Gus Ramage

An Easter greeting card portrait, sent to his Waxahachie congregation: "From your minister, Gus Ramage." Photo: Martis Donald Ramage, Jr., via Find A Grave.

Look through the footnotes on almost any page in this archive and one source keeps turning up: The Oracle, magazine of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists. Here is what most of those citations never tell you. The man who named it was not an editor, and he was not a showman with his name on a marquee. He was a small town Texas preacher who ran his ventriloquism act between funerals, school assemblies, and a probation officer's rounds.^[1] His name was Gus Ramage, and in the spring of 1950 the whole IBV borrowed his idea for the title of its own magazine and never gave it back. Pull up a chair. This one runs through a preacher's collar, a reform school, and a suitcase radio.

A chaplain's collar, then a preacher's circuit

He was born Gus Ramage on December 3, 1889, and by the time the First World War called him up he had already earned degrees from Transylvania University and Texas Christian University, with more study still ahead of him at the University of Dallas.^[2] The Army made him a captain and a chaplain, and that pairing, preacher first, uniform second, set the shape of everything that came after. For more than fifty years he held pulpits as a First Christian Church, Disciples of Christ, minister across twelve towns in Tennessee, Texas, Colorado, and Arizona.^[2] In 1937 he and his wife, Olive Margaret Kelly, settled for good in Waxahachie, Texas, and Gus added a second full time job on top of the first: teacher, truant officer, and probation officer for Ellis County, a post he held from 1940 all the way to 1969.^[2] A minister who spent his weekdays chasing down kids who had skipped school. Ellis County got a preacher and a truant officer for the price of one man, and Gus never seemed to slow down for either job.

Johnny Jabbers, Little Sister, and a doll on a doll's knee

By the time the rest of the Brotherhood met him in print, Gus already had a working cast. Johnny Jabbers was his main partner, working alongside a second figure called Little Sister, and the pair had already played the IBV's own Chicago convention the year before.^[1] Then Gus did something I have not run across anywhere else in this whole archive. He added a third figure, a small talking doll named Korki, and parked it on Johnny Jabbers's knee. Johnny worked the room. Korki did the actual jabbering, voiced through Gus while the audience watched Johnny's mouth.^[1] A dummy inside a dummy act, running two layers deep, built by a small town preacher in his spare time.

That cast went to work everywhere Ellis County needed a program. By 1953 it was his thirteenth straight year performing for the schoolchildren on his own truant rolls, plus the Lions, the Rotarians, a Shriners Family Night, and the Masonic barbecue.^[3] By 1954, thirty two years into his Lions Club membership, Johnny Jabbers had also worked a reform school and a program for what the era called a class of exceptional children, gathered at a big Hobo Ranch event.^[4] By 1957 the Oracle's note takers had shortened the billing to just Johnny and Little Sister, working schools and banquets, and Gus picked up his thirty five year Lions Club chevron that same year.^[5] As late as 1959, nearing seventy years old, he was still working an army town, Killeen, Texas, "with religious work and entertaining with his vent friend Johnny," carrying credits from three separate IBV convention programs in Chicago, New Orleans, and Houston.^[7] By 1960 he was still turning up for the Lions Club Minstrel and a regional Boy Scout and Cub Scout gathering.^[8] Ministry, probation work, and a talking doll built into a room's worth of entertainment. He never treated any of it as three separate jobs.

The man who named The Oracle

Here is the story behind the source you have been reading all along. In 1950 the IBV decided its little club magazine, then called the Grapevine News, needed a name that actually meant something, and W.S. Berger, the Brotherhood's president, opened it up to a vote of the membership. Gus Ramage entered The Oracle, tying the word back to the Greek Oracle of Delphi and the old word engastrimyth, a voice from the belly. His entry won more votes than any other, and starting with the March 1950 issue, that has been the name of the magazine ever since, cited across dozens of pages in this archive.^[1]

The prize made the story even better. Frank Marshall, the celebrated Chicago figure maker you can read about elsewhere in this archive, donated a professional figure named Tommy Knots as the contest's grand prize: one of his own original creations, twenty inches high, built with an internal body control like the expensive stage figures.^[1] Berger thanked Marshall in print for his generosity and his interest in the Brotherhood's welfare, and Tommy shipped off to a new home in Waxahachie, Texas, to live with Brother Ramage.^[1] A Texas preacher renamed the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists' own magazine and got a figure from one of the trade's most prolific makers as a thank you.

The same issue sketched out just how busy Gus already was outside the pulpit and the puppet stage: attendance supervisor for his county's schools, probation officer for the county court, county librarian, chairman of the Lions Club's Eye Conservation Committee, editor of the Lion Log Weekly, a minister preaching every other Sunday, a night school student at Southern University, and a criminology student at a Dallas college on top of all of it.^[1] Berger's writers called him "a scholar and a human dynamo."^[1] Read that list once and the naming committee's choice makes a lot more sense. The man who spent his life sorting other people's problems into solutions found the right word for a magazine too.

A suitcase, a radio, and a letter from Berger

Gus was not only a working vent. He was the kind of member the Brotherhood pointed newcomers toward. In 1958 he wrote in with a rehearsal trick he had worked out at home: play a voice on a portable suitcase style radio or record player, close the lid for a muffled distant tone, then open it slowly to dial in the right pitch. "It's perfect," he wrote. "Try it."^[6] He was already thinking past his own living room, too. "I think I will try it on television when a vent is on the air," he added, years before that would have been an easy thing for a small town Texas preacher to arrange.^[6]

Two years later, Berger put that generosity to direct use. A new IBV member named Ted Angell, out in La Mesa, California, needed help with ventriloquism and, specifically, with writing scripts for church work, the exact combination Gus had spent decades perfecting on the road between pulpits. Berger sent Angell straight to him. Gus wrote back at length, and Berger thanked him in the next issue: "Thanks very much Gus for responding so liberally. I did suggest that Ted contact you for advice."^[9] That is the whole trade in one paragraph. A stranger needed to know something, the man in charge knew exactly who had the answer, and Gus just answered.

The circle

No act runs alone, and Gus's world reached from a Chicago workshop to a California church.

The young minister

An early studio portrait, taken not long after Gus took up the collar he would wear for the rest of his working life, on the road with a Bible in one hand and, before long, a dummy in the other.

Photo: Martis Donald Ramage, Jr., via Find A Grave

The last chorus

Gus Ramage died in Waxahachie at seventy nine, on February 16, 1969.^[2] Preaching was not even his only piece of writing. Somewhere along the way he wrote a cowboy song, "Life Is Like an Old Time Trail Herd," and it got picked up and sung at rodeos across Texas, a second act nobody puts on a ventriloquist's resume.^[2] His daughter, Margaret, summed him up in one line: "he really knew his Bible and was a hail fellow well met."^[2]

That is the whole man. A chaplain who came home from a war and never stopped serving somebody: a congregation, a truant kid, a Lions Club banquet, a green IBV member three states away, or a room full of children waiting on Johnny Jabbers and the doll riding his knee. Ellis County got a bargain. So did the rest of us. He also handed this whole archive its name.

Half a century as preacher, probation officer, and straight man to Johnny Jabbers, and the one title that stuck to the whole art form was the name Gus tossed off between sermons. The Oracle never even sent him a royalty check.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy