Fred Maher

Fred Maher and Skinny Dugan, the studio portrait Maher Studios used to sell the course for twenty years. Ventriloquist Central Blog

Every family has the school that raised half of us, even the half who never set foot in the building. In ours, that school is the Fred Maher Course in Ventriloquism. If your teacher's teacher learned this art by mail, you came up through Fred's classroom whether anybody ever told you his name. He built his own first partner with his own hands, sold his craft out of a Detroit mailbox for eighteen years, and left behind a course that outlived him by three owners and ninety years.^[1] Pull up a chair. Let me tell you about Fred.

A cop, a boy, and a block of plastic wood

Frederick Louis Maher was born in Detroit on August 17, 1896, to William and Emily Maher.^[2] The spark came from a neighborhood policeman. Madeleine, Fred's own wife, told a Grosse Pointe reporter in 1955 that Fred got started in ventriloquism watching a Detroit police officer everybody called "Mr. Wilson" work charity shows around town.^[3] That was Captain George F. Wilson, thirty-two years a part time ventriloquist on top of his day job, a fixture at the Detroit Elks' Thanksgiving show, and a friend of the Great Lester himself.^[3] A boy watched a cop work a dummy for fun, and a business empire followed. That is how this art always spreads. Person to person, in a room, long before anybody thinks to charge for it.

Fred did not wait for someone to hand him a partner. Sometime in the 1920s he built his own first figure out of plastic wood, by his own account in a letter that survives in the record.^[4] He called it Jimmy "Skinny" Dugan and worked it in vaudeville for years.^[5] One annotation on the back of a photograph misnames the figure "Terry," and the man who inherited Fred's papers judged that note simply wrong, the kind of thing somebody scribbles from memory long after the fact.^[6] The figure Fred carved with his own hands now stands in the Vent Haven Museum.^[7] He also married the girl behind the story: Madeleine Tatham, daughter of Charles H. Tatham, a Detroit YMCA band director and one of the first members of Kiwanis Club No. 1.^[8] A cop taught the boy. The father-in-law's fraternal circuit would end up feeding the man's whole career.

Freddie and Skinny work the floor

Here is the Fred Maher most histories skip: a working Detroit nightclub act, week after week, never once the headliner. The Detroit papers have him at the San Diego Club, the Grand Terrace below a pantomime horse act, the Mayfair Club, the Alicia Club, and Morey's, all across 1941, billed as "Freddie Maher" with "his wise-cracking dummy Skinny Dugan."^[9] Support, not the star. That is the economic truth sitting underneath a mail-order school that the firm's own later paperwork would call something Fred started "to supplement his income."^[2]

And here is the detail I love best: in 1940, Fred went out and bought a professional figure from Glenn and George McElroy, master carvers who made fewer than fifty figures in their whole careers, and gave the new McElroy the very same name as the one he'd carved himself. Skinny Dugan.^[10] The founder of America's biggest ventriloquism supply house looked at his own handiwork next to the McElroys' and quietly upgraded. That is not a small confession. That is a craftsman being honest about better work when he saw it.

The school that fit in an envelope

In 1934, Fred and Madeleine opened the Maher School of Ventriloquism at 1700-J Casgrain in Detroit.^[2] The flagship product was the Home Study Course, sold through classified ads in Popular Mechanics, Boys' Life, and the Johnson Smith novelty catalog.^[11] The earliest ad this corpus can date runs in Popular Science, December 1942, fourteen words that are the whole business model in miniature: "Learn Ventriloquism. Send for free folder. State age."^[12] Sell the course by mail, then sell the buyer a figure. Around 1936 Fred went a step further and founded the North American Association of Ventriloquists, so his mail-order students became a community and a customer list at the very same time.^[13] That is a marketer's instinct that would make anybody in my business proud. Teach them, then keep them.

Thirty names off one brochure

The Home Study Course brochure survives, and its testimonial pages are a census of who actually bought this thing: a University of Michigan law student who gave 350 performances and earned $4,500 putting himself through school, a Kentucky state trooper, an Army flyer who practiced his lines while flying cross-country, and Fred's own father-in-law recommending the course for teenage boys "to keep them off the streets."^[14] One line stopped me cold: Dennis Alwood of Oak Park, Illinois, fourteen years old, writing that professional people already told him he had "a good future ahead of me."^[14] That fourteen year old was endorsed in the same brochure that carried Rudy Vallee's blurb, "Yours is a fine course," and a full endorsement from W. S. Berger, president of the rival International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists, who wrote he found "valuable points" in Fred's course that no other book on the subject had.^[14] The president of a competing organization, publicly vouching for a mail-order course that enrolled its own graduates somewhere else. That is how tangled and how generous this little world always was.

Fred wrote his own lessons, too, and this corpus holds one line in his own voice, from Lesson 9 of the course:

By 1950 the operation had grown past a kitchen table. A photograph survives of Fred at his own desk in the Detroit office, dictating a letter to a secretary whose name nobody wrote down.^[16] A real business, with real correspondence, running on the strength of an envelope and a stamp.

The farm-show years

Fred didn't stop performing while the school grew. In 1949 and 1950 he toured the Midwest on the Marathon Oil Company's sponsored farm-show circuit, sharing the stage with the country comedy team Ezra and Elnorie across stops in Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan.^[17] The Detroit nightclub floor of the early '40s had given way to armories, fairgrounds, and company-sponsored halls. The same migration this whole art made, from smoky rooms to sponsored stages, happened to the man who was, by then, selling everybody else the instructions.

Excuse me, I'll be right back

Fred was entertaining a group of Masons in Findlay, Ohio, when Skinny Dugan greeted a friend in the audience with "Hi, Bill." Moments later Fred fell ill on stage and left with the words "Excuse me, I'll be right back."^[18] He never came back. Rushed to Blanchard Valley Hospital, he died a few days later, February 25, 1952, at fifty-five.^[19] He was buried at Grand Lawn Cemetery in Detroit three days after that.^[19] W. S. Berger, the same IBV president who'd endorsed his course, wrote the tribute in The Oracle that says everything: Fred Maher "died with his boots on."^[20]

Madeleine carried it

Here is the part of the story that does not get told enough. Madeleine Maher ran the whole operation alone for the next seventeen years, a figure maker in her own right, building conversions on Dummy Dan bases under her own catalog names.^[21] She sold the actual McElroy Skinny Dugan to Ted Lloyd, a Detroit children's television host known as "Sagebrush Shorty," on the condition it never be renamed, then kept running that figure's photograph in Maher Studios advertising for another fourteen years, even after she no longer owned the object in the picture.^[22] Ted Lloyd's widow eventually sold it to its owner today: Jeff Dunham.^[22] The founder's second Skinny Dugan, sitting right now with the biggest name in modern American ventriloquism.

In 1969 Madeleine sold Maher Studios to Clinton and Adelia Detweiler, who moved it to Littleton, Colorado.^[23] She handed over Fred's own photographs, including the original print of his first Skinny Dugan off her own wall, and Fred's personal library of eight comedy anthologies, kept in storage for thirty-seven years before Detweiler sold them off one by one.^[24] And before she let the business go, Madeleine built one last figure herself, with her mechanic George Eazer, as a gift for Clinton's own act. He performed with it for about ten years.^[7] A widow closing out her husband's life's work with one more thing built by hand, for the man about to carry it forward.

Detweiler kept reprinting Fred's 1948 course for decades, the last known run in 2007, fifty-five years after Fred died. Mark Wade, who I've worked conventions beside, put it best in his own reading list for working vents: "One of the most important things in your vent library would be the Maher Course in Ventriloquism... Maher is to vents as Tarbell's Course in Magic is to magicians."^[25][26] Ninety years now, three owners deep, and the envelope Fred started is still the first stop for anybody who wants to learn this the right way.

The two Skinny Dugans

One name, two figures, and this corpus keeps them straight on purpose.

Skinny Dugan No. 1

Fred's own hand-built figure, carved from plastic wood in the 1920s and worked in vaudeville for years. This flyer shows him with it at an NBC microphone. The original now lives in the Vent Haven Museum.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

Thirty students, one brochure

A law student, two policemen, an Army flyer, and fourteen-year-old Dennis Alwood of Oak Park, Illinois, all in the same testimonial page. This is the market the course actually built.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

Rudy Vallee's blurb

"Yours is a fine course." Vallee's endorsement sits across the page from IBV president W. S. Berger's, a rival organization's own leader vouching for Fred's course by name.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

Skinny Dugan No. 2 is the McElroy figure Fred bought in 1940, the one that became the advertising face of Maher Studios from 1951 into the early 1970s, nearly the whole run of it after Fred was already gone.^[10] Madeleine sold that one to Ted Lloyd, and it eventually passed to Jeff Dunham, who owns it today.^[22] Same name, two different blocks of wood, two completely different endings. Do not let anybody tell you otherwise.

The circle

Nobody remembers Fred Maher for a marquee. Nobody ever saw him headline a theater in his own city. What survives him is a course, a name two different figures carried, and a family of teachers three owners deep who never let the lessons go out of print. That is its own kind of stardom. Quieter, and it lasted longer.

Eighteen years running a school out of a mailbox and not one late paper. Try that with a live audience, Fred.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy