Rev. James M. Fischmann

Photograph contributed to Find a Grave by Tom Myers.

James Fischmann didn't work one calling. He worked several, all at once, for most of his adult life, and according to the people who wrote down who he was when he died, ventriloquism sat right there with the rest of them, not off to the side as some private hobby. Pull up a chair. His record isn't long. Every line in it is doing real work.

A minister with four addresses

He was born in Lakewood, Ohio, on August 2, 1934, and he died in Claremont, New Hampshire, on March 28, 2013, seventy eight years later.^[1] In between, he earned a BA in history and philosophy at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, added a Bachelor of Theology, and was ordained by the Church of the Nazarene.^[2] He spent his working life pastoring small congregations across northern New England: Jackman, Maine; Newport, Vermont; and Woodsville and Claremont, New Hampshire.^[2] Four pulpits in three states is the working life of a rural minister, moving to wherever the next small church needed a pastor.

The welfare office and the nursing home

Ministry wasn't the only place he showed up to do the work. At some point he took a post as a supervisor for the New Hampshire Welfare Department, and later in life he became chaplain of Mt. Ascutney Nursing Home and led a vocal group called the GODSMEN.^[2] A man who spends decades pastoring congregations and then keeps signing up for a welfare office and a nursing home isn't chasing a title. He's chasing the same job in different buildings, and the record shows him still doing it late in life.

Where the dummy fits

The obituary that ran for him summed the whole man up in one sentence, the way a family does when it's trying to fit every side of somebody into a single line:

Look at where ventriloquist sits in that list. Not first, not last. One more thing he was, filed right between chef and grammar corrector, next to storyteller and comedian, which is exactly where it belongs.^[2] Gospel ventriloquism has never needed a bigger stage than a fellowship hall or a nursing home dayroom to matter, and it's a real, working tradition inside this craft, not a footnote to it. It runs on a different economy than club work, too. A club vent needs new material because the room is the same. A minister with a circuit never changed his jokes, he just changed crowds, and the act got tighter every year he ran it. A minister who puts a figure into his own family's list of who he was, unasked, is telling you plainly how seriously he took it.

The last marker

He's buried under a shared bronze marker with his wife, Patricia H. Fischmann, born 1938, the two names carved the same size on the same stone.^[3] That's the whole visible record of the marriage: no separate plots, no bigger name for the minister than for his wife, just two names side by side the way the record suggests he ran the rest of his life, adding roles instead of ranking them.

The shared marker

James M. and Patricia H. Fischmann, one bronze plaque, two names carved the same size. It's the plainest record left of the marriage behind the ministry.

Photograph contributed to Find a Grave by Tom Myers

Nothing about James Fischmann's record reads like a man chasing recognition. A country pastor, a welfare supervisor, a nursing home chaplain, and a ventriloquist, all inside one obituary, none of it crowding out the rest. That's a full life measured in the number of jobs a small town needed done, and a man who kept saying yes.

Filed between chef and grammar corrector, that's me, the dummy, holding my own next to the man's pot roast and his semicolons. Four pulpits, one welfare office, one nursing home, and he still kept a seat warm for me. I call that a full house.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy