Tommy Atkins

Tommy Atkins introduces Compatible Pete at a General Electric exhibit. From the Jimmy Vee Collection.

She wasn't born Tommy Atkins. She was born Ruth Buckley, and when the 1953 directory of American ventriloquists went to print, it filed her under the stage name and then corrected itself in the very next breath: "Atkins, Tommy, see Buckley, Ruth."^[1] Pull up a chair. This one starts at a receptionist's desk in Schenectady and ends in a cowboy hat at a make-believe Ghost Town, and in between, General Electric put her on more airplanes than most performers of her era ever saw.

A receptionist writes her own show

Ruth Buckley graduated Syracuse University in 1947 and took a job as a receptionist at WRGB, the General Electric-owned television station in Schenectady.^[2] Within a year she was writing and producing her own program.^[2] In 1949 she went on the air herself, WRGB's first female ventriloquist to perform on television.^[3] The show, "Tommy Atkins, The Story Lady," ran Monday afternoons into the early 1950s: Tommy told a fairy tale, children in the studio drew what they imagined the characters looked like, and kids watching at home mailed in their own drawings for a chance to appear on the following week's broadcast.^[10] In 1950 she gave the show a puppet, dressed as a nurse's aide for the American Red Cross. She called her Cookie.^[2]

Selling General Electric from the sky

When the television show ended, Tommy Atkins did not leave show business. She took Cookie on the road for General Electric instead, and by 1958 the trade press was calling her "America's Foremost Lady Industrial Ventriloquist," crediting her with more than 150,000 air miles logged entertaining at GE trade shows, plant open houses, and sales promotions, from the top of the Mark Hopkins in San Francisco to the top of the Empire State Building in New York.^[7] Four years later a Scotia car dealer's newspaper ad put the total past 200,000 miles and called her one of three recognized lady ventriloquists in the country.^[10] She worked General Electric's exhibit at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory and its display in the Merrill Lynch, Pierce & Fenner concourse at Grand Central Terminal.^[8] For Revere Copper & Brass she performed with a miniature figure dressed as Paul Revere, three-cornered hat and all.^[9] And for the farm trade she used a second figure entirely: a corporate mascot named Compatible Pete, carved by Foy Brown expressly to talk to farmers about electricity.^[3][4] Cookie earned her own honors along the way. The Saturday Evening Post named her "Miss Post Influential of 1958," and in 1960 the Worthington Corporation dressed her up and named her "Miss Worthy Washington" for a sales pitch aimed right back at General Electric.^[7][9] In 1957, on a swing through Los Angeles, Tommy and her husband John detoured through Las Vegas and caught Edgar Bergen's one-hour show at the Sahara. They ended up photographed with Bergen and Charlie McCarthy afterward.^[6]

A member in good standing

Tommy Atkins joined the trade's own club and worked it. She showed up in W.S. Berger's first world census of ventriloquists, the IBV Directory of August 1953, filed under New York.^[1] In 1956 she sponsored a new member into the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists, Frank J. Mauriello of Schenectady, the same year she reported her General Electric tour swinging through San Francisco, Denver, St. Louis, Sioux City, Cedar Rapids, Hartford, and Buffalo.^[5] Two years later, when the IBV's own secretary Jimmy Jorden couldn't make the June 20th business meeting, Tommy Atkins took the minutes herself, Cookie in hand.^[7] On the magic side of the business she co-founded and served as past president of the Capital District Ring 186 of the International Brotherhood of Magicians, founded its All Magic Day, and received the Society's Merlin Award. She also carried memberships in Puppeteers of America and the North American Association of Ventriloquists.^[2]

Deputy Sheriff, Lady Marshal

Around 1955, Tommy Atkins Productions opened for business in Scotia, a booking agency she and her husband John ran between General Electric contracts, playing schools, car dealers, county fairs, and charity events with titles like "A Trip to Outer Space," starring Cookie and Oogie the Astronaut, and "Cookie's Christmas Castle."^[10] She gave hours to children's and veterans' hospitals, to the American Red Cross, and to WRGB's own Muscular Dystrophy and St. Jude telethons.^[2][10]

The second half of her career belonged to a cowboy hat. For thirty years she played Deputy Sheriff, or Lady Marshal, Tommy Atkins at Storytown, U.S.A., later renamed The Great Escape, working the Ghost Town section alongside Marshal "Windy Bill" McKay.^[2] Several times a day, with Cookie and Oogie in tow, the two of them fought off the bank robbers, then deputized whatever children happened to be watching with a tin star apiece.^[11] McKay and Buckley kept that act running five decades. When McKay died in 2011, the tributes that came in remembered his partner by name: Lady Marshal Tommy Atkins, a stranger's memory of somebody else's childhood by then.^[11]

McKay, Oogie & Tommy

Marshal "Windy Bill" McKay and Tommy Atkins with Oogie between them. For five decades this trio ran Ghost Town at Storytown, U.S.A., later The Great Escape.

Via "Doc Circe Died For Our Sins"

Cookie, after Tommy

Fellow ventriloquist and magician Bob Carroll inherited Tommy's act. Cookie eventually crossed the block on eBay, photographed here for the listing.

Via "Doc Circe Died For Our Sins"

Tommy Atkins died February 22, 2000, at Ellis Hospital, having worked well into her seventies.^[10] Compatible Pete's own trail ran on longer: from Tommy Atkins to Bob Carroll, her protege, to a collector named Paul Gross, then to another named Chance Wolf, each new owner keeping the figure's story attached to the wood.^[4] The 1953 directory that filed her under "Atkins, Tommy, see Buckley, Ruth" had it exactly right. It just took the rest of her career to explain why anyone needed both names.

Filed as 'Atkins, Tommy, see Buckley, Ruth' in 1953, which is archivist for 'we know, we know, just read on.' Two hundred thousand miles for General Electric and Cookie never once got her own seat.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy