Finis Robinson

"Archie & Finis," from a Finis & Co. catalog page. Photo: Dan G., via Find A Grave

Pull up a chair, because I want to introduce you to a man who put a pronunciation guide on his own name. His letterhead read FINIS Robinson, and right underneath it, in parentheses: (FINE-US). Under that: "The End of Gloom." That was not a slogan somebody handed him. That was a fully believed philosophy, printed on stationery and mailed out of Waterloo, Iowa for years.^[1] Folks, that's the whole man in three lines. Let me tell you the rest.

Seven years old and already in the family business

Finis Henry Robinson was born in 1908 in Belmond, Iowa.^[1] His own father carved him his first puppet at age seven, just to give the boy his start.^[2] That is where this whole story begins, a dad handing his kid a little wooden figure and, without knowing it, handing him a life's work.

Finis did not stop at what his father gave him. He apprenticed properly. He trained under George "Pinxy" Larson, who took him under his own tutelage and taught him how to make figures that could actually hold a stage.^[3] He also studied under the late Revello Petee, part of a line of figure makers running back a hundred years.^[4] And then there's the line that stops me every time I read it. Finis and his wife Annamay took personal ventriloquism lessons from the Great Lester himself, and wrote about it plainly years later: "We both enjoyed knowing him in his prime, and his personal lessons have been a real inspiration to us and our students."^[2] They made several trips out to Vent Haven too, just to study Berger's own collection firsthand.^[2] A figure maker who studies the masters instead of just copying their catalogs, that is a different kind of craftsman. Finis even kept the styles of seven other, older figure makers alive in his own line long after those men had stopped working, so a customer could still order a face nobody else made anymore.^[2]

Finis & Co., Waterloo, Iowa

The business traded as Finis & Co., first at 1214 Randolph Street^[15] and later at 624 West 3rd Street in Waterloo.^[2] Finis and Annamay ran it personally, and their daughter Mayann pitched in too, a genuine family operation with the whole family's fingerprints on it.^[5]

Look at what they sold. Figures from 33 to 44 inches. Novelty figures: talking skulls, talking hands, monkeys.^[6] Complete professional figures started at $24.50, and the little novelty pieces ran as low as $3.75.^[1] "Johnny Chesty" talked from your chest pocket for $15 postpaid, with an extra body sold separately to convert him into a 26-inch full figure.^[7] Phil D'Rey's Talking Violin Act came with a special gimmick Finis called the Vent-O-Lin, and D'Rey had reportedly turned down $500 for that same material from another company before he let Finis manufacture it, with royalties paid back to Phil.^[7] The Jack and Jill Impromptu pocket figures, endorsed by working vents Charlie Long and Dan J. Harrington, sold for $3.75 each. And there was the Sock Ventriloquial Figure, five dollars postpaid with a routine by D'Rey, advertised with a line from Lester himself and from D'Rey: "The surface of ventriloquism has only been scratched."^[8]

He revised his instruction book too. "The Modern Encyclopedia of Lessons in Ventriloquism," seventy pages, twenty dollars, updated with a chapter by Phil D'Rey on the distant voice, because as IBV president W.S. Berger put it in his own note on the subject, "very little has been written on the subject, and many letters reach my desk asking what books explain this phase."^[9] By 1958 the supplement catalog alone counted twelve illustrated vent sheets, twenty-two vent heads, eight full-size dressed figures, and a shelf of novelties: talking monkeys, snakes, parrots, a talking dog.^[10]

Here's a detail that matters more than it looks like on the page. His 1953 catalog, number 12, carries the copyright line "Finis & Annamay Robinson."^[11] Not just his name. Both their names, on the legal line, in 1953. Annamay was not the wife who answered the phone. She was a co-principal of the company, and the paperwork says so.

The unpaid job nobody else wanted

In 1951, on top of running his own company, Finis took on the job of Circulation Manager for The Oracle, the IBV's national magazine.^[12] The magazine itself described the position honestly: he "performs the invaluable and unenviable task of mailing out THE ORACLE and keeping the mailing list up to date."^[13] Six years in, a fuller picture ran in the magazine's own pages: "THE ORACLE IS PRINTED IN LOUISVILLE AND MAILED TO FINIS. On receipt he drops his own business and addresses the envelopes, stuffs them and places them in the post," enlisting Annamay and Mayann to help him get it done, and chasing down members who were traveling so the paper would actually catch up with them.^[5] A 1953 bundle got lost somewhere between Louisville and Waterloo and forced a full reprint.^[14] The masthead that carried his name also carried cartoonists Herb Borin, Charles Ising, and Fred Ketch, and Finis personally sponsored three new members onto the IBV's rolls.^[15] That is not a side job. That is a man who dropped his own paying work, month after month, so the rest of the trade could stay in touch with each other.

The material only he used

Finis mixed his own wood dough: wood shavings and glue, home-mixed, cut with over-the-counter wood dough on top of it. He carved plain wood too, and sometimes did both on the same head. One unfinished piece survives that shows exactly how: a small head Finis carved from wood, then started building up in wood dough to keep shaping it, never finished.^[16] That single unpainted piece tells you more about his method than a hundred finished ones would, because a finished head hides its own construction.

Collector and historian Dan Willinger, who has handled both shops' work, put the comparison plainly: "Finis Robinson also did his castings in plastic wood, the same product that the McElroys used, and Finis' castings are always very rough. The roughness is inside the casting as well."^[17] A separate 42-inch Robinson figure, described as having a "very heavy, thick plastic wood" head, backs that up a second time.^[18] Rough is not the same as bad. Rough is a signature, and collectors have learned to spot his work by it the same way they spot his other habits: the same weight cast into every head, and, as a restorer, a tell of his own. Willinger identified a set of eyebrows on a "Marshall" figure as Finis's own repair work, because "he used to cover the brows with hair like these."^[19] And here's the part I respect: when Willinger spotted that fake attribution running on an active auction, he said nothing until after the sale closed. In his own words, "I did not want to jeopardize the sale for the listing person. I don't think that it would have been very fair."^[19] A man who could have blown up somebody else's sale for the satisfaction of being right, and chose not to.

The trade itself he described plainly, in the treatise he and Annamay wrote together in 1957, "Choosing Your Partner," which lays out mouth types, neck mechanisms, sizing by the performer's own build, and painting rules in more technical detail than almost anything else in the record.^[2] They were honest about the economics too: "This is the reason that figure making can not be commercialized and set up on assembly line methods, besides the fact that there are only a few hundred prospective customers," and on the pay, "you can hire the best makers for 25 cents to 50 cents per hour."^[2] They also passed along the casting wisdom of three masters: Lester's advice to always have a picture of the figure before it's made, and his own idea that "the figure look different than yourself so that you would appear to be strangers," which gives a vent more to ask his partner about on stage.^[2]

Archie & Finis

Look back at that photo up top. Finis in a bow tie, grinning, his arm around a figure captioned simply "ARCHIE & FINIS," headlining his own catalog.^[1] That is not a supplier's promotional shot. That is a performer's publicity photo.

And it was not staged. Summers, Finis and Annamay took Magic and Vent out to golf clubs and open air events around Waterloo, "the regular business functioned as usual" back at the shop while they were out working a room.^[20] When he died, his hometown paper did not call him a supplier. It called him plainly "a self-employed magician and ventriloquist" who happened to also own and operate a puppet and magic supply business.^[1] Maker and performer, both, and neither one was the side hustle.

Collector Austin Phillips owns one of Finis's talking parrots, and in a 2022 interview he gave the honest, funny version of the Finis experience: "It is all made out of plastic wood and is heavy as hell. The animations work terribly. Interestingly, it is beautiful in its own way." He first mistook it for a copy of an Insull parrot, "because this one is clearly copied after that." And then the part that matters: "Even though you would order a certain figure, you got whatever he shipped you. He was bizarre and fascinating."^[21] Fellow collector David Malmberg answered that with the defense that matters just as much: "For my generation we all had the Finis experience. He was actually pretty good at advertising. A lot of us would write him, buy his routines and figures... Finis, in a way, created a sensation in the form of a memory."^[21] Rough castings and a mail-order gamble on which face you'd actually get, and it still hooked a whole generation into this art. That's not a contradiction. That's how a lot of us got in.

A family business, and the names it touched

Annamay was Finis's full partner for sixty-six years, right up until she predeceased him in 1999.^[1] Their daughter Mayann grew up folding catalogs and stuffing Oracle envelopes at the family table,^[5] and went on to become a ventriloquist herself, working a figure of her own named Robert.^[22] That's three generations of one family in one small trade, and none of them just watching from the sidelines.

A Robinson figure, up close

Auburn wig, hand-blended cheeks, the slot mouth Finis favored. A working figure meant to hold up under stage light, not sit in a case.

Photo via WorthPoint

The figures with names on them

Finis carved Buster Burch for ventriloquist John M. Burch, who wrote in to say the figure "suits him exactly." He made Cindy Twiggins, a Willie for a performer named Montgomery, a Joey for Addison, and Terry Rogers's figure too. He also carved Lucky, the figure the IBV itself awarded to George Moll at its 1954 Louisville convention.

The Oracle, various issues, 1955–1959^[23]

The parrots were a real product line, not one-offs. Ventriloquist Dave Castle owned one in 1957, alongside a boy and girl made by the late J.C. Turner and a dog he'd built himself.^[24] When Ventriloquist Central photographed a surviving Robinson parrot in 2010, they simply called it "a premiere example," moving beak, flapping wings, and all, in near mint shape for its age.^[25]

He kept the trade's friendships going long after Waterloo, too. A run of handwritten letters survives on his Zephyrhills letterhead, "FINIS Robinson (FINE-US), The End of Gloom," addressed to "Dear Friend Walter." In one, Finis mails over a bonus roll of fifty-eight photographs of old-time performers, free of charge, and writes about looking at those old faces again: "While most of these performers are long gone they still live in our minds as we look over the pictures." In another, he's delighted to hear that Walter's own personal friend, the Great Lester, would be heard performing again on a tape they'd sent.^[26] The same man who built a mail-order figure business also kept a shoebox of old friends warm from four states away.

The end of gloom, Zephyrhills, Florida

Finis and Annamay moved the whole operation down to Zephyrhills, Florida in 1974.^[1] By 1997, a trade directory listed him under five separate headings: Vent Supplies (basswood head blocks, hands, eyeballs, springs, control sticks), Books, Audio, Novelties, and Instructional.^[27] Then a sixth listing, nothing to do with figures at all: "NEW! Bed & Breakfast for Traveling Ventriloquists."^[27] A parts counter and a spare room, both open to the trade, from the same address. By then he'd also come to own the late Doc George's own Marshall figure, supplier and keeper of the art's own history rolled into one retired man in Florida.^[27]

Finis Robinson died July 4, 2001, at ninety-three years old, at a hospital in Tampa.^[1] After he was gone, the bulk of what remained of his shop, the molds, the patterns, the unfinished heads, went to a fellow figure maker named Charlie Horner, who kept giving pieces of it away for years afterward.^[16] A trade this small does not really end. It just changes hands.

A man who put his own pronunciation guide on his letterhead and still let a hundred years of dead men's faces outlive them in his catalog. I'll take FINE-US over Finis any day, at least he never left me guessing.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy