George McElroy

George McElroy shows how to make a dummy stick out its tongue, a Cincinnati-area newspaper feature, around 1940. From the Jimmy Vee Collection.

There is a name in this trade that changes the temperature of a room the second somebody says it: McElroy. Two brothers built that name, working across one bench in Harrison, Ohio. George McElroy sculpted the faces. His older brother Glenn built the machine hidden inside the necks, a keyboard of thirteen keys and more than three hundred parts that could wink an eye, wiggle an ear, cross the eyes, and light up a nose, all from one bank of controls.^[1] I'm not going to tell you George's story without telling you Glenn's right alongside it. Nobody in this business does it any other way. So here's the two of them, the way it actually happened. Together.

Two brothers, one shop, Harrison, Ohio

George McElroy was born December 11, 1912, in Cincinnati, Ohio.^[2] Glenn came along two years earlier.^[3] Both boys grew up at 512 Broadway in Harrison, a small town on the Indiana line, and both trained as draftsmen.^[2] They learned marionettes first, after catching Tony Sarg's puppet show in Chicago, and started out making them for a mail-order magic dealer once they were out of high school.^[4] Word got around about what the two of them could build, and the dealer started sending them dummies to make too. From there they went into business for themselves.^[5]

A few years later, still in their early twenties, George and Glenn decided plain marionettes and ordinary dummies weren't good enough. They wanted to humanize the thing.^[3] So they went to their father's print shop and pulled out a typewriter to use as a model, gathered wire, small pieces of steel and tiny springs, and assembled more than three hundred pieces into a keyboard neck, the keys sticking straight out the back of a dummy's collar.^[3] Their first sale went out in 1936: a figure shipped to a ventriloquist in Fort Wayne, Indiana, for seventy five dollars. Abbott's Magic later put a name to that first buyer in its own catalog: Robert Wedertz.^[3][6]

The split down the middle

Here is the whole trick, and it never once changed in thirty years of anybody describing it. George did the art: the sculpting, the modeling, the painting, the hair wigs made by hand. Glenn did the engineering: the keyboard necks, the levers, the whole moving brain of the thing. Their mother made the costumes.^[2] A Cincinnati newspaper watched them work in 1940 and put it plainly: "Glenn, 26, is the machinist, George, two years his junior, is the artist."^[3] Thirty years after that, when a company magazine caught up with both men again, the caption read the same way, almost word for word: "George does most of the model work, artwork, while Glenn builds and installs the mechanisms."^[7] And when George died, the obituary described it the identical way: George did the sculpting, "while Glenn, who passed away a few years ago, was the genius behind the piano-type keyboards used for the mechanical movements."^[8] Sculptor and engineer, the same split, stated three separate times across three separate decades.

The reporter in 1940 got to watch the machine work in person. Glenn pressed one key, and the dummy's hair stood on end. Another made him cock-eyed, as if he were drunk. Another caused him to wink. In succession the dummy turned his head side to side, wiggled his ears, stuck out his tongue, wiggled his nose, and curled his upper lip into a snarl. Then Glenn pushed a combination of keys at once: the eyelids drooped, the mouth fell open, and the bulbous nose lit up like a red lantern. "One would have sworn he was drunk," the reporter wrote.^[3] That nose ran off two flashlight batteries wired into the skull, the same two-cell rig visible in a McElroy head that has since been opened up for repair.^[9] The eyes, weighted so they'd float and settle with gravity instead of a lever, were ordinary painted ping-pong balls.^[10]

Abbott's 1937 catalog sold two grades off that same neck: a Standard model with three movements, slot jaw, sneer, and floating eyebrows, for fifty five dollars, and a Deluxe with thirteen functions for a good deal more.^[6][11] Custom orders ran in between, and at least one surviving figure splits the difference exactly, a McElroy with more than the Standard's three movements and fewer than the Deluxe's thirteen.^[6]

The Cadillacs of the vent world

That is the phrase the trade reaches for. Ventriloquist Central's own tribute page calls George and Glenn's work exactly that: the Cadillacs of the vent world.^[4] Greg Claassen, a modern maker who has spent years studying and replicating their figures closely enough to write a book about the process, puts it a different way: a McElroy face, he says, has a Norman Rockwell quality nobody else in the trade matched.^[13]

The customer list backs up the reputation. Rudy Vallee bought four McElroy figures for his own night-club act, one of them named Dudley.^[7] Valentine Vox ordered Cecil Wigglenose. Bob Neller became a customer twice over: first when he brought the brothers his old Frank Marshall carved head, Dizzy Dugan, and had them convert the whole works, controls, headstick, body, hands and feet, over to their own mechanism, then again when he had them build him something wholly new, Reggie, a twelve-movement figure he advertised as "the figure with a thousand faces."^[14][15] W. S. Berger, who founded Vent Haven and later served as president of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists, ordered a custom monkey figure in 1938 and waited a full year for it because the brothers had an urgent order for three figures from Rudy Vallee ahead of him. When Jacko finally arrived in 1939, forty two inches tall, dressed in real fur and red velvet with gold trim, Berger paid the hundred and twenty five dollar price across five monthly installments, more than even the wealthiest man in the hobby could write on a single check.^[16] By 1948, Berger noted the difference plainly: you could still call Frank Marshall and order any figure you wanted. Not the McElroys.^[17]

None of it was carved. It was cast, heads and torsos both, out of what the trade called plastic wood and paper mache, the same molding method Berger used for his own Insull figures.^[18] That construction made a finished McElroy run about fourteen pounds against an ordinary Marshall's seven, heavy enough that the shop built a gimbaled cradle into every head, modeled after a ship's compass mount, just so a vent's arm could get through a whole show without giving out.^[19][20]

The price arc tells the rest of it. Fifty five to a bit over a hundred dollars complete in the 1937 catalog.^[6] By 1995, a collector at a ConVENTion quoted a price to David Pendleton as "thirteen." Pendleton heard thirteen hundred and reached for his checkbook, then found out the real number was thirteen thousand and seriously considered mortgaging his house before his wife talked him down.^[21] Twenty years after that, when the Willinger collection crossed the auction block in 2015, an original McElroy Troll brought thirty seven thousand dollars and Cy Leonard's own figure, Happy Hazard, brought forty three thousand, the top price of the entire sale, while good ordinary Frank Marshall figures sold in the very same room for eleven hundred to twenty one hundred dollars apiece. Twenty to one, shop against shop, in a single afternoon.^[22]

In the workshop

Somebody at Procter & Gamble's employee magazine caught the brothers back at the bench years after they'd supposedly quit for good, and had the good sense to photograph the whole process.

The captions on those photographs are the fullest build sheet either brother ever left behind: a fiberglass head, a plastic torso and hands, stuffed cloth arms and legs, wooden feet, ping-pong-ball eyes, and a control reached through a hole in the dummy's back rather than up through the neck.^[23] That last figure was built for a television executive at ABC and named Dudley, same as an earlier McElroy Rudy Vallee had owned years before. The wig was made to order by Max Factor of Hollywood.^[7] So far as the record shows, it was the last figure either brother ever built.

Faces that survive

Nobody kept a ledger. That is the family's own regret, on record. What survives, survives by accident and by the memory of collectors who went looking.

A McElroy figure, circa 1937

Painted floating eyebrows standing proud of the forehead, weighted eyes, and a slot jaw under the grin: the standard McElroy tells on itself in the details. This one, dressed as a small-town sheriff, crossed an auction block under the listing title that gave this archive's figure-maker gallery its shorthand for the two brothers together.

Photo via WorthPoint

A McElroy head, close up

The seam of the slot jaw runs plainly down the cheek. The eyebrows sit raised and separate from the forehead, the McElroy shop's signature floating brow. Ventriloquist Central's own tribute page uses this face to introduce the brothers to new readers.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

The war ended the shop. Procter & Gamble didn't.

Wartime rationing cut off the steel and wire the whole operation depended on, and George and Glenn made the call themselves: get out of a highly specialized business while they still could.^[7] It landed them exactly where two men who'd spent a decade engineering movements out of scrap steel belonged: George went into the Toilet Goods model shop at Procter & Gamble's Winton Hill Technical Center, Glenn into the Soap Products model shop at Ivorydale. Both arrived at Ivorydale in 1954 and spent the rest of their working lives there.^[7] On the side, strictly as a hobby now, they kept a hand in the old trade: Dudley, the ABC executive's figure with the Max Factor wig, came out of that later period.^[7]

George served on the Vent Haven Museum's own board of trustees.^[24] Years later, Janice McElroy of the family wrote a short piece imagining George and Glenn talking things over from somewhere up above, a fiction, but one carrying real family testimony about what the two of them would have changed. Keep better records, one says. The other has a one-word answer of his own: "Copyright, Glenn. Copyright."^[25] Neither brother ever got to act on it. Glenn died first, sometime in the few years before December 1997, no exact date on record anywhere in this archive. George followed on December 6, 1997. A ventriloquism newsletter carried the news within weeks, remembering him as "one half the McElroy brother team which created those fantastic vent figures of the '30s and '40s."^[24][8]

The circle

No figure maker builds a reputation alone, and this one least of all.

By the count of what survives, and by what collectors have paid to own it, no other American shop split the labor between a sculptor and a machinist as cleanly as George and Glenn McElroy did, or got as much craft out of that split. Two brothers, one bench, one keyboard neck between them, for six years before the war took the steel away. That is the whole story, and neither half of it works without the other.

Thirteen keys, three hundred parts, and one typewriter borrowed from Dad's print shop, that's a better origin story than most of us dummies get. Seventy five dollars for the first one, and folks, I have seen what inflation did to that figure at auction since.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy