George "Pinxy" Larsen

George at the bench, carving heads for the trade. Photograph identified by the community, Ventriloquist Central Blog, 2010.

Start with the name, because the name is doing more work than you'd think. Folks called him Pinxy. Some records spell it Larsen, some Larson, and for years the collectors couldn't even agree how many people the name belonged to. Turns out there were two: George, who carved the figures, and his wife Grace, who ran the front half of the business and signed her own side of it Madame Pinxy.^[1] Sort that out first and the rest of George's story gets a lot clearer. Pull up a chair. Let me tell you about the Punch and Judy man who moonlighted in ventriloquism, or maybe it was the other way around.

Punch and Judy first

The Puppet Arts Museum's own 1998 exhibit program put it plainly: George Larsen and his wife Grace "were noted 'Punch and Judy' performers" who "sometimes manufactured handcrafted vent figures for sale" on the side.^[1] Read that twice. The figures that outlived him were the side job. His stage act was swinging Mr. Punch's slapstick.

He and Grace ran the shop together, and the 2015 sale catalog for their own work printed the same line twice, on two different lots: "Madame & George Pinxy Larsen were builders of figures in the heyday of figure making. Many professional ventriloquists used their unique style of figures."^[3] Notice who gets top billing in that sentence. Grace, not George. She was also, in her own right, the woman who convened the first official gathering of American ventriloquists, on June 16, 1939.^[4] Whatever else the Pinxy shop was, it was never a one-man operation.

The shop on West Ontario Street

I've got a piece of Pinxy's own paper in my collection: an undated price sheet from the shop at 62 West Ontario Street, Chicago.^[5] Read it and you're looking at a full catalog of options, priced like a diner menu. One winking eye, $3.50, state left or right. Both eyes to wink, $7.00. A water-tear crying effect, $4.00. A spitting attachment complete with bulbs, $3.00. Real dentist teeth on plates, uppers and lowers, $10.00, uppers alone $6.00. Hand-carved wood hands, $3.50 a pair. And at the bottom of the sheet, the whole shop's attitude in one line: "If it can be done in wood, Pinxy can make it. None better."^[5]

He also sold a mechanical walking body, engineered against every complaint a working vent ever had about walking figures: legs that step forward instead of dragging, a lock so the figure stands alone without tipping, legs you could remove for packing.^[5] That's not a novelty item. That's a man who'd heard every gripe about the equipment and built the fix.

The same sheet carried a whole shelf of early ventriloquism literature for sale, Pinxy's own course among the titles, marked down from fifty dollars to ten.^[5] An eighty percent cut on your own instructional course isn't a sale. It's a shop clearing its shelves. By his own account, relayed in a 1957 trade ad, George had quit building figures around 1942 "to follow a more remunerative branch of art."^[6] That branch turned out to be tattooing, and we'll get back to it.

The teacher

Two named men learned this trade at George's bench. Ken Spencer, who went on to become one of Chicago's own major figure makers, cut his teeth in the Mack shop and then "also studied the art of figure making from Pinxy (George Larson)."^[7] And Finis Robinson, who ran Finis & Co. out of Waterloo, Iowa for decades, called George flat out "our dear friend and teacher."^[2]

When George was ready to step back, he didn't just let the name die with him. In a 1957 note to Finis and his wife Annamay, in his own words:

That's not sentimental talk from an old man clearing out a workshop. That's a tradesman handling succession the right way. Finis & Co. later published a book, Punch and Judy for Everyone, billed as carrying "the last legacy of the late George 'Pinxy' Larsen."^[2]

Everybody built a Charlie

By the mid-1930s every figure shop in the country was fielding requests for Edgar Bergen's two faces, and the auction record for George's own shop says as much outright: "George Pinxy Larsen was a contemporary of Frank Marshall, Ken Spencer and the other ventriloquist figure builders of the golden era. All of the makers were influenced by the popularity of Edgar Bergen's Charlie and Mortimer figures."^[3]

George built both. His Charlie came dressed in a sporting outfit instead of the usual tuxedo, with a moving mouth and side-to-side glass eyes.^[3] His Mortimer kept the original joke and topped it: Mortimer Snerd's whole face gag was a pair of fixed, crossed eyes, and George built a Mortimer whose eyes stayed intentionally cockeyed, exactly like the original, except his could move.^[3] He even matched the shoes to the strange color the real Mortimer wore. That's a harder build than a plain face copy: he kept somebody else's punch line and gave it a mechanism. Both figures ended up in the same collection, bought new from George himself by a collector named Nick Tomei and kept until Tomei's own death.^[3]

The house face

A close look at the shop's own style: the bulbous nose, the hand-painted crow's-feet radiating from the eyes, a raised eyebrow rigged on one side. Collectors called this Chicago look "cartoony," and the Pinxy shop had it down cold.

Dan Willinger's Pinxy Collection, via Ventriloquist Central

Pinxy's Charlie

George's own answer to the figure every performer in America suddenly wanted: dressed in a sporting outfit instead of Bergen's tuxedo, with the moving mouth and glass eyes to match.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

Pinxy's Mortimer

Purchased new from the shop by collector Nick Tomei and kept in his collection the rest of his life. The eyes are set deliberately cockeyed, just like Bergen's original. On this one, they move.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

Fenton

One of the named figures carrying the Larsen shop's attribution to auction, sold through Potter & Potter, right back in the city where George built it.

Photo via Potter & Potter Auctions

The name in the last place you'd look

George usually signed his work on the bottom of the neck. Everybody in the field knew that, including restorer Steve Hurst, who once took in a figure for a customer named Lynn Hoskins that had, in his words, "a Marshallesque look to it" but a leather upper lip and jaw that didn't fit the pattern.^[8] Hurst checked the usual spot. Nothing. For a minute he figured he had an unsigned, genuine Frank Marshall on his hands, and got excited about it. Then he took the head apart to look closer, and there it was: PINXY, carved into the back of the head, a spot nobody in the trade had ever seen him sign before.^[8] His own restoration partner hadn't seen it either. Hurst called him on the spot to ask.^[8]

That's the whole trade in one story: even the men who'd handled the most figures were only just learning where George hid his name, decades after he carved it. And he didn't only build his own work. His shop reconditioned other makers' figures too, including at least one older Theodore Mack figure redone at his bench in the 1930s.^[9] The man ran a shop, not just a bench.

Uncle Sam, and the last stretch

Among George's surviving work, Uncle Sam has the clearest paper trail. He carved it, ventriloquist Stanley Burns used it clear through the country's Bicentennial celebrations in 1976, and in 1998 it went on loan from Burns's widow Sylvia to a ventriloquism exhibit at the Puppet Arts Museum, described there as "a prime example of the 'Pinxy' style."^[1]

Grace didn't live to see any of that. She died January 15, 1948, in Babson Park, Florida, at sixty-one.^[1] George kept going another twelve years.^[2] By December 1956, an old friend from the trade, IBV founder W.S. Berger, found him at the Hollywood Arcade on South State Street in Chicago, "engaged in tattoo work," and the two spent the visit going over old stories about the Great Lester.^[10] By 1958 he was sick, in a veterans hospital.^[11] He died August 1, 1960. Finis and Annamay placed the memorial notice themselves: "World's Greatest Comedy Punch and Judy Performer and Figure Maker... our dear friend and teacher."^[2]

A man can spend his whole working life split between two stages, a Punch booth and a carving bench, and yet leave the trade fuller than he found it. George Larsen taught the men who taught the next generation, then gave his own name away instead of letting it end with him. That's a good way to close out a career in this business.

Seven dollars to make both eyes wink but the man who put dentist teeth in a dummy's head for ten bucks still let his own name go blurry across a hundred years of paperwork. Priorities, George.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy