Charles Mack

Paul Stadelman with his troupe. The bench that carved one of these heads, in 1913, belonged to Charlie Mack. Photo: Ventriloquist Central

Charlie Mack poured drinks for a living and carved figures for love, and for thirty years the trade could never quite decide which one was his real job. He was Theodore Mack's son, the second generation on a Chicago bench that had already built The Great Lester's own figure before Charlie ever picked up a chisel.^[1] Pull up a chair. This is his half of the family story.

The moving spirit, between shifts

Charles O. Mack was born August 30, 1872, in Chicago.^[2] By the time the trade got around to writing his obituary, decades of ventriloquists knew him simply as Charlie, the son who worked the family carving bench part time. His real job, the one that paid the bills, was a restaurant he ran with his wife Martha around the corner from the shop, on Harrison Street.^[3][4] A 1960 profile in The Oracle, the ventriloquists' own club magazine, put it plainly: "the son Charlie was the moving spirit in the organization. He devoted his spare time in carving figures when not engaged in the restaurant business, which he operated with his wife."^[4] Carving was the side line. It just happened to be the side line that mattered.

Between the bar and the bench

Here is where Charlie's own apprentice enters the story, and it is a good one. A young man named Ken Spencer had been hanging around the Mack carving department on Saturday afternoons and Sundays, loafing, watching, getting underfoot, until Charlie finally put him to work roughing out hands.^[4] Spencer told the same story from his own side of it decades later: he'd wandered into the back room of what he remembered as the Mack Bros. furniture store, found a man carving what turned out to be a ventriloquist's figure, and was handed a job on the spot.^[5] Spencer kept an old head on his own workbench for the rest of his life, and told visitors it had been "made by a fellow by the name of Charlie Mack," who, as a boy in Chicago, had put him to work carving hands in the shop.^[6] Spencer went on to sever his day job at a motorcycle factory, buy his own tools, and turn professional in 1934 as both a ventriloquist and a figure maker in his own right, working out of Minneapolis.^[4] The same bench that trained Frank Marshall trained him too. Different apprentice, same teacher.

Real orders, under his own name

Charlie's work shows up in the record attached to real customers, not just to "the Mack shop" in general. A 1956 Oracle profile of the vaudeville ventriloquist John Hunniford, who performed as Ramon the Great, credits "the famous figure maker Charlie Mack" with the two figures Hunniford carried through his first fifty-one weeks on the Keith circuit.^[7] And Paul Stadelman's Windy Higgins, one of the better-documented figures in this whole trade, started life in 1913 as a head carved by Charlie Mack for thirty-five dollars. Stadelman built the body himself and installed the handshake movement, then added a rolling eyelid and a cigarette-smoking attachment years later, a figure built up in layers over a working lifetime.^[8] By 1968, in his own sales catalog, Stadelman was still bragging that the original levers and strings were functioning, after an endurance stunt somewhere in his career that ran the jaw more than a million times over seventeen days.^[9] That is a testimonial no advertising copy could improve on: a thirty-five dollar head from 1913 still working fifty-five years later.

The name the newspapers reached for

Charlie McCarthy, Edgar Bergen's partner, came out of the Mack shop. Whose hands actually held the knife is a question this archive's page on Theodore Mack takes on directly, and it deserves to be read there in full.^[1] What belongs here is Charlie's own half of that record, because more than one period source reaches for his given name specifically, not just the family surname.

A Chicago Daily Tribune humor column, reporting on Stadelman, put it in one sentence: "A Chicago wood carver, Charlie Mack, created Lester's dummy, Frank Byron Jr., Bergen's Charlie McCarthy, and Mr. Stadelman's Windy Higgins. On the death of Mr. Mack, Frank Marshall took up the tools."^[9] Stadelman's own 1968 catalog said the same thing in his own voice: "In 1922 Chicago wood carver Charlie Mack created a character to later become famous as Charlie McCarthy... Before that, in 1913 he carved the figure now known as Windy Higgins."^[9] And decades earlier, on May 30, 1937, while Bergen was still a young star giving interviews, The Laredo Times told its readers plainly that "a Chicago craftsman named Charlie Mack (hence Charlie McCarthy) carved him out of white pine."^[10] Add Ken Spencer, who apprenticed at the very bench and was, by his own account, "adamant that Charlie Mack had carved Charlie McCarthy."^[6] Four separate accounts, all reaching for the son's name.

Weigh that against what Edgar Bergen himself put in writing across four decades: never once a first name, only "Mack." That could mean the father just as easily as the son, and it is the father's own page in this archive that carries Bergen's letters in full. There is one more wrinkle worth knowing. A syndicated column that same September said Bergen first called the figure "Charlie Mack" outright, after the brother of the woodcarver, and only switched to "Charlie McCarthy" when someone reminded him about the libel laws.^[11] Whose brother, exactly, the column never said, and nothing else in the record says either.

None of this settles who actually held the knife, and it shouldn't pretend to. The honest version, the one this archive stands behind, is that Charlie McCarthy came out of a father-and-son bench, and the credit belongs to that shop before it belongs to either man by name alone. Ken Spencer's testimony, and the newspapers that reached for "Charlie," are real evidence for the son. They are not a verdict.

The end of the bench

Death came for the Mack shop fast, and Charlie was the last one standing. Louis Mack, another Mack in the trade, died October 12, 1921.^[12] Theodore, in declining health, was placed in a nursing home in January 1922, and by then the puppet work at the bench had already passed mostly to Frank Marshall and a shop mate named Alex Cameron, with Charlie concentrating on the shop's ornamental carving instead.^[3] Theodore died April 25, 1923. Charlie followed him fourteen months later, on June 4, 1924, at about fifty-two.^[2][12] His own son, Daniel, had occasionally worked the bench too, but it was Frank Marshall and Alex Cameron who bought the business outright from Charlie's widow, Martha, and carried the tools forward.^[3]

Ask most people in this trade to name the Mack who mattered, and they'll say Theodore, if they say anyone at all. But it was Charlie who kept the bench running between restaurant shifts, Charlie who put Ken Spencer to work roughing out hands, Charlie whose given name two newspapers, his own biggest customer, and one of his own trainees all reached for when they wanted to put a single man behind Bergen's figure. He never got to be the whole story. He was too much a part of it not to be some of it.

A man who poured drinks all night and roughed out hands all Sunday, and somehow the hands got famous. I'd have settled for good tips.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy