Bob Munstedt

Most performers only get to brag about the night a big star watched their act. Bob Munstedt got to keep the receipt. Somewhere in New Guinea in 1944 he marked an actual X on his own suitcase, right where Bob Hope had parked himself to watch the show, then lettered the words onto his puppet's trunk so it would never wash off.^[1] That puppet was Alex Smallwood, "The Smart Dummy," and the man working him billed himself as "Mr. Bob."^[1] Pull up a chair. This one runs from a Swiss village to a war zone to the White House.

A puppeteer at eleven

Munstedt was born in Switzerland and started his career as a puppeteer at age eleven, near Bern. He immigrated to the United States at thirteen.^[1] Neither the corpus nor this search turns up his birth year, so none gets printed here. What we do know is the year he became a ventriloquist instead of just a puppeteer: early 1939, when he found a "beautifully hand-carved puppet" and paid $25 for it. "A large sum for me in those days," he said, looking back on it decades later.^[1] He named the puppet Alex Smallwood, and when the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists got around to registering him in its directory, Alex came in at BVD No. 5, low enough to place him among the very first figures ever entered in the ledger.^[5]

Alex goes to the Pacific

When the war came, Munstedt served in the Air Corps' Special Service, attached to the 312th Bomb Group, for forty-four months across the United States, Australia, New Guinea, and the Philippines. He carried his barracks bag and his rifle. He also carried his accordion and Alex Smallwood.^[2] He entertained everyone from privates to generals in hospitals, on shipboard, and in service clubs, and the trade paper covering it put it best: Alex had "the distinction of having insulted generals... with immunity."^[2]

In New Guinea he caught a stop of the Bob Hope Show, with Frances Langford and Jerry Colonna, at Hollandia, and ended up performing right alongside them.^[1][2] Hope watched from the side, laughed, then leaned in and spoke straight to the puppet, with Munstedt standing right there.

That Christmas, an ocean away, the Oracle's editor C. O. Montgomery was dug in at Le Mans, France, fifteen kilometers from a Paris that looked as good as lost. A Christmas card arrived from the Pacific: Bob and Alex, entertaining New Guineans. "I thought: if Bob Munstedt can stand the Pacific, I can take it here," Montgomery wrote years afterward. "And I did." The Oracle put that same card on its own cover a decade later.^[2]

Ranch Boss and the Bunker Hillbillies

Home from the war, Munstedt built a second act that had nothing to do with a stage curtain. He coached dramatic groups and puppeteers for the Boys' Clubs of Boston, did their cartooning and publicity, and around 1944 founded a kids' band called the Bunker Hillbillies, built on songs he wrote himself. He was still directing them a decade later.^[2] The archive that now holds the group's programs, scores, correspondence, and photographs at Northeastern University catalogs its run from 1940 all the way to 1995.^[7] To those kids he wasn't Mr. Bob. He was Ranch Boss.^[8][9]

The Hillbillies weren't a backyard operation. On December 1, 1969, Ranch Boss brought the whole group to the White House, where President Nixon sat down at the piano and played for them.^[8] Around the same years, he and Alex kept working Boston's airwaves the way they always had: the very first telecast out of a Boston television station, spots on Uncle Carl DeSuze's Surprise Package and Big Brother Bob Emery's programs, and fifteen weeks of Alex's own show, Westy's House.^[2] He also turned up in three 20th Century Fox comedy shorts, though the trade paper needed a follow-up issue to get the titles straight: "Ham and Eggs," "Sweeties," and "Bashful Buckaroo." "Excuse the inadvertence, Bob."^[4][2]

A diversity of talents

By the mid-1950s he was working out of West Roxbury, "a veteran Vent of many years' experience" on stage, radio, and television, playing variety for children and adults alike.^[3] The Boston Daily Globe, writing him up in January 1959, called it a "diversity of talents": accomplished pianist and accordionist, maker of movie shorts, songwriter, cartoonist, puppeteer.^[5] The following year found him "very busy" playing summer dates, lodges, and fairs throughout New England.^[6]

Robert A. Munstedt died in Norwood, Massachusetts, on Saturday, January 9, 1999, of congestive heart failure.^[1] Alex Smallwood, the puppet he'd bought for $25 as a young man and carried through a war, was still with him at the end, the same name printed right alongside his in the notice.