Steve Hurst

Steve, the day the award finally caught up with him. Photo: Ventriloquist Central Blog.

For seven straight years, one man wrote every caption, posted every photograph, and answered every email about the largest private collection of ventriloquist figures in America. He had never once held any of it. Steve Hurst ran Ventriloquist Central from twelve hundred miles away, working off nothing but the pictures his partner mailed him, and it never seemed to strike either of them as an odd way to run things.^[1] Pull up a chair. This is the story of the guy on the other end of the line, and it turns out he had a whole career before anybody ever learned his name.

The dummy he couldn't afford

Steve started in ventriloquism at fourteen, the way a lot of kids do, then set it down and didn't pick it back up until his late thirties.^[2] By his own account the reason he eventually built his own figures wasn't romance. It was money. He remembered flipping through a Maher catalog and falling for a figure called HAL #108, loaded with every extra he wanted. Fully dressed out, it ran over $500.00, and this was the late 1960s. "It might as well have been 5 million," he said.^[2] He tried building his own instead, and gave up on it, by his own count, a dozen times or more before he ever finished one.^[2]

The thing that finally taught him to finish was a man named Ray Guyll. Steve met him in 1996 and spent years afterward showing up most Saturdays to learn figure building at Guyll's bench, one lesson at a time.^[3] He wrote up the whole apprenticeship years later in a memoir he titled "Saturdays With Ray Guyll."^[2] Guyll's other lesson landed slower. Steve once bought a Brant Gilmer dog figure "strictly because I liked it," with no character in mind at all. It took him roughly ten years to finally land on who that dog was.^[4] The dog became Charlie Dog, and Steve worked with him for years afterward.^[5] Guyll had told him, kindly at the time and more honestly later, that his very first build "needed a dummy with character," because it had none in its face at all.^[4] It took Steve a decade and a dozen false starts to actually prove him right.

A ventriloquist first

Before he was anybody's webmaster, Steve worked kidshows around Western Washington, advertising the way a jobbing performer actually advertised in the 1990s: party planner directories, parent guides, and a promotional slot on the local cable access channel.^[6] His one surviving piece of tape from that run is a 1996 holiday greeting he arranged with the cable company. He wanted his phone number on screen too, but they'd only run the name. "Everything went okay," he said, "except... they spelled my last name wrong. They refunded my money, however, I still got a couple of jobs from the exposure."^[6] In 1997 he was at a ventriloquist convention in Las Vegas when Ray Guyll introduced him to Jimmy Nelson.^[7] A few years later Steve moved to Oklahoma, started his own business, and stopped performing in public. The man who'd go on to run a website with him for over a decade, Dan Willinger, later admitted he'd known Steve was a ventriloquist the whole time and had never once seen him work.^[6]

The website nobody else could have built

Steve met a figure collector named Dan Willinger once, at a ConVENTion in October 2006, and the two of them built Ventriloquist Central together from two different cities from that point on, Steve in Oklahoma and Dan in Boston.^[8] For the next seven years, every photograph and every description of Willinger's collection ran through Steve first: Dan handled the figures and wrote the copy, Steve edited it, hosted it, and put it online from 1,200 miles away.^[1] Then in the summer of 2013, Willinger flew Steve out to see the actual figures in person for the first time.^[1] Seven years of captions, and it took that long for the man writing them to see what he'd been writing about.

What the two of them built became, in Willinger's own words, "one of the largest, if not the largest" website devoted to the art of ventriloquism, and what started as one collector's showcase turned into what he called "a second job for the two of us."^[9] Steve's real day job was website and business consulting, the kind of work he normally charged clients "hundreds and even thousands of dollars" for.^[10] When he sat for a live call-in interview about what actually makes a website work, Willinger made a point of saying so on the air: for their own listeners, the whole hour was free of charge.^[10] A few years later, writing under his own name for once instead of Dan's, Steve put the underlying philosophy in writing. Giving your services away for free, he said, was something he'd "been preaching for years," aimed straight at ventriloquists, magicians, and any other performer who kept getting asked to work for nothing.^[11]

Teaching the next builder

In 2007 Steve packaged everything Guyll had taught him into "The Ultimate Guide To Building Your Own Ventriloquist Figure, Volume 1," an eleven disc set of CDs and DVDs covering sculpting, casting, painting, and mechanizing a figure start to finish, over four hours of it.^[12] He'd been strictly a private builder up to that point. His first figure sold to the public went to a buyer named Mehdi in France in 2009, who wrote back, "Your little boy is very amazing! I send you pics of me and my new friend!"^[13] Buyers followed from the UK and South Africa, and fellow builder Gary Koepke gave the course the endorsement that mattered most in a trade that had always taught itself from books: "You can actually see projects being worked on and see how he handles them, instead of just reading about it."^[14]

The clearest proof the course worked wasn't a testimonial. It was a student named Peter Leger, who built a figure called Johnny from Steve's course, then started sculpting a second one while writing, "I plan on starting to do shows in mid April and when Tony is done I plan on doing it full time."^[15] Tony turned out to be Tony Bag of Donuts, a New York mobster whose kids painted his gun pink for Father's Day. A beginner who had never heard of Ray Guyll's rule, character before carving, worked it out for himself anyway, and went professional on the strength of his second figure.^[15]

Who cares about the hands

Steve and Dan ran a public, good-natured argument for years over what actually matters on a figure. Willinger was fixated on hands as the detail that identifies a maker. Steve found the whole obsession funny. "He always laughs when I show them, even in the videos that I make for the site," Willinger wrote. "He always says, 'who cares about the hands!!!??'"^[16] Steve's own position, argued as a performer rather than a collector, was plain: "If you are a performer then it makes absolutely no difference who made any part of the ventriloquist figure, so long as the figure is complete and you can give the illusion that the figure is talking for itself."^[17] Willinger put the whole thing to a public vote on the blog: "who's right, Steve or me???"^[17] Nobody ever settled it in print, which is about right for two men who ran a website together for the better part of a decade without a real falling out on record.

For a man who said the details didn't matter, Steve had a builder's eye when it counted. Restoring a figure for a collector named Lynn Hoskins, he expected to find a Pinxy signature stamped where Pinxy always signed his work, on the bottom of the neck. It wasn't there. He nearly called the figure a Marshall instead, until he took the whole head apart and found "Pinxy" carved into the back of it, a spot nobody in the trade knew to check.^[18] The man who claimed the hands didn't matter found a maker's mark nobody else had thought to look for.

The circle

Nobody runs a trade this size alone. Here's who Steve built it with.

The award, and the goodbye

In July 2012, Steve and Dan received the W.S. Berger Distinguished Service Award together at the Vent Haven Convention, for the work they'd done promoting ventriloquism through the site. Steve wasn't there to accept it. Dan carried the plaque back and told the room, "I only wish my friend, and 'brother by another mother,' had been able to be on that stage with me. However, I can guarantee you that Steve is basking in this glory anyway!!"^[19]

Steve Hurst died on or shortly before May 8, 2020.^[20] Daniel Jay Robison's tribute on Cybervent remembered him plainly: "I can't remember which ConVENTion I first met Steve at. But let me tell you this, I was a fan from the first moment I met him. That contagious smile and laugh, and he never had anything bad to say about anybody. He loved his beer."^[20] Jimmy knew him too. "Steve Hurst was a ventriloquist and the webmaster for Vent Central," he says. "He was a friend of mine and a great guy. He sold me a couple of his figures before he passed away of cancer."^[21] No exact date, no stated cause, just a smile people remembered and a website that carried more of this trade's day to day conversation than anywhere else, for years.

The smile people remembered

The photograph that ran with his farewell tribute: "that contagious smile and laugh," in Daniel Jay Robison's words.

Photo via Cybervent (ventriloquist.org)

HAL #108 ran over five hundred bucks in the sixties and Steve called it five million. Funny how a man who couldn't afford a dummy ended up describing everybody else's for seven years without laying a hand on one.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy