Clinton Detweiler

Clinton and Adelia Detweiler at the Detweiler family reunion, 2010. Via detweilerreunion.blogspot.com.

Every family carries one name that comes up no matter who's talking. In this family, ventriloquism's family, that name is Mr. D. Clinton Detweiler ran Maher Studios for thirty-seven years, longer than Fred and Madeleine Maher ever ran it themselves.^[1] He taught the course, built the figures, printed the catalog, edited the newsletter, and answered his own mail for four decades straight. Half the vents I know learned something from this man, whether they ever shook his hand or not. Pull up a chair. Let me tell you about Clinton.

A Kansas farm kid and a classified ad

He was born December 11, 1936, on a farm in south central Kansas, six days before Edgar Bergen made his first appearance on Rudy Vallee's radio show. Clinton liked to point out, decades later, that a baby born in an isolated Kansas farmhouse that same week would grow up to spend his whole life in the profession Bergen introduced to the country that December.^[2] His parents took a farm one mile east of Harper, Kansas, along Highway 160, when he was in the eighth grade, and that's where he spent his teen years.^[3] His dad had him driving a "tricycle" Farmall tractor in the fields at eight years old, and by his own account he was also "an old cake decorator," the kind of man who still can't walk past a 4-H cake exhibit without stopping.^[4]

He gave his first magic show in the eighth grade, 1949, building the effects himself out of how-to books from the local public library.^[5] A classmate named Leon got him started building models out of toothpicks at Pilot Knob, the one-room Kansas school he attended through seventh grade. "It all began with toothpicks," Clinton wrote years later. "It really did."^[6] Not long after, he found Paul Winchell's book Ventriloquism For Fun and Profit on the library shelf and built his very first figure, a self-made dummy named Woody, straight out of its chapters on construction.^[7] And somewhere in the 1950s he answered one of Maher Studios' small classified ads in Popular Mechanics, the same way half this trade found its way in. Fifteen years before he owned the company, he was already one of its customers.^[8]

He married Adelia in July 1955. They'd met as high school classmates, she from Colorado, he from Kansas, and by twenty-one he was driving a soft-drink delivery route in Wichita with two kids already at home.^[9][10] Ventriloquism hadn't entered his mind yet as something to try himself. The biggest thing on it, he said later, was the wedding.^[9]

Buying the school that made him

Around 1958, having answered that Popular Mechanics ad, Clinton enrolled in the Maher Home Study Course. Fred Maher had died six years before and never met the Kansas kid who'd end up carrying his life's work forward. "I have come to think of Fred Maher as a friend and confidant," Clinton wrote, decades into owning the man's company.^[11] In 1968 he and Adelia moved to Colorado. The business didn't pull them west. They were already there a year later when an ad insert tucked inside the very first issue of Vent-O-Gram he ever received told him the Maher School of Ventriloquism was for sale.^[12]

On August 1, 1969, Clinton and Adelia bought Maher Studios from Madeleine Maher, Fred's widow, who had run it alone for seventeen years.^[13] They had three kids of elementary and middle school age. Their fourth, Dawn, was born that same month. The whole operation moved into their own three-room house, under a thousand square feet: one bedroom wall became the office, the kitchen table became the packing department, and an aging single-car garage with its back wall coming off the foundation became the shop.^[13] That same year Clinton made a trip to Detroit just to study painting technique at Madeleine's side, because she was the one who had first taught him how to paint a figure.^[14]

From 1969 to 1973 it ran as a family production line. Adelia made the arms and legs, lined every body, dressed and wigged every figure they produced. Their son Kevin built the bodies. Clinton sculpted the heads and hands out of wood dough himself and did all the mechanics and the painting. Between the three of them they built around 350 figures in four years, out of a garage, evenings and weekends, while Clinton still held an outside job during the day.^[15] That's not a company's origin story. That's a family that decided to work together and figured out the rest as they went.

The teacher's trade

The course itself needed work the day they bought it. Mrs. Maher's figure-building lesson had shipped for years as a mimeographed set of plans that Clinton, a former student himself, knew were "less than adequate." In 1975 he rewrote Lesson 18 from the ground up, with photographs and illustrations showing a beginner how to build a full-size figure with ordinary household tools. That edition ran until the day Maher Studios closed.^[16] By the 1980s he was running the whole catalog off his own in-house offset press, learning the trade as he went and printing far more paper than any outside shop would ever have let him afford.^[17] He wrote two books under his own name, Ventriloquism Revealed and later Ventriloquism In A Nutshell, and for years he tucked a copy inside the box with every figure he built. Nobody who bought a Detweiler figure ever went home without instruction.^[18]

Ask Clinton what ventriloquism actually was and he'd hand it to you in one sentence: move the puppet like it's alive, make it seem to be talking while you supply the words, and make it seem like you're not talking at all. Manipulation first, the illusion of speech second, concealment of the operator dead last.^[19] And he never once pretended a good head carved the whole act. "Personality and character give a figure its greatest appeal, and that's up to the ventriloquist," he wrote. "I can make a figure look good, but that's only part of the picture. After all, a figure's good looks are only a layer of paint deep."^[20]

On top of everything he built new, Clinton repaired and repainted several hundred figures a year, every year, for decades.^[21] Do that arithmetic and you land somewhere uncomfortable for anybody chasing a clean provenance: a very large share of the American vent figures still circulating today, whatever name is stamped inside the head, carry a Detweiler repaint or a Detweiler repair nobody wrote down. He also served a term as President of the North American Association of Ventriloquists, the membership body Maher Studios published under.^[22] Different hat, same desk.

Mr. D of the dummy dungeon

He came aboard Newsy Vents in 1969, the same year he bought the company, and kept a hand on it for the rest of his working life.^[23] In 1982 the Fellowship of Christian Magicians named him Outstanding Vent of the Year.^[24] The next year, the International Ventriloquist Convention gave him the bigger prize: Ventriloquist of the Year, 1983, "for his outstanding contribution to the art of ventriloquism."^[25]

In 1992 the Rocky Mountain News sent reporter Patti Thorn out to the Littleton office to see what a mail-order ventriloquism company actually looked like from the inside. She called the piece "A dummy corporation," and she wasn't exaggerating: "the inhabitants are the boss' puppets. Literally." Clinton gave her the line that ought to be carved somewhere: "I say dummy around here is an affectionate term, unless you're saying it to me."^[26] The photographer shot him at his workbench, heads lined up on the counter waiting on a face-lift, in the room the family and half the trade called the dummy dungeon.^[27] The article called Maher Studios "a local mom and pop venture that services ventriloquists around the world," a right-hand man for anywhere from $79.95 to $1,700, backed by 135 booklets and a correspondence course with a lifetime of support behind it.^[26] That was the whole business in one sentence: small, personal, and shipping to five continents out of a workshop Clinton once said he could stand in the middle of and touch all four walls.

The Year of Maher

By 2013 the Vent Haven ConVENTion had decided to spend the whole year celebrating Maher Studios, and they called it exactly that: the Year of Maher, honoring Clinton and Adelia both. It had been a husband-and-wife business from the morning they signed for it, and the convention finally said so out loud.^[28] Clinton spent the first weeks of January writing new-year posts and promising his readers he'd finally sit down and write the real memoir: the Madeleine Maher correspondence, the whole forty-plus years, all of it.^[28] He never got the chance. On January 22, 2013, six days into that anniversary year, Clinton Detweiler died suddenly of a heart attack.^[29][30] Three days before, he'd been at Wal-Mart buying a circle cutter to mount coins. Six days before, he was hand-assembling five Maher Courses at his kitchen table, the same table he'd worked at forty-three years earlier when the whole thing began. "I guess we've come full circle," he wrote, two days before he died.^[31]

Terry Fator, the highest-earning ventriloquist alive, posted a public tribute the same week the news broke.^[32] Within a few years Fator was funding the Clinton Detweiler Scholarship, an annual prize that sends a beginner to the Vent Haven ConVENTion with an online course and a puppet thrown in, judged by video entry.^[33][34] That's the exact currency Clinton spent his whole life selling: a convention ticket, an education, and a figure. His son Kevin went on building figures of his own. His daughter Joy and her husband Dale Scheuerman had already taken over daily operations back in 2003, with Clinton and Adelia staying on in support, and it was Joy who ran Maher Studios through its final years before the family closed it in 2006 and Joy who posted the news of her father's death.^[35][36] The Kansas kid who answered a classified ad ended up being the ad, for everybody who came after him.

The circle

The catalog

"Clinton & Adelia Detweiler, Directors." Puppets, Dummies, & More, mailed out of P.O. Box 420, Littleton, Colorado, for thirty-seven years.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

Mr. D

Clinton in the early Maher years, the studio portrait the trade used to remember him by when the news came in January 2013.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

Adelia

The other half of the business. She made the arms, the legs, the linings, the wigs, and the clothes on every figure the family built for over three decades.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

The scholarship

Terry Fator announcing the Clinton Detweiler Scholarship: a convention ticket, an online course, and a puppet, still going to a beginner every year in his name.

Photo via Cybervent

Every trade needs somebody willing to run the mail-order counter nobody else wants, and do it so well and so long that the whole art gets measured against him. Clinton Detweiler was that man for us. Not the name on a marquee. The name that comes up anyway, every single time, no matter who you ask.

Thirty-seven years running the place he answered a classified ad to join. Somewhere Woody the toothpick dummy is taking full credit.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy