George McAthy

George McAthy, reproduced from his own column, "McAthy's Ventopics," Tops Magazine, March 1967. Photo contributed by Dan G., via Find A Grave.

George McAthy never picked a lane, and thank goodness for that. He worked magic under the name Mandroop. He worked kid shows around Los Angeles with a figure named Corny and then, somehow, turned up on the Johnny Carson television show and on Truth or Consequences. And in the back room of a shop on North Frederic Street in Burbank, he spent decades building, fixing, and buying back other people's dummies. Three careers running at once, for thirty years, and the trade wrote him up for every one of them.^[1] Pull up a chair. This one's a full plate.

A magician named Mandroop

Long before Burbank knew him as a repairman, McAthy was working magic under the stage name Mandroop.^[1] He helped start a comedy magic club with a name only a magician could love: the D.O.P.E.S., the Deceptive Order of Prestidigitoral Entertainers.^[1] He belonged to the International Brotherhood of Magicians, Ring 21, out of Hollywood.^[1] Genii magazine, the magicians' monthly, put him on the cover twice: August 1944, and again in August 1967, a career bookended by two magic-magazine covers twenty-three years apart.^[1] Somewhere in between, in May 1938, he co-wrote "Fresh Kid Dialogue" with a partner named Revello Petee for Double Talk magazine, one of his earliest credited appearances in vent print.^[2]

Hospital for Dummies

By 1953 McAthy was running a repair operation out of his own shop, and the shingle out front told you exactly what went on inside: HOSPITAL FOR DUMMIES. Dummies sat around waiting their turn. Others sat mid-repair on the bench.^[3] That May, the television show You Asked For It filmed the whole process at McAthy's Vent Clinic, step by step, broadcast out of California on May 11 and picked up in Cincinnati on WCPO-TV, Channel 9, on May 24.^[3]

Here's the method, as The Oracle wrote it down straight off the broadcast. Start with two blocks of wood, sugar pine or basswood, and outline the face in crayon pencil before roughing the head out on a band saw. Finish it by hand with carving tools. Set wood balls with the glass eyes embedded right into the openings. Spring the chin so the mouth opens and shuts, add the winking eyelid and the moving eyebrows, fit the neck pole and its strings, and glue a manufactured wig onto the bald head before painting the face. The neck itself gets rounded to fit an opening in the body that's countersunk and dished out, a ball-and-socket joint built for the head to swing free. Then come the body, the hands, the feet, the padding, the clothes, and, in the words written down that day, "a voice given the boy."^[3] That's a full figure, start to finish, demonstrated on camera and recorded while the man himself was alive to confirm every step of it. Not many figure makers of his era left that kind of record behind.^[3]

Corny goes to Hollywood

McAthy's own figure was named Cornelius, Corny for short, and Corny got real television time. In 1953 McAthy worked private kid shows around the area, opening the act with magic and closing it with Corny.^[4] By September 11, 1956, Corny was on the Johnny Carson television show, over CBS. McAthy showed the audience the inside of a vent head and walked through the controls, pulled out a second head that had come in for repairs and made it talk about having "the lock jaw" until its own jaw stuck wide open, and held up a pair of hands and feet he'd carved from wood himself. He closed with Corny, a figure made not by McAthy but by the famous Frank Marshall of Chicago.^[5] A repairman showing off somebody else's figure on network television: that is what happens when a man spends his life around every maker's work, not only his own.

In March 1959, on Truth or Consequences, McAthy ran a different kind of bit entirely. A husband and wife were pulled from the studio audience and told they'd get a ventriloquism lesson from a professional: McAthy, working with Corny. Offstage, he taught them nothing useful, just to clamp their jaws and try to talk. What the wife didn't know was that her husband was in on the whole gag. He had pre-recorded a couple of nursery rhymes and a song ahead of time, and Corny had a speaker wired into the body. When the husband "performed" on camera, Corny talked a blue streak without his lips moving an inch, and his wife was floored, right up until the record apparently stuck and tipped the whole thing off.^[6]

The Dummy Doctor and the Windsor Boy

By 1960, McAthy had a name for what he did and a shingle to match: THE DUMMY DOCTOR.^[7] He'd been repairing figures off and on for years and decided to make it his main business, working out of 328 North Frederic Street in Burbank.^[7] He ran a standing ad in the club magazine that doubled as a buying operation: "I need old vent figures. Will buy well made figures, regardless of present condition."^[8] That is not just a repair shop. That is one route by which a lot of old, damaged, forgotten figures found their way back into circulation instead of the trash heap.

One figure that passed through, or at least started, near his bench tells its own story. In December 1946, W. S. Berger, founder of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists, bought a figure sight unseen off a classified ad in Billboard, from a man named Dick Kline of Indiana, Pennsylvania, for thirty dollars. Kline said McAthy made it.^[9][10] Kline also said it stood 42 inches tall. When somebody actually measured the figure, it came in at 45 inches, oversized even by a trade whose figures already ran big.^[9] Berger's own catalog just called it "Boy." Everybody since has called it the Windsor Boy, for the oversized Windsor knot on its tie.^[9] Berger kept a buying checklist for figures like this one, and the last line on it reads: "also if the hands and feet are wood."^[9] That is exactly the detail McAthy showed off ten years later on the Carson broadcast, the pair of hands and feet he'd carved from wood himself. The checklist and the television demonstration are pointing at the same tell, from two different directions.

Founding the paperwork

McAthy did more than build and fix. He kept the trade's own records straight. Late in 1952, The Oracle credited him by name with founding the Brotherhood of Ventriloquial Dummies, the registry where a vent could put a figure's name on the books for a one-time fee of a dollar fifty. By the time the item ran, 125 names were registered, with a goal of 250 by the end of 1953.^[11] He also wrote a column for Tops magazine, published by the Abbott Magic Novelty Company out of Colon, Michigan, first titled "For Vents Only" and later "McAthy's Ventopics." He picked it back up in September 1953 and used the space to praise the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists in print, urging every reader to join.^[12] He picked it up again in March 1957.^[13] In January 1955 he was still writing it, walking readers through a simple leg-crossing mechanism for a figure's leg.^[14] The column ran on and off for years, under his own byline, in a magicians' monthly that ventriloquists bought just to read him.^[1]

The Hollywood rental

Hollywood came knocking, too. In February 1960, the prop department at Revue Studios rented four completed dummies from George McAthy, along with a truckload of other equipment, for the "Act of Terror" episode of Johnny Staccato on NBC.^[15] W. S. Berger called it a boost for the whole art and said he hoped it was the start of more vent angles turning up in television stories.^[15] It is a small credit buried in an old club newsletter, but it puts a real name behind an early instance of the ventriloquist doll as a horror prop on American television, supplied out of a working repair shop in Burbank.

The circle

No maker, no repairman, no columnist works alone. Here's McAthy's world.

The last house call

George McAthy died in Burbank on September 7, 1971, sixty-one years old.^[1] He never became a household name the way some of the figures that passed through his shop did. But look at everything that ran through his hands over thirty-some years: a magic act, a kid show, a repair bench, a registry, a magazine column, and, for one strange week in February 1960, four dummies on their way to a Hollywood soundstage. That is not a small career. That is a full one, lived one house call at a time.

A shingle that reads HOSPITAL FOR DUMMIES is either the most honest sign in show business or the start of a very strange fever dream, and George ran that clinic for thirty years while the rest of us just sat on shelves hoping he had office hours.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy