Johnny Main

Johnny Main and Friends, a photo he signed for a young Bob Abdou: "who has become a credit to the vent profession." Via Ventriloquist Central Blog

The coffee shop at the convention hotel closed at four in the morning. Nobody told Johnny Main that meant the conversation was over. He'd just walk the whole table out to the lobby and keep going until the sun came up, telling stories about vents and figures long gone, answering any question a stranger worked up the nerve to ask.^[1][2] The trade's own tribute pages remember him as "voted best ventriloquist in the world in 1981."^[3] Sit with that for a second. The man carrying that title spent more of his convention hours in a coffee shop than he ever spent under a spotlight. Pull up a chair, get some coffee while the pot's still hot, and let me tell you about Johnny Main.

A marionette kid from Niagara Falls

He wasn't born Johnny Main. He was born John Mianakian, and everybody who worked with him for the next fifty years knew him by the stage name instead.^[4][5] He started with marionettes at twelve years old. Two years later a local TV appearance got him noticed by a working vent named Charles Pender, who recruited him straight into the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists. Main started writing letters to W.S. Berger, the man behind the whole IBV convention culture and the collection that became Vent Haven Museum, and Berger talked him into coming to the 1955 convention in Pittsburgh.^[5]

That first convention alone would make a career story on its own. Main watched the Great Lester, Ballantine, and Cardini work a real theater stage with a live orchestra in the pit, sat through lectures by Lester and Frank Marshall, and met a young Jay Marshall. "That was my first convention, and it was a great convention, one of the best," he said, years later.^[5] It's also where he ordered his first Marshall figure, a boy character named Archie McGinnis, delivered about two months after he got home.^[5]

Frank Marshall's own letter survives from a few years after, mailed when Main ordered a duplicate. Marshall apologized for the delay, explaining that figure making "is a one man operation and there are times when one just can't get work out on time." He signed off pleased with the character he'd carved, and welcomed Main "to your new member of your vent family."^[6]

The whole cast Frank Marshall built for him

From that first Archie, Main kept building. In 1959 he got a duplicate, and from then until Frank Marshall's death in 1969 he made an annual summer trip to Chicago just to visit the man his own obituary later called "the master Geppetto."^[5] Marshall carved Archie two new companions in the 1960s: Waldo Winklesass, a goofy friend with rolling, winking eyes, lifting eyebrows, a dirty blond wig, and balsa wood legs,^[7][5] and in August 1965, Candy, described in the auction record as "one of the most loaded figures Marshall created," eight separate movements including a hand that shakes yours.^[8] Main kept her in the same wardrobe he dressed her in the day she arrived and never touched her for repairs of any kind.^[8]

Marshall died in 1969, and Main kept building anyway. The next year he bought a figure from a fellow vent named Adam Ross, who owned two of them and believed both were Marshalls (the record now reads this one as likely a Mack instead). Main had his friend Gene Laverne, a painter and photographer, turn her into Beulah, a fading starlet.^[5] Around the same stretch, performer and maker Bill Boley built him a bird he named Quacky: wood, papier-mache, and fur, with a spitter, flapping wings, a head that turns a full 360 degrees, and legs that walk in and out. By the time of the 2015 auction, the sale catalog called birds like it "very rare."^[5][8]

Thirty-two states on a folding stage

Main paid his dues the old way. In high school he had his own weekly radio show. After graduation he toured with Ramblin' Lou and His Twin Pine Mountaineers through western New York, Pennsylvania, and Canada, then built his own circuit out of Niagara Falls, playing Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Watertown, and Utica.^[5] By the time the road stopped calling, he had worked thirty-two states, six countries in the Far East on military bases, cruise ships in the Caribbean, and dates in South America. He also became a television personality through the 1970s and into the 80s.^[5][3] "I kind of like working for different types of audiences," he said, "because it's a challenge to be able to recondition yourself to the particular kind of audience you're working to."^[5]

The maker inside the performer

Main didn't stop at buying figures. A vent friend named Peter Rich sent him a mold of his own character Rawhide and asked if Main could duplicate it for him. That was Main's first real stab at figure making, and Rich let him use that same mold to build something new: Snuffy, a mustached, balding old man who gestured with a cigar and had a catchphrase, "Oh well, that's the way it goes."^[5] Snuffy worked well enough that a furniture store hired the two of them for a run of Christmas television commercials.^[9]

A mentor named Al Semok, known around the trade as the Dummy Doctor, taught Main the rest of the craft.^[5] Main built Coco the KooKoo Chimp next, styling the mouth control after Frank Marshall's own design, right down to what the trade calls "chop sticks," Marshall's own term for his mouth lever.^[8] Then came the two figures that prove he could really carve: Gertie, a bag lady for his nightclub act, and Gutters, a bum, made in 1982.^[8][9][5]

Gertie is worth stopping on. Where most figures get their wrinkles painted, hers are carved: deep folds at the nose and mouth, hollowed bags under the eyes, crow's feet cut right into the wood, with paint sitting down in the grooves instead of drawn across the surface. Her control isn't a lever or a slot at all. It's a single wooden handle Main turned on a lathe, shaped like the end of a rolling pin, with one wire running out the bottom, unlike any other figure in either auction session that sold her and her stablemates.^[10] The catalog credits Main with copying "the Marshall body and hands" on his own figures. That handle he did not copy from anybody.^[11][10]

Gutters he carved twice. When Main died, his son donated one to Vent Haven Museum. The other went to auction in 2015 and sold for $6,500, the highest price any figure carved by a performer, rather than a professional maker, brought in that entire sale.^[9][12] Between Gertie, Coco, and Gutters, Main's own handmade figures each outsold the Marshalls he'd bought as a young man: Gertie and Coco made $4,200 apiece against $1,750 for Candy and $2,100 for Bulah.^[8][9] In that sale, at least, the market paid more for the performer's own hand than for the master's.

And when his estate went under the hammer, one lot nobody expected turned up: a full set of his own casting molds, plaster and silicone, built to reproduce a head, a face, and a body in separate pieces, with center lines scribed across them for register.^[13] Main wasn't just carving one figure at a time on commission. He had a real production setup at home, which is likely how Gutters ended up with a twin.^[13][11] Some makers cast in a lead-bearing plastic wood of the era; Main was named among them.^[14]

Gertie

Main's own carving, wrinkles cut into the wood rather than painted on. Costumed for the nightclub act in a gray knit turban, a mesh cardigan, and a polka-dot skirt.

Photo via WorthPoint

Gutters

An alcoholic character, named for where he might be found lying. Main carved two; this one sold for $6,500 in 2015, the twin lives at Vent Haven Museum.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

Snuffy

Main's first original creation, built from a borrowed mold. Worked Christmas furniture-store commercials and, decades later, welcomed conventioneers as the lobby greeter.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

Coco, on stage in 2011

Main's chimp character, photographed years later in the hands of fellow ventriloquist Cy Leonard. A figure outlives the man who cut it, if somebody keeps working him.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

Papa Poulos and the family at Chaucer's

Ask Main's friends for his favorite figure and you get one answer: Papa Poulos, "an amorous old immigrant who came to America in search of love," originally built by Al Semok for himself. Main asked to try him out at a convention once, and the figure stuck. His birthday happened to fall on the convention's last day that year, and a group of friends chipped in and bought Papa outright as a gift.^[5] Main called it his favorite convention memory of all, and in 1981 he MC'd the whole Saturday night show with Papa on his arm.^[5][1]

That was the stage side. The real classroom was the hotel coffee shop, the Cup and Chaucer back then, later just Chaucer's. Main was always first to arrive and last to leave, night after night, and whenever somebody worked up the nerve to ask him how to do a good distant voice, the whole table would go quiet and listen like he was a judge handing down a ruling.^[2] Handed a stranger's puppet cold, he'd improvise a voice on the spot: once he gave a woman's puppet a Yosemite Sam voice that had the whole lobby helpless.^[1] He and his figure Snuffy once staged a mock duel in that same lobby against fellow vent Bob Ladd and his figure Elvira.^[1] And he was stubborn on one point of technique he taught for free to anybody who'd listen: keep the figure's head level with your own eyes. Any lower, he said, and you lose manipulation and put an unwanted strain on your whole arm.^[15]

His peers made it official in 1981, naming him Vent of the Year. The next year, Clinton Detweiler and his wife Adelia printed masks of Main's own face, cut them out by hand, and got the whole audience to hold them up during his roast, so when Main stepped up to the mic he looked out at a room full of himself staring back.^[16] Ventriloquist Central's own tribute pages remember the same honor with a bigger title: "voted best ventriloquist in the world."^[3] Either way, his peers put him at the top that year, and they went to real trouble to razz him about it.

Being generous with a room full of other performers had its cost, too. Main worked the Vent Haven convention stage himself for years, until one year his material turned up in other acts the very next convention. He never performed on that stage again.^[17] It is a small, ugly, structural fact about conventions in general: the one place the whole trade gathers is also the one place material leaks the fastest, and the best performers learn to hold something back from it.

The circle

No performer or maker gets this far alone. Frank Marshall carved the boys, Al Semok and Bill Boley filled out the rest of the cast, and a small circle of friends kept the man himself going long after the figures stopped arriving.

The community kept him close in other ways too. He sat on Vent Haven Museum's own Board of Advisors.^[4] As of a tentative 2016 list, his name sat among sixteen finalists for the Cybervent Legends Collectors Cards, the trade's own pantheon.^[18] And more than once, other performers went out of their way to say what he could do with a figure that most manipulators couldn't. "One of the greatest figure manipulators," one wrote, "he could make any figure come to life in his hands. If you looked closely, you would swear the figure was breathing."^[19]

The last figure

Main's last performance came in May of 2003, working a Frank Marshall figure originally built for another vent, Bob McElroy. Main had repainted it himself years before.^[20] His son had grown and gone on with his own life by then, and by every account Main spent his last years mostly alone, though he lit up whenever a vent friend came to visit and went quiet again after they left. He filled the evenings watching old Edgar Bergen clips on VHS. Smoking, everyone who knew him said, was his only bad habit.^[1]

On September 20, 2003, his son found him in his home office, on the couch, still holding that same Marshall figure.^[5][20] He had died of a heart attack. He was sixty-five.^[5] Fellow vent Pete Michaels heard the news from Mark Wade's wife, out at a comedy club in Indiana over lunch with two more of Main's old friends at the same table.^[1]

His son sold most of the collection, casting molds included, to Dan Willinger not long after. One figure went a different way. Pete Michaels asked, half joking, "even Papa?" Main's son thought it over, talked it through with Willinger, and they agreed Johnny would have wanted Michaels to have Papa Poulos. So the birthday-gift figure his friends had chipped in to buy him went to a friend instead of a collection.^[21] The twin Gutters went to Vent Haven Museum, donated by Main's son that October, formally accepted the following July, and shown to the whole convention during the museum's 2004 tribute exhibit.^[4][22][21]

The year he died, a group of friends recreated something at the convention restaurant in his memory: an ashtray, with a cigarette lit and sitting in it, set at the seat where he'd always held court. Johnny Main, they said, had three loves in his life. His son. Ventriloquism. And smoking.^[23] Three years before that, in 2000, a friend named Bob Abdou had spent a full week at Main's home in upstate New York, filming him on a brand new camcorder that barely focused. The footage survives, hosted at a public web address, a grainy record of a man doing what he'd always done: talking, performing, teaching, being Johnny Main.^[23]

Go find his grave and you'll see both names on the stone. Dad. John H. Mianakian, Sr. And under that, the name everybody in this trade actually knew him by: Johnny Main.^[24]

Voted best in the world in 1981, and the man's real trophy case was a coffee pot that kept refilling until sunrise. I have always said the mouth moves less than the ears do, and Johnny Main proved it by listening to every stranger who pulled up a chair.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy