Lee Miller Dean

Dean and Kriket, the figure he built in 2003 after almost forty years away from the bench. Photo: Ventriloquist Central.

Twelve years old, and Kentucky was already talking about him. "Another aspiring vent for Kentucky," The Oracle called him in January 1955, a kid from Harrodsburg "unfolding his ventriloquial talent before many audiences."^[1] Pull up a chair, because this one has a second act nobody saw coming. Television stardom before he could drive. Personal tutoring from The Great Lester. A law career that pulled him clean out of the art for almost forty years. And a comeback in his sixties that beat everything he built as a boy.

The boy from Harrodsburg

Lee Miller Dean grew up in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, the son of Mr. and Mrs. W. Earl Dean.^[2] His interest in ventriloquism started in the third grade, and the trigger was about as small-town as it gets: a newspaper detective comic strip with a dummy character named Poddy Majure, and a school visit from a Kentucky state trooper, Lee Allen Estes, who ran a traffic safety program built around a figure of his own.^[2] A kid who watched a trooper work a dummy for road safety grew up to build his own. Dean built his first figure in 1950 and used it for a few years before buying an Insull figure from W.S. Berger himself, the man who ran Vent Haven.^[2] By January 1955, at twelve years old, he already had a line in the newsletter.^[1]

A legend in the sleeper car

That spring, Dean's parents drove him to Fort Mitchell to visit Vent Haven for the first time. He demonstrated with his figure, an alter ego he called Jerry Mack, and he brought Berger a gift he'd made himself: a head modeled out of papier-mache, red hair cut from toweling, eyes made from painted plastic bottle tops. Berger got a kick out of it and jokingly called it "Modern Art."^[3] Weeks later Dean was on his way to Pittsburgh for the IBV convention, down on the roster to perform under the name Tony Mack.^[4] He got there in a sleeper car, his first train ride, with The Great Lester as his traveling companion. Lester introduced him around, put him on the convention show, and taught him privately, the kind of attention a fourteen-year-old does not forget.^[5] Lester also caught something nobody else had: Dean was clenching his teeth and fighting a nasal problem that was choking off his labials. Freeze the jaw, freeze the lips, Lester told him, and showed him how to hold it still without forcing the sound through his nose.^[6]

Somebody photographed the trip. Marshall, Lester, Berger, and Dean, all in one frame, over coffee at a shop down from the hotel. Twenty-four years later that same photograph ran again, in a 1979 tribute issue of The New Oracle honoring Marshall, captioned "Vent Memories of Yesteryear," the boy in the front row marked unidentified. It took until Dean found the reprint himself and wrote in to say so: that's me.^[5][7]

Kentucky in a bow tie

By 1956 Dean had a run of local television that would make a grown performer jealous. He appeared on WHAS-TV's Western Show while he was still in school.^[8] That same year the Louisville Courier-Journal photographed him as "King" of the Crusade for Children, an all-night WHAS-TV telethon for children with disabilities that raised what was then a record sum. He posed with the dummy in hand, next to his "Queen" and another performer the caption left unidentified.^[9] Decades later Dean looked up the coverage himself and found the paper had swapped the crowns: the girl got named king, he got named queen. "Nice going, Lee," the original caption said, and he still thought it was funny enough to bring up.^[7]

In 1957 his figure, now going by Tony Mack, turned up on Hi-Varieties.^[10] He guested on Hayloft Hoedown that July and picked up a weekly Thursday commercial spot on WHAS as a character called Hawkeye.^[11] By 1958 he and Tony Mack were pitching Sealtest chocolate milk in a Courier-Journal advertisement, appearing every Thursday afternoon on the Last of the Mohicans Show.^[12] A kid from Harrodsburg, on television every week of the year, years before he could drive to the studio himself.

Naming the family

Dean wanted a real Marshall figure of his own, and in November 1958 he called Berger from Harrodsburg just to get Frank Marshall's Chicago address.^[13] Marshall shipped him two brand new figures, a boy and a girl, for $275 total.^[2] Dean named them with a pun stacked on a pun. Take "Ken" off one figure and "Tucky" off the other, and you get Kentucky, his home state. Take "Del" and "Mars" off one and "Ken" and "Hall" off the other, and you get Marshall, the man who carved them. Two figures, two tributes, in one naming trick.^[14] He brought them to Vent Haven in the spring of 1959, ran a short routine with both, and by then he had the labials down exactly the way Lester taught him.^[15] He also handed Berger something he had made with his own hands again: a vent head Berger's own notes call "a real character."^[15]

Lester's advice about the nose came due that same year. Dean had the surgery days before the 1959 convention, could barely breathe through his nose beforehand, and performed on the show anyway.^[14] He also picked up a small figure from Marshall he called "a brash wooden midget," built to work close-up crowds.^[14] That September, on WCPO-TV's Beans Clubhouse, Dean debuted another new Marshall miniature named Little Willie, moving eyes, one eyelid at half mast. He ran the suitcase bit, the distant voice, a three-way phone call, and a closer where little girls from the audience sang along as makeshift figures of their own. Whoever built that day's show built it around Dean.^[16]

Baylor, and a bear with the mascot's face

That same year, Dean's talent bought him something bigger than a TV slot: a four-year scholarship to Baylor University, in ventriloquism.^[2][17] He worked for Baylor's public relations department and kept performing with two of his Marshall figures, Kenny Hall and Del Mars, for campus and community groups. Dean had his own name for the man who trained him, and he used it twice in one season: he called Lester "the Socrates of Ventriloquism."^[17] By his senior year, Dean was one of twenty-six college students chosen from four states to perform in Campus Revue at Six Flags Over Texas, a duo-ventriloquism act with a partner named Ralph Sparks, billed as the only act of its kind on the bill. He was an arts major, a singer, and had written a hundred and thirty-four songs by then, and he told the paper he planned to keep working as a ventriloquist after graduation.^[2] Marshall built him one more figure in these years: Chubby Cub, a bear modeled on Baylor's own mascot.^[2] Chubby Cub outlasted the college kid who ordered it. The bear crossed an auction block in 2015 for $1,700, decades after Baylor's mascot inspired it.^[18][19]

Baylor, 1959

Lee Miller Dean, senior arts major, performing in Campus Revue at Six Flags Over Texas with duo partner Ralph Sparks. The clipping calls it the only duo-ventriloquism act on the bill that summer.

Photo: Ventriloquist Central

Chubby Cub

Frank Marshall built this bear to match Baylor's own mascot. Dean traded it away once, got it back when his wife undid the deal, and it eventually found its way to auction.

Photo via WorthPoint

He put it down

The rest of Dean's life in the art, in his own words years later, was "the ordinary shape of it."^[5] Around 1963 or 1964 he traded the Marshall bear to Clifford Guest for a pair of kangaroo figures, a mother with a joey in her pouch, until his wife undid the deal and he ended up with the bear again anyway.^[5] A year later he traded the boy figure for a Marshall walker, then let the walker and the girl figure go, left the bear in Texas, and came home to Kentucky to finish law school.^[5] His first daughter finished off his old $40 figure around 1971, when she filled a child's pool and took it swimming with her.^[5] By his own account, Dean dropped out of the art entirely around 1965, after what he called a futile attempt in California, and did not pick it back up again until 2003.^[5] Thirty-eight years is a long time to leave anything sitting.

Kriket

What brought Dean back to the bench was about as simple as a reason gets: he wanted to show his grandchildren what he used to do.^[5] In 2003 he built a figure named Kriket with twenty control effects, and in the process worked out new mechanisms for rolling eyes and varying brows, run off variable controllers instead of the usual on-off levers.^[20] He showed it to a room full of professional figure makers at the 2004 Kentucky ventriloquist convention.^[20] And in a detail that says as much about the man as the mechanism, Dean worked out how to make Kriket's slot jaw show the lower teeth and lip on full extension, and chose not to install it.^[21] He had the answer, and he left it out. That is a builder confident enough in his own work to know when a feature is a distraction rather than an improvement.

What he wrote down

Dean became a working writer for Ventriloquist Central, introduced there as a man "taught ventriloquism by The Great Lester" who "does all the throat sounds that so many ventriloquists are unable to achieve."^[22] In March 2008 he published "Lost Art: The Wooden Dummy and Ventriloquist with Frozen Lips who Throws Voice," laying out Lester's actual private method in four instructions: do not clench the teeth, lock the jaw down and back, drive the voice from the diaphragm, and set the tongue tip behind the upper lip and teeth for labials.^[23] It reads like a technique paper from a man who was in the room, because he was. Inside that same piece, Dean also argued for wooden figures with as few moving parts as possible, to honor the history of the art form, a position that sits a little sideways next to the twenty-effect figure he had just built. He seemed to know it.^[23] Three months later he wrote "Ventriloquism & Speech Therapy," after a therapist called him about a young girl whose frozen jaw and lips were keeping her from talking. Dean told her the girl would make a perfect ventriloquist, and offered to start teaching speech therapists how the technique worked.^[24] A disability and a discipline turned out to run on the same muscles.

He kept turning up in the community for years after that: a "regular contributor" of news items to Ventriloquist Central,^[25] a source for a Six Flags stakeout story about his old touring roommate, the magician John Moehring, who went on to appear on the Ed Sullivan Show in 1966,^[26] and, in 2010, the man who sent in a page from his own 1964 college yearbook just because someone might get a kick out of it.^[27] His business, Kriket Puppet Shows, was still answering at its own web address as late as October 2020.^[28]

One of the longer stories in this art

Most people who leave an art for thirty-eight years do not come back to it better than when they left. Dean did. He came back a working writer, a technical authority other builders wanted to interview, and a builder who solved a mechanism and then chose, on purpose, not to use it. Kentucky found a twelve-year-old with a talent for throwing his voice in January of 1955. It turned out to be one of the longer stories in this whole art.

Eyes made from painted bottle tops and Berger calling it 'Modern Art' - I'd call that the first review any of us ever got right. Thirty-eight years off and he still remembered how to hold a chisel better than most remember how to hold a grudge.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy