Bob Isaacson

Bob performing his own carved Charlie McCarthy figure. Photo via Ventriloquist Central.

Ask five different vents to describe Bob Isaacson and you will get five different jobs: ventriloquist, figure maker, repairman, historian, teacher. Ask a sixth person and you will get a sixth job. That is not confusion. That is just how much one man packed into sixty years in this trade, and he gave away nearly all of it for free, because he loved the art more than he needed the credit. Pull up a chair. Let me tell you about Bob.

A library book and a television set

Bob taught himself ventriloquism from library books at fourteen years old, after watching Paul Winchell on television, and it was not long before he met a real Chicago vent, Paul Stadelman, in person.^[2] His first figure was a Turner, bought through Abbott's Magic Company. Then, still in high school, he saved up and bought a figure directly from Frank Marshall himself, paying on installments.^[2] That purchase put him inside Marshall's working life, not as a later collector reading about the man, but as an actual customer standing in the shop.

In the early 1960s Bob worked corporate functions, banquets, and shows under a stage name, Robert Royal, and he had two others besides: Bobby Wayne and Bob I.^[3] He also made a run of educational training films with his figures playing the student instead of the teacher. In 1966, thirty-one years old, he stood in front of a camera with his Frank Marshall figure Speedy Wheeler and made one of those films for a natural-gas utility, teaching safety instead of jokes.^[18] In the 1970s he toured with a big magic and illusion show called International Startime, and in later years he performed old-time-radio recreations, playing Bergen, Charlie McCarthy, and Mortimer Snerd himself, including a long run of shows at Chicago's Museum of Broadcast Communications.^[2][19] Sometime in the mid-1990s, the trade voted him Ventriloquist of the Year.^[2] He never once had an agent. Sixty years of bookings, all by word of mouth.^[19]

The shop history nobody else wrote

Frank Marshall died in 1969, and what was left of his shop passed through his sister Mae to a young figure builder named Brian Hamilton, and from Hamilton's hands it eventually reached Bob.^[6] Bob is the earliest surviving link after Hamilton in that chain, and for years he was one of the only people alive who had actually watched Frank Marshall carve.

He knew Marshall personally for two decades, and he is the source of the hard numbers this hobby now uses to talk about how fast Marshall worked. "Even when Frank was under the weather, way back in '62, he took three months," Bob wrote. A backup figure he ordered later, paid in advance right after a TV appearance, took two months instead. "If you paid Frank right up front for the total cost, you could have the figure in a very short time."^[5] That kind of detail does not come from an auction catalog. It comes from a man who stood at the counter and waited his turn.

Bob eventually wrote the research article this hobby leans on for Marshall's own history, illustrated with Marshall's business card, two of his brochures, a photograph of Marshall with W.S. Berger, and a full sequence of photographs showing a figure being carved from a raw block to a finished, painted face.^[4] Marshall had a way of finishing a figure's cheeks and nose that collectors came to call his stage orange, and by most accounts nobody else could match it. Dan Willinger, who runs Ventriloquist Central, watched Bob strip down a poorly restored Marshall and repaint it that same way. His verdict: Bob really knows the technique, and is a true master of it.^[7] That is not a skill you pick up from photographs. That is a skill somebody teaches you, hands on, and Frank Marshall was not around anymore to do the teaching.

A maker in his own right

Bob did not only collect Marshall's work and repair other people's figures. He built his own. In 1962 he carved Orville Sweet, which he later donated to Vent Haven Museum in 2005.^[3] In the early 1980s he built Mr. Crabbe, and like most figures in this trade, it took more than one set of hands: John Arvites cast the head, Alan Semok built the mechanics, and Bob did the finish carving, the painting, the wig, and the body.^[11] The face he finished is unlike almost everything else that collectors chase. Most figures in this hobby are boys, cheeky youths, or caricatures. Mr. Crabbe is a portrait of an old man: bald on top with gray hair at the sides, heavy gray eyebrows, a full gray mustache, deep lines across the forehead. Bob built old age on purpose, and there is barely another figure like it.

In 1983, wanting a Charlie McCarthy of his own, Bob started collecting every photograph of the real Charlie he could find at collectible shows, from as many angles as he could get. That is how he discovered something worth writing down: there was not one Charlie face. There were several, with small differences from year to year and copy to copy. It took him about two years of spare time, carving in basswood, to settle on a face that averaged all of them into one.^[12] He carved his own Mortimer Snerd too, and said it came easier, because Mortimer's features were so exaggerated there was less room for a carver's hand to wander.^[14]

When Willinger later bought that Charlie for the Ventriloquist Central Collection, Bob explained the matching Mortimer had to stay home a while longer. One of his sons loved it too much to give up. Bob had no argument. Family comes first. So he built his son a second Mortimer, and once his son agreed the historical pair belonged together, the original Mortimer followed Charlie into the collection after all.^[13]

Mortimer Snerd

Bob's own carved Mortimer, built easier than his Charlie because Mortimer's exaggerated features left less room for the carver's hand to wander.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

Mr. Crabbe

Head cast by John Arvites, mechanics by Alan Semok, finish carving and paint by Bob. A portrait of old age in a hobby full of boys and cheeky youths.

Photo via WorthPoint

The repairman at Northwestern

In 1982 Bob got the strangest repair job of his career. An ABC television special had used the actual fiberglass Charlie McCarthy that Edgar Bergen worked with for years, and the figure came back with a cracked finger. Frances Bergen had loaned that Charlie, along with an original Mortimer Snerd and Effie Klinker, to Edgar's alma mater, Northwestern University, for a display that was being planned. Because the figure carried a large insurance policy, it could not leave the building, so Bob went to Northwestern and did the repair on-site: the hands were solid fiberglass resin, too brittle to drill, so he made a new pair, matched the old paint, and fitted them to the actual Charlie McCarthy right there.^[14] He asked to see Mortimer and Effie Klinker while he was there and was told they could not be taken from the vault. He checked back with the university for years, waiting on that display. It never happened.^[14]

Teaching the next generation

Bob gave this art away every chance he got. Starting in 2003 he taught a free beginner's ventriloquism class at the Vent Haven ConVENTion, open to anyone whether they already did the art or not: how to breathe for it, where to put your voice and tongue, how to project. Mark Wade brought him in because the family wanted to keep growing, not just gathering.^[15] Candice Bergen sat in on that same class the following year.^[15] For years Bob was the permanent emcee of the Junior Open Mic, the spot at every ConVENTion where the newest, youngest performers get up and try it in front of a room, and he was always quick with an encouraging word for a nervous newcomer.^[1]

Sometime around 2003 he also took on a young collector named Dan Willinger, and the mentorship stuck. Over a decade later Willinger was still calling him with every question he had about an old figure, and Bob still had the answer.^[17] Bob was also a sharp-eyed observer of the craft itself: he was the one who first pointed out that Jimmy Nelson almost never moved Danny O'Day's eyes side to side, turning the figure's whole head instead, so smoothly that most audiences never caught it.^[16]

The clearest proof of what Bob noticed came in 2011, when Vent Haven threw a seventy-year career celebration for Jimmy Nelson. Bob decided an unnamed 1940s Marshall figure from his own collection deserved a part in it. He named the figure Donny O'Day, Danny O'Day's first cousin, and spent three months writing and rewriting a tribute routine, working the same falsetto voice Nelson used for the real Danny, right down to that same still head and moving eyes trick he'd studied for years. At the end of the routine, Bob had Nelson come up on stage, and Donny O'Day handed him a wristwatch.^[8] Three months of rehearsal for a three-minute bit, because honoring somebody the right way takes real work, not just good intentions.

Closing night

Bob closed the ConVENTion's Saturday-night mainstage show in July 2012 with Speedy Wheeler, his longtime Frank Marshall figure, on stage in front of more than 600 people. Willinger reviewed the set that same month: Frank's creation still showed incredibly well on the stage that night.^[9] I have him on my own list of ConVENTion performers I've tracked over the years: Bob Isaacson, 2012, Saturday night.^[10]

Bob Isaacson died December 29, 2017, at eighty-three years old, after forty-three years on the Vent Haven Museum's Board of Advisors, a seat he had held since 1974.^[1] The following year's special exhibit, in the Jimmy Nelson building, was a tribute to him.^[1] A man who spent sixty years learning and writing down everybody else's history in this art finally became part of it himself.

Three stage names, five job titles, and not one agent in sixty years. Bob, some of us wooden folk just wanted someone that organized fixing our jaws.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy