Ron Blaskett

Ron with the whole crew, Gerry Gee front and center in his own jersey. Photo: Ventriloquist Central Blog

Folks, in September of 1956 Australian television switched itself on for the very first time, timed so the country would be ready to broadcast the Melbourne Olympics two months later.^[1] That same week, at the Melbourne Royal Show, a ventriloquist and his wife stood in front of a brand new camera and became the first vents Australia ever saw on the small screen.^[1] That was Ron Blaskett and his wife Merle. It is a hell of a way to start a story, being first at something an entire country is watching for the first time. Pull up a chair. I want to tell you about a boy from Melbourne, a woman with her own stage career, and a woodcarver in Chicago who never once met either of them, and how the three of them built one of the acts of Australian show business.

Before the wooden boy

Ron Blaskett performed ventriloquism while he was serving in the Australian Army, years before his home country owned a television set to put him on.^[2] He married Merle, and the two of them built a genuine husband and wife act, working English figures made by Len Insull before Gerry Gee ever existed. A photograph from around 1955 shows exactly that: Ron and Merle with their Insulls, an earlier chapter almost nobody remembers because the chapter that came after it got so much bigger.^[3]

Merle had her own history on real stages, too. Her last appearance before she stepped back to raise a family was at the Theatre Royal, Brisbane, and she kept turning up on television whenever the act needed her.^[4] Write that down: this was two performers, not one performer with a wife standing off to the side. Ventriloquist Central said it plainly years later: Merle Blaskett was a performing ventriloquist in her own right, not a spouse footnote.^[5]

A letter to Chicago

By late 1956, Ron had a figure in the works with, in the Brotherhood's own words, "the internationally famous Frank Marshall of Chicago."^[1] Marshall built him to order and shipped him across the Pacific. What came back was a boy named Gerry Gee, and he arrived at almost the exact moment Australian television itself arrived.^[1]

Ron was already an active member of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists, and that same year he sponsored a brand new Australian into the club, Trevor Thom of Sunshine, Melbourne.^[6] He wasn't just importing a Chicago carver's name for himself. He was building the club's presence in his own country at the same time.

Gerry Gee runs the show

What happened next reads like a highlight reel. By March of 1957, the newspapers were reporting that Gerry Gee was "stealing the show,"^[7] and by May, Ron was drawing "a great deal of newspaper publicity" for his work with the figure.^[8] By September he was pulling in five hundred pieces of fan mail a week for his "offsider," his own word for Gerry Gee, and GTV-9 had already picked up its option on him twice. That year he also launched "Do You Trust Your Wife?," a husband and wife quiz format built around his figures, essentially the Edgar Bergen radio format ported straight to Melbourne television within a year of Gerry Gee's arrival. He put out a thirteen page instructional booklet too, "You Can Be A Ventriloquist," four lessons, his own photo and Gerry Gee's on the cover.^[9]

By September he had his own program on Channel Nine, presented with a whole "family of dolls," Gerry Gee, Adolphus Twerk, and Agnes Arnott. Gerry Gee also worked the commercial side of the business: modeling for a lingerie parade at a Melbourne department store, and getting himself sawn in half by a magician for a laugh.^[10]

By 1958 the whole household was in the act. Ron's own son was doing his own vent routine at his school in Ivanhoe and brought the house down. Merle kept up her occasional television spots. The family sat for a full color magazine cover with all three vent figures at Christmas.^[4] "Gerry Gee's Happy Show" ran five nights a week on GTV Channel Nine, tied to a children's charity club run with the Spastic Children's Society of Victoria that once drew almost twenty seven thousand people to a single meeting at the Zoo. When the show needed a spectacle for a Victorian Anti-Cancer Campaign fundraiser at Como Park Oval, a helicopter landed in the middle of the crowd, and Ron stepped out holding Gerry Gee.^[11] That is not marketing copy. That is an actual newspaper report from 1958.

In 1958 Ron and Merle even built one figure themselves, a baby boy, no Marshall involved that time, just the two of them at the workbench.^[12] By 1959 the act was running eight television programs a week, and Merle returned after seven months away to reform the husband and wife team.^[13] The full TV family by then was Gerry Gee, Gerry Gee Jr, Agnes Arnott, Tiny, Brocky, and Willie Ross, with Ron blowing a trumpet while Gerry Gee read the sheet music, and Merle appearing weekly with her own figure, Sandra Simpkins.^[14] A competition ran on air that year to find the sharpest child viewer at working Gerry Gee Jr, and a Melbourne reviewer wrote that Ron's combined act was as clever as any ventriloquism he'd seen anywhere in the world.^[25]

By 1960 Ron had been made Associate Producer at GTV-9, on top of his own performing schedule. He and Merle spent eight weeks in Japan that spring, and he cut his first record, on the Astor label.^[15] Gerry Gee and Gerry Gee Jr even worked a novelty television spot rigged as marionettes, strung from above by the hands, alongside Wallace and O'Rourke, the Hollywood puppeteers who had worked on the film Lili.^[16] By September, Ron had gone national on the Graham Kennedy Show and signed a three year contract for his own nightly program, in a country its own trade press had been calling a vent desert only two years earlier.^[17]

The eyes, not the mouth

When Ron wanted a new face built, he didn't leave anything to chance. He had George Havrillay, a graphic artist at Channel Nine, paint exactly how he wanted the figure to look, in Ron's words "more a painting than a drawing," then posted the artwork off to Chicago in 1959. Frank Marshall worked from it, and by every account got it exactly right.^[18]

Ron also had an opinion about why the figures worked on an audience at all, and it came from a performer who had actually switched makers mid career. He had started on the English Insull figures and moved to an American Marshall, and Ron said the difference in how children responded to the two was down to one thing: Frank Marshall's eyes.^[18] Not the paint job. Not the price. The eyes.

The TV family

No act like this runs alone. Here is the crew that shared Ron's set, and what became of the boy who started it.

Gerry Gee

The figure that made Ron a household name across Victoria, carved in Chicago by Frank Marshall and shipped across the Pacific in time for Australia's first television broadcasts, September 1956.

Photo: Shane Jusseit, via Find A Grave

Gerry Gee, decades later

A Gerry Gee figure, listed as having belonged to Ron, eventually crossed an auction block. Even a figure that carried a nightly television show ends up, sooner or later, as a lot number.

Photo via Invaluable

Ron and Merle, 2015

Ron's ninety third birthday, celebrated with family and two of the original Marshall figures brought out for the occasion. A portrait of the two of them with Gerry Gee hangs on the wall behind.

Photo: Ventriloquist Central Blog

The circle

Nobody builds a fifty six year act by themselves. Here is Ron's world: the carver, the wife who was a performer in her own right, the figures, and the friend down under who spent years chasing one of them.

One of Ron's figures, a female figure, was sold years before anyone thought to ask where she went. His friend Colin Williams spent years afterward trying to track her down for the record.^[23] As far as this archive knows, she was never found.

Ninety years old, working clubs and nursing homes

Ron first called it quits in 1999. His fans wouldn't let him stay retired, and he came back to work the nostalgia circuit: clubs, reunions, nursing homes.^[20] And in those nursing homes he found the one thing about this art that matters more than any rating or fan letter count. "At some of the homes, people who haven't spoken for years through dementia are suddenly talking to the doll," he told the Herald Sun, smiling.^[20] He wasn't making a clinical claim. He was a performer reporting exactly what he saw, night after night, in front of people the rest of the world had stopped reaching.

He retired for good in November 2012, at ninety years old, seventy six years after he started and fifty six years after Frank Marshall shipped him Gerry Gee.^[20] "I had to give up because Gerry Gee is starting to think I'm real," he told the papers, and gave his final show at Knox.^[20] The Herald Sun called him "Aussie TV's first and foremost ventriloquist" on the way out the door, and thought him to be the world's oldest working ventriloquist at the time.^[20] After national television, Japan, a record deal, and half a century with the same wooden face on his knee, nobody in Australia was going to argue.

He kept the figures at home, and he kept Merle. The two of them marked seventy years married on the thirty first of August, with two of the original Marshall figures, Gerry Gee and Sandra Simpkins, brought out for the photographs.^[21] Around those same years, friends down under photographed Ron with yet another Frank Marshall figure living quietly in an Australian collection, proof of just how far the Chicago shop's reach had gone.^[24]

In April 2015, on his ninety third birthday, the family gathered again. Merle was living with dementia by then, and when she saw Sandra Simpkins, the figure she had performed with for years, she came alive. Ron and Merle closed the afternoon the way they had closed a thousand shows together: a musical duet, "I'll String Along With You," Gerry Gee, as one guest in the room put it, "full of his usual cheek."^[22]

Ron Blaskett died on April 14, 2018, one day after his ninety sixth birthday.^[19] His memorial calls him an entertainer and ventriloquist, and records his Second AIF service number, V501528, the young soldier underneath the television star.^[19] But the description that says the most is the simplest one, the one his own country used without needing to explain it any further: "the father of Gerry Gee."^[19]

Fifty six years with the same partner and Ron never once complained about Gerry's wages, his top billing, or his refusal to age a single day.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy