Joe Boley

Joe Boley with two of his own figures. Photo: DLP, via Find A Grave.

Joe Alan Boley grew up in a house that already had a Colonel living in it. His father, Bill Boley, ran a five-state circuit out of Hopkinsville, Kentucky, and carried a real Kentucky Colonel's commission of his own.^[10] Joe earned that same commission later in his own life, which is how Kentucky ended up with two working ventriloquists both billed "Col. Boley," a mix-up real enough that it tripped up a figure collector in 2009 who found a signed Boley figure and had to ask which Colonel had carved it.^[6] Pull up a chair. This one runs from a Kentucky Wild West tourist town to a headstone with a pair of theater masks carved into the granite, and the family never once had to leave the Commonwealth to make a living at it.

The son who grew up in the workshop

Bill Boley was already one of the best-known ventriloquists in the American South by 1957, the year Joe was born: president of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists, working something like 350 shows a year without ever leaving Kentucky.^[8] Joe didn't discover this trade from a stranger on a stage the way his father had. He grew up inside it. On October 11, 1997, about 150 people turned out for an open house at the elder Boley's home workshop, the one Bill called the Dummy Den, and Dialogue magazine's photographer caught Joe Boley in the crowd alongside fellow performers Dave Mitchell, Stephen Knowles, Dr. Garland Boyd, and Bill DeMar. Joe wasn't a visitor to his father's world. He was part of it.^[8]

He gave something back too, around that same stretch of years: a gold ring made to his own design, a Charlie McCarthy crest set right into the band, a gift from son to father.^[8] Only a kid who actually grew up in this trade thinks to put Edgar Bergen's dummy on a piece of jewelry. Joe knew exactly what he was honoring.

Joe built figures of his own eventually, and Ventriloquist Central's own tribute page credits him plainly: located in Kentucky, ventriloquist and figure-maker, son of Bill Boley.^[5] Both men signed their work "Col." Both men earned that title from the Commonwealth, not a stage manager.^[1] That overlap caused real confusion in the collector market. In 2009, a buyer found a figure signed "Col. Joe Boley 2007" inside the head and asked Clinton Detweiler whether the maker was kin to the famous Bill Boley. Detweiler's answer was plain and fair to both men: "Joe Boley is the son of Bill Boley. Bill was the better figure maker (my opinion) but Joe has done a lot of work as well."^[6] That's an honest, bounded verdict from a man who watched them both work a knife. Check the first name and the date on any signed Boley figure. The surname alone will fool you every time.

Working Kentucky's Wild West

Joe carried the family act into a corner of the business his father never had to touch: Kentucky's roadside tourist trade. He worked Tombstone Junction, Guntown Mountain, and Kaintuck Territory, Western-theme parks built for the tourists driving through the Commonwealth, doing puppets and magic on the kind of outdoor stage his father never needed.^[1] By his own community's account he entertained local families for more than thirty years, which puts his start somewhere in the early 1980s.^[2] Ventriloquist Central listed him on its roster of working professional ventriloquists in the 2000s: one line among the trade's working membership, nothing more and nothing less.^[4]

And in 2005, Joe worked the Vent Haven ConVENTion itself, on the Wednesday bill, a fact that comes straight out of Jimmy Vee's own convention records.^[7] Whatever else Joe Boley did with his life, he had at least one turn on the trade's own national stage, and it's in the record now.

Thirty years of giving it back

Performing was only part of what Joe Boley did in Hopkinsville. He belonged to S.K.I.T., the Eagles, the Jaycees, the Lions Club, Big Brothers Big Sisters, a local spouse abuse center, and Hillcrest Baptist Church, the kind of civic list a small town keeps close track of.^[1] By 2008, kidney failure had caught up with him. Bob Isaacson broke the news to the wider vent community that year: "I found out that Joe Boley has been ill for the past year with kidney failure. That's one of the reasons he was missing from the 2008 Convention. I spoke with Joe's wife & found out that Joe has been on dialysis & is hoping to be put on a list for a transplant." Joe's wife authorized Isaacson to share those details publicly, because that's what a community does for one of its own.^[3]

Five years later, the Fraternal Order of Eagles in Hopkinsville organized a full return on everything Joe had put into that town. On Saturday, December 21, 2013, the Eagles Hall put on an All Star Christmas Variety Show: magician Russ Nowack, comedy magician Wallace Redd, cloggers and singers Holly and Kelly, even Santa himself, five dollars a ticket, the money going toward Joe's medical expenses and to sponsor underprivileged kids who couldn't otherwise afford to come.^[2] The flyer put it plainly: Joe had entertained the families around that area for more than thirty years with his puppets and magic. Now the families entertained him back.

None of that was new to this family. Sixteen years earlier, in 1997, more than fifty ventriloquists on the trade's earliest internet mailing list had organized a mail campaign for Bill Boley when his own health failed, sending cards, letters, and checks until Bill sat at his kitchen table and cried for over an hour reading them.^[9] Hopkinsville had already learned that lesson once: take care of the man who spent his life taking care of you. When it was Joe's turn, the town already knew exactly what to do.

The circle

No performer works entirely alone, and Joe's circle ran through his own family and the people who chronicled him.

The last chapter

Joe Alan Boley died January 30, 2016, in Hopkinsville. He was 58.^[1] The Kentucky New Era ran his obituary two days later, and it named him what he was: a Kentucky Colonel, a member of half a dozen Hopkinsville civic organizations, a man survived by the community he'd spent thirty years entertaining.^[1]

His grave carries the family name in bronze, a pair of comedy-and-tragedy masks set into one corner and a ribbon reading Colonel set into the other.^[1] Beside him rests his wife, Reba Jo Boley, born in 1961.^[1]

Two Colonels came out of that one house in Hopkinsville. One of them learned his trade by watching his father give material away for free and look out for other people's kids. The other one just kept doing it, thirty years and three Wild West towns later, until the town turned around and did the same thing right back.

Two Colonels, one commission office, and a collector in 2009 stuck asking which Boley carved his dummy. I've got splinters older than that paperwork problem.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy