Jack Coats

Jack Coats with two of his own figures, the only publicity photo most of the trade ever saw of him. Photo via Ventriloquist Central

A pattern maker at a Detroit auto plant spent his nights somewhere stranger: alone at a workbench, carving faces for a living nobody at the plant knew about. Three hours a night, four more on Saturday, and out of that schedule came about forty finished ventriloquist figures a year, for Paul Stadelman, for Jimmy Nelson, for a former Miss America, for a Michigan kid who never got over meeting him.^[1][2] His name was Jack Coats, and a bad heart took him at forty-two, on a camping trip with his family.^[9] Pull up a chair. His working life was short. What he left on the bench wasn't.

A hoe handle and a dollar a minute

He was born Leroy Jack Coats in Detroit on September 13, 1931.^[9] At ten years old somebody handed him a stuffed-body Charlie McCarthy figure, no moving parts, and the boy couldn't leave it alone. He rigged a head stick out of half his father's hoe handle so the head would move. “I used half of the handle to make Charlie's head move,” he liked to say, “and Dad used the other half to make sure I didn't cut up any more of his hoes.” His first real figure was a Turner, bought through Abbott's Magic Company. His first paying customers were the neighbors, a dollar a minute for two to five minutes of material, and he never forgot hitting that number.^[1] He knew he'd found something.

The night shift

By day he worked Detroit auto parts, a pattern maker for Chrysler by his mentee's account, at a shop he thought was called Kelsey-Hayes by a customer's account. The corpus holds both.^[1][3] By night the real job started. Three hours on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, four more on Saturday, Wednesday off: sixteen hours a week that turned out about forty figures a year, on top of every repair and repaint his shop generated. He could carve a whole head in three hours flat. The mechanics took a week.^[1][2] His wife Pat did every wig on every figure he ever built and covered the animal figures in their fur, which means there is no such thing as a Jack Coats figure that isn't also a Pat Coats figure, whatever the catalog says.^[2] Run the arithmetic on a career at that pace and you land somewhere around a few hundred figures total, which is exactly why a real one draws a crowd at auction.^[2]

A 1998 exhibit catalog called him one of “the great figure-makers of the century,” and noted, fairly, that his later work leaned on the look of the more famous Frank Marshall while his early figures carried a charm all their own.^[2] His early customers had already decided that without any help from a catalog.

Essance, and the man who found him a customer

Coats never ran his own storefront. He got found, standing in someone else's booth. Paul Stadelman, the ventriloquist and author, kept a table at the Abbott's Get-Together in Colon, Michigan, selling books and a couple of vent figures with price tags that struck at least one browsing kid as a lot of money. Asked who made them, Stadelman pointed into the crowd: that man right there. It was Coats, and when the kid couldn't afford the tag, Coats told him, “Hey pardner, you don't have to pay those prices, let me carve one for you and it won't cost you near that much.”^[3] That was the whole sales operation: standing in a distributor's own booth, undercutting the distributor's price on his own work.

Stadelman sold Coats's figures as “Essance Enterprise” pieces, the deluxe wood-carved line in his catalog, the brand name itself a shortened “S and C” for Stadelman and Coats. Paul would bring other makers' figures around for Jack to study, and some of the Frank Marshall influence that shows up in Coats's later work reportedly came in through that side door, borrowed by the eye rather than taught hand to hand.^[4] American figure making ran on catalogs like this one for at least forty years, men in sheds and back rooms printing price lists and mailing them out, and Coats's own brochure from the 1960s survives for exactly that reason.^[6]

Coats priced for people he liked, which is the polite way of saying no reliable Coats price list exists. He built a customer a bird for whatever was offered, found two traveling brothers a place to sleep when they'd been sleeping in the car, and got photographed slipping a kid some cash so he could stay in Colon a few extra days.^[3] Any surviving receipt with his name on it is a friendship price, not a market one.

A style all his own

His own catalog said it plainest: “Each figure an original. These are not production items. No molds are used.” Everything came off a sketch or a description, worked out with the customer, plans kept confidential.^[5] Heads and hands were hand-carved basswood, kiln dried, with smile lines and dimples cut into the wood rather than painted on. He built a slot-jaw mouth as his house style and said so in print: “English lip also available but not recommended,” a maker publicly taking a side in the oldest argument in the trade. His paint was his own blend, “applied with a porous effect,” and his sales pitch leaned on the newest threat the business faced: figures built to survive “the critical eye of the T.V. camera.”^[5]

Two details separate a real Coats from everything else on a shelf. He glued his eyebrows out of flock material, the fuzzy fiber used on 1960s and 70s wallpaper, instead of painting or carving them, and they wear off with age rather than fade.^[7] And at least two surviving figures carry a battery box wired into the body with the leads cut, purpose unknown, presumably (the honest word the original cataloger used) for eyes that once lit up. Nobody has turned up a wired, working example yet to settle it.^[8] One of his figures got so close to a Marshall that a man who owns seventy real Marshalls looked at it and said it made him shake.^[8] Surviving figures turn up for sale now and again, carved basswood with the original wig and mechanics intact, the plainest proof that the work outlasted the maker.^[16]

Homer, and the boy who got him back

Coats performed too, in his own low-key way. In the late 1960s he ran a weekly TV show out of Ann Arbor, Michigan, working a figure he'd built and named Homer. When the show ended he sold Homer to another ventriloquist, freshly repainted. While Coats stepped into the next room to fetch something, the man walked out the door with the figure, no payment, gone. Three years later Coats was judging a junior ventriloquist contest when a thirteen-year-old boy walked onstage with Homer and performed. The boy was Gary Koepke, who had no idea what he was holding. Coats waited a year and a half before telling him the figure's real history, and Koepke later said he was glad for the wait: it gave him time to get to know the man first.^[1] Koepke went on to order three figures of his own, visited the shop regularly, and wrote the tribute most of this page leans on.

Coats had firm opinions about what a figure needed and what it didn't. He talked one customer out of raising eyebrows and crossed eyes on his own commission: “Eyebrows can snap off and crossed eyes is a tricky thing. I like the way I do 'em without crossing the eyes,” a durability call from the man who'd have to fix it later.^[3] Asked how he got his signature finish, he told one wide-eyed teenager it was “a concoction of everything from paint to ground up Kellogg corn flakes,” and the kid never did find out if he meant it.^[3] Around a crowded restaurant table he could stop the room cold with his two-note train whistle and, better yet, his baby cry, thrown so well that people nearby would look for the infant.^[3]

The circle

No maker works alone, and Coats had a wide circle for a man who died at forty-two. His late-60s and early-70s client list ran to Paul Stadelman, Jimmy Nelson, former Miss America Vonda Kay Van Dyke, Bill DeMar, and, in his biographer's words, “many of the top vents in the business.”^[1] Two separate lines of American figure making trace straight back to his bench, and every man on both lines kept the same rule he did: no molds, ever. Ray Guyll bought a Coats figure in 1969, corresponded with him afterward, and some of Guyll's own early figures picked up a similar look. Guyll would later hand his own method down to Steve Hurst. On the other line, Brian Hamilton, fourteen the year Coats died, built a head-stick lock the same way Coats built his, whether by a brief encounter, a look inside somebody else's Coats figure, or a published method nobody has traced yet.^[12] Clinton Detweiler, who talked with Coats by phone for years before he died, put it plainly decades later: if he had to pick one personal favorite figure maker, it would be Jack Coats.^[10] A separate tribute page names two more of his figures rebuilt by restorer Al Stevens and put back to work in the hands of ventriloquist Jerry Goodspeed, by that page's own account.^[13]

Rudy

A 40-inch Coats figure, carved entirely in wood, with COATS branded in serif capitals along the head stick, one of the only marks the man left on his own work.^[8] Mark Wade has kept him in the same stage wardrobe for years and worked kid shows with him regularly.^[14]

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

Gary Koepke

The boy who got Homer back, seen here decades later with three of his own Coats figures.^[1] He wrote the tribute that keeps most of this record alive.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

Ray Guyll & Hart Throb

Guyll bought a Coats figure in 1969 and corresponded with him afterward.^[15] One of two figure-making lines that trace back to Coats's bench, both built on the same house rule: no molds, ever.^[12]

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

Died without a figure of his own

Coats saw it coming and said so quietly. At what turned out to be his last meeting in Colon with a friend, he mentioned that the doctor didn't love the shape his heart was in, and that he might not make the trip every year the way he used to.^[3] He died in his sleep in July 1973, on a family camping trip, just short of his forty-second birthday, leaving a wife and three daughters.^[9] Going through what he left on the bench afterward, his widow found countless patterns: drunken characters, country characters, a witch, an Ed Sullivan figure, baby figures, notebooks full of ideas he never got to build. Jack Coats built figures for some of the biggest names in the business and died without ever building one of his own.^[1]

That's not a sad ending around here. That's the whole trade in one sentence. The work he left behind gets carried onstage in other people's hands, under other people's names, and that was always the deal. Years afterward, a Michigan admirer named a figure Coats built for him Leroy, simply because that was Jack's own given name, tucked under the stage name everybody knew him by.^[11] That's not nothing. That's a career.

Half a hoe handle for Charlie's head, the other half so Dad's tools stayed safe, and forty of us a year after that. A dollar a minute never bought so much heart, and it only cost him the one.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy