a Portland teenager in 1954 had almost no way to get on his own.^[6] Then Bradford put the kid on stage. At the big Saturday Youth for Christ show at the Portland Civic Auditorium, in front of a crowd of more than three thousand, the largest room Portland had, Bradford wrote Miller's jokes, coached his timing, and built him a routine: Miller mouthing the spiritual "He's the Lily of the Valley" while Bradford supplied the voice, letting it fade as Miller walked off, then swelling back up as Bradford brought Jiggers out of the trunk to finish it. Bradford called the kid back out to share the bow.^[6]

That kid grew up to become the man who drew nearly every piece of art this hobby produced for the next forty years, and never charged a cent for it. Dave Miller's "Ventoons" ran in Newsy Vents for more than thirty years unpaid, he designed the NAAV's own silhouette logo, and he later designed the National Ventriloquist Hall of Fame's coin series.^[10] None of that shows up on a marquee either. It is exactly the kind of unpaid, decades-long generosity Bradford showed him first, for free, in one afternoon in Portland.

The gospel road

Bradford became a Christian in 1951, and from then on the ministry mattered more to him than the marquee.^[11] By his own count he logged more than a million miles and performed for over 15,000 groups, on radio and television both, carrying Jiggers Johnson and the rest of the cast into churches and youth rallies instead of nightclubs.^[11] Lester noticed. Bradford remembered his old teacher's brief disappointment when he gave up show business for it.^[11] It did not change his mind.

His closest friend in the trade was a fellow vent named Bob Fillman. It was Fillman who tracked down Bradford's address for the writer David Erskine at the 35th Annual T.A.O.M. convention in 1980, telling him exactly that. Fillman never got to make the introduction himself. He died at El Paso after a fight with Hodgkin's disease before Erskine ever made it out to see Bradford, and the Bradfords drove from Anaheim to sit with their friend in the hospital in his last days.^[11] Erskine finally met Bradford once, in person, in August of 1981, in Anaheim. It was the only time the two men ever spoke face to face.^[11]

Found, fifteen years later

Bradford died in 1984. For the next fifteen years he was, to most of the vent world, simply gone. Erskine kept looking anyway: public library phone directories first, then the internet, right up until the week of the 1999 Vegas convention.^[11]

He never had to make the call himself. At a dealer's table on the convention floor, a woman recognized some of Bradford's old Great Lester items and left a note and a business card behind for the stranger who had been asking after her father. Her name was Debbie Bradford Gaccetta. Her father, she wrote, had passed away in 1984 at the age of fifty-three, in a Los Angeles hospital: his hospitalization was routine until, unexpectedly, he died.^[11] She told Erskine why it mattered that somebody was finally asking. Bob was one of Great Lester's most talented protégés, in her words, and he later had almost no contact with vents at all. He was remembered for his amazing voices and his showmanship, and he was a man of faith who chose to share the gospel rather than extend a blossoming show business career.^[11]

Fifteen years of silence, closed by a note on a dealer's table. That is how this art holds onto its own, even the ones who walk away from it on purpose.

Great Lester called him one of the best he ever coached, then never got to say another word in print, and Bradford took that compliment and Jiggers Johnson both off to the reform schools where nobody was keeping score. Took his own daughter fifteen years to find the folks who remembered. We remember him now, splinters and all.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy