William Henry James Shaw

A Shaw walking figure, Chicago, circa 1900. Photo: Potter & Potter Auctions.

Here's a strange thing about this business, folks: the man who built the figure can leave behind less than the figure does. William Henry James Shaw is a case in point. Every figure of his we know about survives in some collector's cabinet or some museum's drawer. The man who built them left a name, a death date, and not one photograph of his own face. That's not a complaint. It's just how the attention worked in this trade. So pull up a chair, and let's talk about William Henry James Shaw, and about all the people who got their start because he was there.

A mannequin man who also made figures

Shaw came from a place the record calls Victoria, Missouri, and his real trade was window displays. He built mannequins and mechanical wax figures, the kind you'd see posed behind glass at a department store or in a wax museum modeled on Tussaud's.^[1] Ventriloquist figures were a sideline off that bench, built the same way the shop-window men built everything else: wood and papier-mâché over a rigid frame, made to hold real clothes and stand up straight. His catalog, by his own boast, made the world's best.^[1] Nobody in this trade gets to say that about themselves without somebody checking. Dan Willinger, the collector who has handled the most of Shaw's surviving work, calls Shaw's mannequin-and-wax-figure background a third distinct doorway into this craft, alongside furniture carving and antiques dealing.^[2] A man spends his days posing wax and cloth in a shop window, and somewhere along the way he starts building little wooden people that talk. Makes sense to me.

The shop itself ran out of Chicago. Potter & Potter, the Chicago auction house, has cataloged a Shaw walking figure straight as "Chicago: W.H.J. Shaw, ca. 1900."^[3] And sixty years after he bought from the man, the ventriloquist Augustus Rapp still remembered exactly where the shop was: he called Shaw "the Chicago magical manufacturer of the nineties" in his own 1951 recollections, and said buying two of Shaw's figures was where his own vent career actually started.^[4] Rapp's verdict on the business, in his own words: "it takes a lot more than a dummy, some bad jokes and an overstuffed ego to be a ventriloquist."^[4] Sixty years in and he still called himself just a Vent. I like that kind of honesty in a man.

The hands and the leather mouth

Here's how you spot a Shaw figure today, if one crosses your path. The mouth is leather, hinged and soft, not a carved wooden slot jaw. The hands carry stylized, almost sculptural fingers, the kind of hands a window-display man would carve because that's the hand he already knew how to make.^[5] Those two marks sit on the parts almost nobody replaces when a figure gets restored. A restorer will repaint a face and rewig a head without a second thought. Hardly anyone re-carves the fingers.^[6] Willinger has even used the small, easy-to-miss parts to settle an argument on at least one figure: the winker, the little untouched sliver of original paint, came back not-black, so he wouldn't call a repainted head a former Black figure on faith alone. He said so plainly and left the question open rather than force an answer.^[6] That's the right way to handle a figure you can't fully account for.

He also solved a real engineering problem his own way. Most figures of this era rode on a head stick held loose with a rubber band, string, or a spring, and the head wobbled until the operator's hand steadied it. Shaw built an actual lock: a foot-long screw at the bottom of the head stick that seated into a scissor-type catch on the body board. Slide the arm over, and the head locks flush. You could even pick the whole figure up by the head stick once it was latched.^[7] The corpus this page draws from knows of exactly one other true locking head stick from this whole era. Everybody else made do with a rubber band.

The banjo nobody cataloged

One surviving Shaw figure, photographed for a 2015 estate sale, turned up laid next to a five-string open-back banjo in the auction photograph, a detail the actual lot description never once mentions.^[8] Whether that banjo belonged to the figure or just got set down beside it for the photo, somebody thought to put them together, and it isn't the only time it happened. Three years earlier, W.S. Berger himself had gone looking for information on a lost poster of the performer Billy F. Jones: five figures lined up, banjo in hand, and every one of them, Berger wrote, was "of the vintage of W.H.J. Shaw."^[9] Two separate sightings, decades apart, and the same instrument keeps showing up next to this man's work. Somebody out there could probably still answer Berger's question. Nobody ever wrote back.

Where the careers started

Shaw wasn't building for the biggest names of his era so much as he was building the figures that got people into this business in the first place. Waldo Mason toured Lyceum halls, theaters, and schools through the 1890s working a figure called Tommy, made by Shaw, and Mason kept at it until he was in his eighties.^[15] Orin McKnight, the stage name of a vaudeville "distant voice" ventriloquist born Ormsby MacKnight Mitchel, worked a Shaw figure called Jimmie.^[16] Small world moment: his birth name honored a Civil War general, the same general Fort Mitchell, Kentucky is named for, which happens to be where the Vent Haven Museum sits.^[16]

Then there's the story I like best. Harry Lester, the man who would become the Great Lester, started his career at twenty with two figures: one from a Chicago magic supply house, and a papier-mâché boy out of Shaw's shop that he converted into a girl so he'd get two acts out of it.^[13] Both figures were stolen off a streetcar not long after, which is where Lester's own story goes in a completely different direction. But for a little while, before any of that happened, one of the figures that started a legend's career came off this man's bench. A few years later, up in Buffalo, a performer named John Hunniford got his own start the same way: three papier-mâché figures "from the vintage of the late W.H.J. Shaw," working steady as an inside lecturer at Lynn's Museum until the place closed.^[14] Two careers, one in Chicago and one in Buffalo, both beginning on secondhand Shaw figures nobody thought to keep track of at the time.

Both sides of a segregated stage

Some of what came off Shaw's bench went straight into minstrelsy, the blackface variety acts that filled out turn-of-the-century bills. His catalog carried that line under the era's own blunt language, and this page won't reprint it.^[10] What the record also shows is a very different customer. John W. Cooper was one of the very few Black ventriloquists working the vaudeville circuits at the time, having broken into the white-dominated business during a 1901 actors' strike.^[17] By 1903 he billed himself the Black Napoleon of Ventriloquism, and his working set that year was two walking figures, an old man who worked with a crutch, and two boy figures, one Black and one white. Every one of them came off Shaw's bench.^[12] A figure maker in Victoria, Missouri doesn't get to choose who buys out of his catalog. Shaw's catalog reached both ends of a stage that was, at the time, sharply divided by color, and I think that's worth knowing plainly rather than skating past.

A surviving minstrel-line figure

One of Shaw's catalog figures built for the minstrel trade, complete down to the tweed Norfolk jacket, checked waistcoat, and striped stockings of the period costume.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

A figure that shows its age

Offered at Crown Auction Company's October 2016 sale, this example wears a century-plus of handling honestly: worn paint, a coarse original wig, and a body that has clearly worked for a living.

Photo via WorthPoint

The scissor catch

The business end of Shaw's own head-lock: a long screw seated into a scissor-type catch on the body board. One of only two true locking head sticks the record turns up from this whole era.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

An honest maybe

Willinger offered this one with a question mark built right into his own title: "...Shaw???" A Philadelphia body marking doesn't rule Shaw out, since a figure can be built in one city and sold in another, but nobody's calling it settled.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

What's left of him

A complete accounting of Shaw's surviving figures would fill its own catalog. His shop's oldest documented sale is also its best: the opening lot of the 2015 Willinger estate sale, a Shaw figure dated 1890 to 1910, brought $1,250 against a $1,200 to $1,800 estimate, one of only two lots in that entire sale to meet its own numbers.^[1] A weathered example crossed the block again at Crown Auction Company in October 2016.^[11] Potter & Potter in Chicago, Shaw's own hometown auction house, has sold at least two more: the walking figure pictured at the top of this page, and a 1910s figure with a single mouth movement plus a water-squirting gag built in, which sold for an estimated $600 to $900 in their 2017 Winter Magic sale.^[18] And in 1987, ninety-two years after a Shaw papier-mâché figure named Mose was made, the ventriloquist Paul Barth and his brother Albert, who had worked Mose between them for about thirty-five years, sent him to the Vent Haven Museum to close out his working life for good.^[19]

Shaw died on November 15, 1929. Nobody wrote down when he was born, and nothing turned up in this research that fills that in honestly, so this page won't guess.^[20] What outlasted him is the same thing that outlasts every maker in this trade: the work, still turning up in estate sales and museum drawers a century later, still doing the job it was built to do. A man doesn't need his own photograph on file when his figures keep introducing him for free.

No photo of Shaw survives, but I say a man's face is optional when his hands built half this trade's first act. Wood and papier-mache outlasted the boaster who bragged his catalog was the world's best, and folks, the catalog won that argument.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy