Dick Weston

Eddie O'Connor, Dick Weston's first partner, recast in plaster by Frank Marshall for a remake that never got finished. Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog.

Dick Weston played the Silver Slipper in Las Vegas for a run most acts would kill for, working one show built around two puppets he carved with his own hands. When network television came calling with an audience of millions, he turned it down flat. Here's the part that gets me: Dick Weston wasn't even his real name. He was born Earl Henry Estenson, in Minneapolis, in 1926, and outside this family hardly anybody ever heard the two names in the same sentence.^[1][2] He grew up on the radio, taught himself a trade nobody handed him, and built one of the tightest little rooms the Strip ever booked. Pull up a chair. This one earns it.

A radio, a $35 figure, and a name that wasn't his

As a kid in Minneapolis, Earl Estenson was hooked on singer Nelson Eddy and the Chase and Sanborn Hour, and that's where he first heard Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy work. He enrolled in the mail-order Maher Course of Ventriloquism, and the dog-eared, mimeographed original stayed a treasured possession his whole life.^[3] His first partner, a cowboy figure named Eddie O'Connor, had been carved by the puppeteer Martin Stevens and sold through the Maher shop for $35. It landed in young Earl's lap around 1943, and he took Eddie on the road for school assemblies, fairs, and family shows.^[3][4]

The act grew up with him. As his material got more sophisticated, he moved the show into supper clubs and adult rooms, added a hand-carved old maid named Aunt Martha, and around that same stretch he started billing himself as Dick Weston. The name and the grown-up act arrived together.^[3] Whatever you want to call the man, I'll tell you this: he built the whole thing himself, from the name on down.

Camp Atterbury and the Bergers who adopted him

In 1950 the Army interrupted everything. Weston was drafted and sent to Camp Atterbury, Indiana, sidetracking his career for a stretch, though he still found time to mail a gag line back to The Oracle.^[1] On weekend passes, W.S. Berger and his wife, known to everybody as Muzz, more or less adopted him and gave him the run of Vent Haven. "Muzz Berger fed me real food," Weston said later. "It was hard going back to that Army chow after her delicious chicken and famous porcupine dish."^[5]

That visit to Vent Haven did something to him. From then on he built almost every figure in his own act by hand, the lone exception being Eddie O'Connor, who'd come from Stevens.^[5] He learned the method, plastic wood built up over a carved core, with two named craftsmen, John Shirley and Lemuel Williams, helping him learn to sculpt and cast.^[4] A performer walked into an army buddy's collection and walked out a figure maker. In June of 1951 he represented the whole art of ventriloquism at the Puppeteers of America Festival as Cpl. Dick Weston. The Oracle noted, a little wistfully, that no ventriloquist had appeared on the festival program in years.^[6] He was medically discharged that fall.^[7]

One more Vent Haven memory worth keeping: at a 1950 Trio party there, Weston brought his "inseparable companion" Eddie, dressed him as a cowboy, dressed a fellow vent named Charlie Montgomery up as Annie Oakley for a comic bit, and stayed two extra days because, in the club's own words, he "slept with the dummies so he would not miss anything."^[8] That's not a joke about the man. That's just how much he loved the work.

The distant voice, and watching a trend die

In the May-June 1952 Oracle, Weston wrote an article on the "distant voice," the old thrown-voice trick that used to send a ventriloquist's sound into a suitcase or up into the attic. The editor's note that ran alongside it was blunt: times had changed, small woodenhead figures had taken over, and most vents had settled for "near" ventriloquism. The Great Lester's own warning ran with it too, that trying to master the distant voice without expert instruction could strain the throat. Weston added that he'd never actually met the Great Lester, "a couple thousand miles away" out west, and that he'd been using a tape recorder, walking room to room through his own house, as his own substitute for studying his voice.^[9] He picked up a stray bit of audio science that same year too, watching a Minneapolis Symphony recording session: skip the cheap disc or wire recorders, because only an expensive disc rig comes close to a good tape machine, and the majors record to tape first and press the disc copy after.^[9] A working vent, quietly turning himself into his own sound engineer.

A dozen characters and the fair circuit

By 1949 Weston had built out a small company of characters: Horatio, a slow-talking bear, joined Eddie O'Connor on the bill.^[4] He wrote a "Helpful Reminders" column for The Oracle on how to build and use a gag file, how to buy special material, and how to tailor a routine to the room, quoting Elmer Wheeler's old sales line about selling the sizzle, not just the steak.^[10] He entertained the American Legion in Sioux Falls with Eddie, Aunt Martha, and Horatio, and The Oracle called his cast "outstanding examples of craftsmanship." That same stretch, he was excited about a new convertible Chrysler and the drive it would let him make, finally closing the distance to the Great Lester and meeting the man in person after years of admiring him from afar.^[11]

He worked the fair and supper club circuit hard: entertaining 5th, 6th, and junior-high classes back home in Minneapolis with Aunt Martha and Horatio,^[12] then out to the Kansas City area, playing The Grove in Springfield, Missouri and the Italian Village in Lincoln, Nebraska, with a stop for a late-night miniature convention at his hotel in Kansas City.^[13] A new brochure that year had his three characters riding a freight train on the cover, with Weston himself drawn as the conductor swinging a lantern from the caboose.^[14] On a nine-week swing through the West in 1956 he built two more characters, a blustery politician named Senator Hawkeye from Texas and a pair of Ozark hillbillies, Ma and Pa McGrew, and moved his home base from Minneapolis to Hemet, California.^[15] He played Anchorage, Alaska that stretch too, closing out an engagement at Olivera's Restaurant and Cocktail Lounge,^[16] and kept a small test replica of Horatio around, his own first modeling attempt, before the larger Horatio he used professionally.^[17]

Aunt Martha, Clarence, and the trip to Las Vegas

Aunt Martha, his hand-carved old maid, "singing the old gay '90s songs and wisecracking with customers in supper clubs," came together in 1954. Clarence, an easygoing tramp, followed in 1959, and between the two of them they carried Weston to a legendary Las Vegas career.^[4] Weston opened at the Silver Slipper starting June 1, 1959, his second run at that room; The Oracle noted he'd come a long way since turning up at the 1949 IBV convention in Chicago.^[18] Aunt Martha was the one who landed. "Everyone falls in love with Aunt Martha," the Canadian columnist Haldane wrote that fall, calling Weston "one of the best vents in the business."^[19]

On April 23, 1960, Weston made the front page of the Las Vegas Sun: a photograph of him with Aunt Martha and Clarence turning the hands of a giant clock ahead for Daylight Saving Time. The caption noted that Edgar Bergen, Elvis Presley, Sid Caesar, and Patti Page had all admired his act.^[20] He closed out 22 consecutive weeks at the Silver Slipper that year and moved over to the Hotel Thunderbird, praised in print for his "fresh material, technique, timing and lip control."^[21] Across the decades that followed, the residencies stacked up: 28 months on the Lido Show at the Stardust, 15 months on Hello America and 12 on Pizzazz '70, both at the Desert Inn, and a run in Bravo Vegas at the Imperial Palace in the 1980s.^[4] He opened for Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and Eleanor Powell along the way, and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and HBO's Third Vent Event.^[3]

Weston wrote his own account of that world in 1990, twenty years into living in Vegas by then. He named the small handful of vents who'd worked the town at the same time as him: Stu Scott, Jay Nemeth, Lou Dupont, "and yours truly Dick Weston." Stu and Jay, he noted, had already passed.^[2] He remembered the old showroom rules too: coat and tie required when Bergen and Charlie opened at the Desert Inn, a comedian always the headliner with a singer in support, except for Sinatra, and rooms smaller and friendlier than what came later, when the singers became the stars and it took two names on a marquee to fill a room.^[2]

The trick nobody quite explained

Weston's whole act rested on the two figures he'd carved himself, Clarence and Aunt Martha, and he'd have them conduct clever little debates with each other on stage.^[22] Mark Wade, asked years later, credits him as the vent who likely brought the classic old-man and old-woman character types back into the art, though Wade hedges it honestly: "I think he was."^[23]

There was a trickier bit too: Weston sang in two voices at once. Mark Wade calls it "kind of a fake deal," the same trick Stu Scott used to run, and says flatly, "it is cheating a bit, but it was entertaining." David Malmberg, who was interviewing him, had a different read: it fooled a lot of people.^[23] Nobody in this archive has ever nailed down exactly how he pulled it off, and honestly, maybe that was the whole point.

The room cost him something, too. Weston told Mark Wade directly that the smoke inside those casino showrooms ruined the falsetto voice he used for Aunt Martha, a straight occupational hazard from a career built entirely indoors.^[24] And when television came sniffing around, he turned it down on purpose, and told Wade exactly why: one tight act could run for years in Vegas with just the odd polish, but a single national broadcast burns through it all in one night, in front of an audience big enough that you can never use that material again.^[24] A lot of working vents felt the same way. Not many said no as cleanly as Weston did.

The advice he gave the next generation

David Malmberg's father, a professional musician, worked the fair circuit alongside Weston, and the younger Malmberg started writing to him in the early sixties, by which point Weston was already headlining Vegas. When Malmberg mentioned he was thinking about ordering a figure from Finis, Weston wrote back, "I don't think that's a very good idea." He didn't need to say more than that. He pointed Malmberg instead toward "a very fine figure maker right in Minneapolis" named Ken Spencer, passed along the number himself, and that referral is the reason Spencer got the commission.^[25]

Todd Oliver met Weston at his first convention, back in 1985. "I had a million questions and he was a gentleman," Oliver remembered. Weston's one rule about working a figure has stuck around this family ever since: "Don't overdo it, because it will look phony."^[26] Weston later sold Oliver his own working joke file, choosing to hand it over himself while he was still alive, and told Malmberg, of all the vents he'd known, "for my money, Todd Oliver is the real talent."^[26] A man doesn't say that about a rival. He says it about somebody he's rooting for.

Frank Marshall's unfinished head

Eddie O'Connor, the plastic wood cowboy figure that started the whole career, meant enough to Weston that at some point he brought it to Frank Marshall hoping for a proper remake. Marshall got as far as sculpting a plaster maquette of the face and no further. "I think this was as far as the project went," is how figure historian Dan Willinger put it.^[27] The plaster head survived anyway, donated to the Willinger Collection by Ray Guyll: a Frank Marshall object for a figure Frank Marshall never actually finished building. The same record fills in one more detail: it was Martin Stevens and his wife, Olga, both puppeteers rather than professional figure makers, who first taught the young Weston how to build in plastic wood at all.^[27]

The circle

No performer builds a career alone, even one who built his own puppets. Here's Weston's world:

After Vegas, the paintbrush

Weston retired out of performing and into painting, working in the neo-impressionist, pointillist style he'd first picked up between shows in his own dressing room.^[3] One of his paintings had already made its way onto the vent world's own bookshelf: the cover of a 1979 collector's-edition Newsy Vents devoted to Edgar Bergen's memory, a colorful portrait of Bergen and Charlie McCarthy that Maher Studios was still mailing out to members, free of charge, nearly two decades later.^[3] A posthumous exhibition, "The Puppets and Pointillism of Dick Weston," opened at the Las Vegas Art Museum in 1997, including a self-portrait alongside that same Bergen and McCarthy piece.^[3][4] The community remembered him, too: in 2016, Cybervent put his name on its own tentative sixteen-name list for a set of Legends Collectors Cards.^[28]

Weston wrote his own closing line back in September 1990, after describing a musicians' strike and hotel executives who'd rather run tape than pay a band: "Maybe one day a new vent will appear on the horizon and cause as much excitement, become a household name, loved and adored by the general public as Bergen and McCarthy were in the glamour period of the thirties and forties. But I doubt it. We all can hope though, can't we?"^[2] Early in 1997, Newsy Vents carried the news the family had been dreading: "The world of ventriloquism lost a friend recently with the sudden passing of Dick Weston."^[3]

Eddie O'Connor cost thirty five dollars mail order and taught a Minneapolis kid the whole trade before Earl Estenson ever borrowed the name Dick Weston. Funny how the wooden ones keep getting there first.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy