Tom Farrell

Tom Farrell with his gang, the crew he called on for schools, retirement homes, and corporate functions across Cincinnati. Photo: Ventriloquist Central Blog

Here's a story that starts at a Rexall drugstore counter and ends up on a shelf at Vent Haven Museum. In between: a radio talent show that rolled through Cincinnati, a twenty-two year gap nobody would have blamed him for leaving closed, and twenty-three thank-you letters he said were worth more than any check he ever cashed. Pull up a chair. This is Tom Farrell.

A drugstore doll nobody could buy

Tom Farrell was born July 16, 1936, in Cincinnati, and Cincinnati never really let go of him.^[1] At fourteen he caught Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy on the Chase and Sanborn Hour on the radio, walked to the library, checked out Bergen's own book on ventriloquism, and practiced. And practiced.^[2]

A local Rexall drugstore had exactly the figure a vent-struck kid needed: a Charlie-type doll with a pull string in the neck, called Dapper Dan. You couldn't buy Dapper Dan. The only way to get him was a store loyalty punch card, filled up purchase by purchase.^[2] So Farrell did what any future marketer would do: he talked his entire family and his entire neighborhood into shopping at that one Rexall until his card was full.^[2] A fourteen-year-old ran a loyalty promotion on his own block to win a doll the store never intended to sell. I've built whole careers on less imagination than that.

Ted Mack came through town

Once he had the doll, Farrell dressed him a little different, gave him a new name, Jerry McDuff, and inside a single year had won an amateur contest in school and gone on to perform when the Ted Mack radio show came to Cincinnati.^[2] A punch card and a library book, and twelve months later he was already a working act.

By 1953 he was seventeen, in the room when the SAM/IBV national convention landed in his own hometown.^[3] A photograph survives from that day: W.S. Berger out front holding "Skinny" in a tuxedo, Max Terhune at Berger's side with "Elmer," and young Tom Farrell in front of them holding Jerry McDuff, the one figure in the whole shot that actually belonged to the kid holding it. Everybody else's figure came out of Berger's own collection for the afternoon.^[4] The photo ran later on the cover of The Oracle.^[4] By his own account years afterward, Jerry McDuff had by then gone to live at Vent Haven Museum, Farrell's own contribution to the family record.^[2]

A whole life around two day jobs and a family business

The Vent Haven ConVENTion kept pulling him back. In July 1960 the club newsletter noted Farrell coming through, giving more shows than he had before, and doing something particular: he traded in a figure he no longer used for one he admired in the museum's own collection, then left the old one behind for good.^[5] That November he was on the road with a brand-new figure, Jimmy DeWitt, working a festival party for St. Vivian's parish.^[6]

None of this was ever his day job. Farrell performed on two Cincinnati children's television programs, the Len Gorrian Show and the Skipper Ryle Show, while working for the B&O Railroad and then Cincinnati Electronics.^[1] Later he and his wife Donna ran two businesses together for more than thirty years, Echoes and Shapes Ceramics and Echo Video Productions, and he still found time to put a figure on his knee and go do a show.^[1] That's the part of this trade nobody puts on a business card. Most of the people who kept it alive were doing it around a real job, not instead of one.

Twenty-two years, and twenty-three thousand dollars

Then it stopped. For twenty-two years Farrell didn't do a school show.^[7] In the spring of 2010, a few months shy of his seventy-fourth birthday, he picked the Maher Course back up as a refresher and booked one anyway.^[7] He called it a huge success, his first in twenty-two years, and gave the credit to what he called his refreshing refresher course and his recaptured talent.^[7]

The figure on his knee that day carried its own history: an Insull-carved head named Jerry DeWitt, once owned by Jimmy Wallis, refurbished by Kevin Detweiler, and painted by Clinton Detweiler. Four sets of hands worked on that figure before a fifth grade class ever laid eyes on it.^[8] The kids already knew Jeff Dunham and Terry Fator by name, and a couple of them had already been out to Vent Haven themselves.^[8] Two days later the thank-you notes arrived: twenty-three of them, on art paper, with drawings and pop-ups. Farrell put his own number on what they were worth to him. I'm not arguing with his math.^[8]

For years the whole outfit had a name and a home online: Tom and The Gang, billed in the Maher Studios directory as "Comedy Magic and Ventriloquism," a show built around "amazing magic and crazy characters."^[9] The website is gone now. tomandthegang.com stopped resolving in August 2026, though the December 2022 snapshot is preserved on the Internet Archive.^[10]

Tom Farrell died September 30, 2021, at eighty-five, in the city where he'd been performing since before Eisenhower was president. Forty-five years married to Donna.^[1] A ventriloquist who never stopped being a marketer first, not really, not since the day he figured out he could get a whole neighborhood shopping at the same drugstore on his say-so.

Twenty-three thank-you notes from fifth graders got him back on stage after twenty-two years. Cheaper than a Rexall punch card, and it worked just as well.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy