Paul Stadelman

Stadelman's own promotional sheet, billing "Paulstad and his alter ego Windy Higgins." From the Jimmy Vee Collection.

Most vents will tell you about the day they got the bug. Paul Stadelman is the rare one who'll tell you about the day he lied his way into his first booking, with no figure, no act, and no idea what he was doing. That's the whole man in one story: nerve first, craft close behind, and none of it wasted once he actually had it. He spent the back half of his life giving that craft away to anybody in Chicago who wanted it. Pull up a chair. Let me tell you about Paul.

A wrestler, a patrolman, and a magician called Sandu

Stadelman was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, on January 12, 1900, and ventriloquism was the last stop on a résumé that already had some mileage on it.^[3] He wrestled in the Army during the First World War, liked it enough to turn professional, and opened his own gymnasium.^[1] Somewhere in there he also worked as a merchant patrolman, and in 1927 that job put him in the middle of a pistol duel with a car-theft crew under a viaduct at two in the morning. He fired back, shot a hat clean off one man's head, and kept the hat.^[1]

Then, in the middle of the Depression, he chased a boyhood ambition and became a magician, billed as Sandu, touring small-time theaters and second-rate clubs from 1932 to 1937.^[1] He got himself known nationally for two things: a gimmick called Polka Dot Paint, which he used to produce "color" on black-and-white television sets, and an illusion called the Genie in the Bottle, a voice that seemed to pour straight out of a small bottle carried through the crowd.^[2][3] He wrote it all down too: Secrets of Sandu in 1933, Sandu Writes Again in 1934.^[3]

Two weeks

Here's the story I love best, and I'll let him tell it. "The booker asked me if I could do a 'vent' act, so I said: 'Sure!'" Stadelman was working a return date as a magician, got asked a question he didn't have an honest answer to, and answered it anyway. The booker gave him two spots on the show. Stadelman wired a dealer for a figure and spent the wait writing material and drilling lip and voice control, on an act he had never once performed.^[1]

"The manager was so enthused that he said I should junk the magic and stick to vent," he wrote. "I never did tell him that he was paying for my debut, as a ventriloquist." And then the honest part, the part that actually matters: "I learned a lot of things in those two weeks. It has taken me several years to 'unlearn' some of the mistakes."^[1] That's the whole apprenticeship system in two sentences. Bluff your way to the booking, then spend years earning it for real.

The figure that came out of that wire order was Windy Higgins, carved by Charlie Mack.^[4][5] Stadelman took a stage name to go with him, Paulstad, and a tagline he never stopped using: "Funtriloquism at its peak." His own promotional sheet closed with a line that was really a mission statement: "At last! A ventriloquist who dares to be different!"^[17]

Seventy thousand miles

In 1939, Stadelman pulled off what he called his biggest publicity stunt: he had Windy run for Governor of Kentucky. Keen Johnson, the candidate who actually won, hired the pair to travel his speaking tour, and Windy roasted every candidate on the ballot, Johnson included, on opening night. Stadelman got summoned to Johnson's hotel room that same night expecting to be fired. Instead Johnson complimented the act, then asked, with newspapermen in the room looking dead serious about it, whether Stadelman might hold Windy a little closer to the microphone, since Windy's voice didn't carry as well as his own.^[10] Stadelman never did figure out who was kidding whom.

From August 1939 to February 1941 he took Windy on a 70,000-mile tour of nine states and more than two hundred theaters, at twenty-five dollars a day, forty for two days running, complete with colored lobby blowups and film trailers ahead of every stop.^[10] The tour ended at Chicago's State-Lake Theater, on a bill with Buddy Rogers, Nick Lucas, and Judy Starr, in 1941, before television existed as a business.^[1] He played Loew's and RKO houses in New York too.^[1]

And that was just the theaters. Stadelman built a whole portfolio of sponsors: Seven Up, on radio out of Nashville; eight months for a flour mill; a year and a half for Oertel Brewery in Louisville; a year for Sealtest Dairy; a twenty-six week Chicago television run for Holsum Bread, with Windy in costume as "the Holsum Kid"; regular spots on Chicago's Super Circus. Later on, in 1959, he took a new figure, Freddie the Bear, out to Louisville to sell Fehr's Beer.^[1][12] Add nightclub runs at the Netherlands Plaza in Cincinnati, held over three separate times, two seasons of family party shows for International Harvester, and USO camp shows that took him through military and hospital installations across the Philippines during the war.^[1][3] One man, every market this trade had.

The publicity kept pace. United Press syndicated his story to more than 2,300 papers, on top of features in Life, Liberty, Telecast, TV Forecast, and the daily papers in every city he played: Chicago, Indianapolis, Louisville, Cincinnati.^[1] And in case anybody doubted his stamina, he set a world's endurance record for it: seven hours a day of ventriloquial talk, seventeen days straight, working an Olson Rug Company booth at the McCormick Place Home and Flower Show with no microphone. By one count, that ran to 1,162,400 movements of Windy's jaw. Stadelman lost five pounds over the run. Windy, the write-up noted, stayed "as chipper as ever."^[1]

The Chicago classroom

Stadelman made Chicago his home for most of his career, and his own address turned into a gathering point for the community around him.^[6] In December 1956 he inducted W.S. Berger, the man who would found Vent Haven, into something he called Windy's Club, at the Round Table in the Drake Hotel, handing him a membership card and a circular club emblem of his own design.^[9] On Wednesday afternoons in 1957, Paulstad and Windy showed up at Uptown Federal Savings on Broadway to help Chicago kids learn to save money, three to four-thirty, week after week.^[14]

The teaching went well past appearances. Stadelman ran an actual ventriloquism course at the Chicago Central YMCA, complete with a graduation dinner for his students at the Mayor's Row Restaurant, and the companion tapes for his book Ventriloquism of Today were built directly out of those classroom sessions.^[1] He also taught vent at the Top 20 Institute of Magic, which billed itself as the largest school of magic in the United States: six lessons to competence, the announcement promised, and a graduate walked out with a thirty-eight-inch figure, fully dressed, the same one used in class.^[11] And beyond the classroom, he took private students one at a time, the way a young Chicago vent named Ilene got her start.^[16] Stadelman's own claim was bigger than any of that: he said he'd begun the first school for ventriloquism in the United States.^[4][5] I'll let that stand as his claim. What isn't in dispute is that his teaching outlived him. Clinton Detweiler, writing in 1989, called it what it was: "the teaching of Paul Stadelman is legendary."^[7]

He left behind two published books, Ventriloquism and TV Ticklers and Ventriloquism of Today, plus a pair of reel-to-reel course tapes, The Alpha & Omega of Ventriloquism and Ventriloquial Polyphony, that his son Ron eventually loaned out to be digitized so people could hear Paul and Windy exactly as they sounded on the bench.^[1][3]

His signature bit was billed under the heading "Ventriloquial Virtuosity," and Stadelman's own promotional sheet described it plainly: two boxes set out for the audience, a voice planted in each one, then both voices apparently going at the same time.^[17]

Windy and company

He kept showing up at the exhibit tables too, long after the touring years slowed down. At the 1959 IBV convention, fellow members stopped by to say hello, and word around the room was that Windy was "giving a good account of himself."^[8] Here's the record of the man across four decades, in his own promotional material and on his own bookshelf.

Paul & Windy Higgins

The figure Stadelman wired for the day he bluffed his way into his first booking, carved by Charlie Mack and his partner for the rest of his career.

Photo: Garbo, Chicago, via Travalanche

Sandu, "Jack of All Tricks"

His promotional sheet from the magician years, before Windy Higgins ever entered the picture. He toured on this bill from 1932 to 1937.

Photo courtesy of Conjuring Arts, via Magicpedia

Ventriloquism of Today

Built directly out of his Chicago YMCA classes, with companion course tapes recorded from the same sessions.

Photo via Travalanche

Trudy Stadelman

Paul's wife, photographed with the figure the Finis Robinson studio built her in 1956: blonde pageboy wig, rolling eyes, and a blue satin dress.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

The circle

Craft and conscience

The road stories are where you actually meet the man. In Herrin, Illinois, an elderly deaf man who read lips sat through both the matinee and the evening show without cracking a smile, then told the manager afterward that he'd understood everything Stadelman said and not one word out of the dummy. It baffled him completely.^[10] Across the street from Max Terhune's live show in Vincennes, Indiana, Stadelman heard Terhune's crowd arrive mid-performance and had Windy start talking, in character, about missing his old pal Skully, alone in that big empty theater next door. Terhune invited them over. Word got around town that the two dummies were feuding, and it built business at both houses.^[10] After a big steak dinner with Terhune one night, Stadelman felt a belch coming on mid-routine and let it out in full, blaming it on Windy. The audience loved that part best of all.^[10] And once, before he owned the Windy he kept for the rest of his career, a heckler he'd gotten the better of came backstage, slapped the figure clean off its chair, and ran. Stadelman called that one time the illusion worked a little too well.^[10]

He was just as plainspoken about the mechanics. Kids would put an ear to the floor during his distant-voice bit and swear they could hear Windy coming up through the stairs from a cellar that didn't exist; Stadelman explained it as a trick of which ear catches a muffled sound, with the imagination doing the rest.^[10] He bored two small air holes into the back of Windy's travel case because children kept worrying about how the figure would breathe inside it.^[10] He stopped slapping Windy around for being sassy once he noticed the kids in the audience genuinely resented it on the dummy's behalf.^[10] And he turned down a paying job once, from an auctioneer who wanted him to throw fake bids into a crowd to drive prices up. Dishonest, he called it flat out, and walked.^[10]

One story he told stayed with him longer than the rest. Performing at a veterans' mental hospital in Danville, Illinois, opening with the Genie in the Bottle, he noticed one man in the front row stay through a second show, then wait for him outside afterward. The man confided that he had a "sacred cup" nobody else knew about, that he used to hear God's voice through it, and that lately he'd started hearing evil voices in it too. He wanted to know how Stadelman kept the evil voices out of his own "cup." Stadelman told him, gently and with real conviction, that God's voice would always be the stronger one. The man left relieved. Stadelman wrote afterward that he often wondered if the power of suggestion had actually helped him.^[10] That's not a magic trick story. That's a man who understood what he was actually handing people when he handed them a voice.

He picked up craft wherever he found it, too. A farmer in Dothan, Alabama, once told him about a late brother who'd thrown his voice a mile out with no stage experience at all, self-taught by straining to lift a stone too heavy for him while talking at the same time, using the strain itself to build the diaphragm pressure the trick needed.^[10] And Stadelman is the one who first told the joke about the ventriloquist whose wife had to leave the room to hear him talk in his sleep, a line that circulated among vents for years afterward, trimmed a little here, turned a different direction there, exactly the way material moves through a trade.^[10]

The last Vent-O-Rama

Stadelman had a theory about why he'd landed where he did. He said Chicago was the ventriloquism center of the world, and pointed out that Edgar Bergen, the Great Lester, and Jimmy Nelson had all started hurling their voices right there.^[1] He also served as president of the International Ventriloquist Association and founded Vent-O-Rama, the annual gathering that grew into one of this trade's real family reunions.^[3]

At the four-day 1970 Vent-O-Rama in Colon, Michigan, a teenager named Gary Koepke entered the junior vent contest. Stadelman told him that if he kept practicing regularly, he'd probably win it the following year. Stadelman died that next spring, of cancer, on March 18, 1971.^[3] The 1971 Vent-O-Rama was held as the Paul Stadelman Memorial Vent-O-Rama, and Gary Koepke won the junior contest and the originality award, just like Stadelman said he would.^[1] In 2016, Cybervent put his name on the working list for its Legends Collectors Cards, the community's own homemade pantheon.^[15]

Windy Higgins wasn't the only figure in that house. In 1956, the workshop of Finis Robinson built Trudy Stadelman a figure of her own: blonde pageboy wig, sleeping and winking eyes, rolling eyes, raised eyebrows, dressed in blue satin and high-heeled slippers.^[13] Paul talked his way into this trade with a lie and two weeks to make it true. He spent the rest of his life making sure the people around him, students, kids saving nickels at a bank window, a man in a hospital who needed to hear that the good voice wins, never had to bluff their way through any of it.

He shot a hat clean off a car thief and kept it as a souvenir, which tells you Paul always understood that a good prop is worth more than the story behind it, present company included.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy