Erich Everty

He was fifty five years old when he died. Or maybe fifty. His own trade paper couldn't settle the question, and it took three tries to try. Two separate notices in the same publication, one right after his death and one months later at year's end, both said fifty five. A third, the full obituary in between, said fifty.^[1][3][2] What the record does settle is this: on the night of January 26, 1958, Erich Everty had a heart attack on stage at the Cabaret "von der Tann" in Regensburg, Germany, and he never got to take his bow.^[1] Pull up a chair. It is a short record, but it earns every line.

A trade passed down

Erich's father was a ventriloquist before him, and Erich followed him into it.^[2] He built his own act around two figures: Felix, a full size character, and Roland, a small one, and from sometime in the early 1920s on he carried the pair across Europe, in his union's words entertaining "millions of people."^[2] Somewhere in there he added a bit of his own. In 1923 he started folding a doll into a trunk about twenty inches long, legs dangling out over the side, and had the doll complain in a running gag: "the box is too small." He said, in his own union's write up, that he had never seen anyone do the bit before he did. By 1933, other ventriloquists were doing it too.^[2] That is how a good bit works. Once it is out of the box, everybody wants to borrow it.

A knife, a fire, and a figure named Ruland

Somewhere in the war years, Everty became a prisoner in Russian captivity.^[4][5] Felix and Roland were not with him. So he made a new face: whittled out of a piece of firewood with a primitive knife, tar pressed into the wood for eyes, a body built out of paper because there was no cloth to spare. He called the head Ruland, and he used it to entertain thousands of fellow prisoners stuck in the same camp.^[4] When he got his career back after the war, he did not keep it. In 1949, the same year he joined the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists as member No. 567, he gave Ruland to the Vent Haven Museum.^[4][5] A fire log, a pocketknife, and a scrap of paper: it is one of the strangest and most complete objects the museum holds, and its whole provenance sits in one sentence of a 1958 obituary. The story surfaced again more than sixty years later in a magazine feature on the museum, told exactly the same way.^[8]

Bergen's verdict

The war reshaped his career more than it ended it. In 1945 he was performing in English for American and British soldiers stationed in Germany.^[2] By the early 1950s the trade paper described him as the first ventriloquist to get a chance on German television, discovered doing a dialogue routine with his figures in a cabaret in Cologne and handed a contract on the spot.^[6] And in 1948, in the middle of all that, Edgar Bergen caught his act. Bergen did not hand out that kind of praise for free. His union's own telling of it has him saying it straight to Everty's face: "Everty, you are the best ventriloquist I have seen for a long time."^[2] That is the man behind Charlie McCarthy, one of the biggest names American ventriloquism ever produced, saying that to a German performer he had just met.

The last bow

By August 1953 the IBV's own worldwide directory had him filed under Germany, at an address in Hannover-Limmer.^[7] He never went far from it. When he died on that Regensburg stage in January 1958, his burial was held from that same home.^[1] A fellow member, Erich Fischer-Carro of Hannover-Linden, reported the death to the union so the rest of the family would know.^[1] He left a wife, Mrs. Mast Everty, a daughter, Mara, and a son, Lothar.^[2]

Everty proved the same point twice in one lifetime: once with a knife and a fire log in a prison camp, and once on a nightclub floor the night his heart gave out. A ventriloquist's whole job is making somebody else's voice matter more than his own. Erich Everty did that with everything he had, right up to the last second he had it.

Felix and Roland got the billing, but Ruland was carved from firewood and tar just to keep men laughing in a prison camp, and that is the figure I'd have wanted on my knee. The box was too small in 1923 and by his last curtain in Regensburg, so was the world's patience for letting a good man rest.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy