W.S. Berger

Berger and one of his family, dressed for the occasion. Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog.

Every family has the relative who didn't perform, didn't carve, didn't write the act, and somehow ended up at the center of everything anyway. In our family, that's W.S. Berger. He never made a living on a stage. He ran a tile company. And because he wrote a letter a day for forty years and couldn't say no to a figure that needed a home, this art has a permanent address today. Pull up a chair. Let me tell you about William Shakespeare Berger.

A tragedian's son with a fist full of greasepaint

His father, Geza Berger, was a playwright, journalist, and Shakespearean actor who later covered the First World War as a correspondent for a Cincinnati paper.^[2] That's the whole explanation for the name. As a boy, W.S. would watch his father rehearse and get bored out of his mind, until Geza would make a little hand puppet out of his own fist, greasepaint, and a colored handkerchief and give it a voice. That was the first ventriloquism William Shakespeare Berger ever saw, and he never got over it.^[2]

He was also, as a kid, a magic bug who trailed Alexander Herrmann through Cincinnati's Sixth Street Market watching him pull rabbits out of customers' shopping baskets.^[2] At fifteen he bought up every discount vent book he could find and came away more confused than when he started. He kept at it anyway.^[2] In 1894, at fifteen or sixteen, he started at the Cambridge Tile Manufacturing Company of Cincinnati sweeping floors, was promoted after he found ten missing cents in a ledger nobody else had caught, and eventually retired as head of the company more than fifty years later.^[2][9] That's the whole man in one sentence: he noticed the dime, and he never stopped noticing things after that.

Tommy Baloney, and twenty years in a drawer

In 1910, thirty-two years old and in New York on a tile trip, he caught a vaudeville turn by Harry "The Great" Lester and walked out a changed man. He bought a figure off a newspaper classified, a piece called Tommy Baloney, used him exactly once, and put him in a drawer for two decades while he ran a business.^[2] Then, at a Cambridge Tile Christmas party around 1930, he dug Tommy out to entertain the room, and that was that. From that office party forward he was, in his own words, an ardent collector of vent material.^[2] The friendship with Lester held for the rest of Lester's life. Berger wrote, when Lester died in 1956, that he'd "been so close to Lester since 1937" that it felt like losing family.^[15]

Three of the four bedrooms

Here's the part every collector's family recognizes. The figures took over the dining room, the living room, and the upstairs bedrooms, wherever he could find a flat surface.^[3] By one good count he'd filled three of the four bedrooms in the house before his wife, Josephine, everybody called her Muzz, had had enough.^[1] Jimmy Nelson, who used to visit the Bergers whenever he played the area, told it straight: "I think it was Muzz who gave the ultimatum: they go in the garage or I go. That's when he began to build those extra buildings."^[3] That's the whole founding myth of Vent Haven Museum. Not a grant, not a board meeting. A wife with a line in the sand, around 1948.

Muzz never left, obviously. She spent the rest of her life cooking twelve-pound turkeys for Christmas at Vent Haven, setting a place at the table for the dummies, and welcoming vents at the house at almost any hour of the day or night.^[4] Berger built her a building of her own eventually and dedicated it to her when she passed in 1967.^[16]

And once the figures had a garage instead of a bedroom, the collecting stopped being an accident and became a method. He wrote letters. One letter, one person, one country at a time, on a manual typewriter, for years.^[12] By the time he died the file held correspondence with 5,747 people and businesses, both sides of every exchange, because he kept carbon copies of his own letters. Seven filing cabinets, full.^[10] He also ran a steady supply line with the L. Davenport magic house in London from 1932 to 1971, ordering dozens of figures, pocket figures, Toby jugs, even parrots, and reselling some of them to working vents around the country.^[13] He sold figures for Frank Marshall too, and most of the Len Insull pocket figures that ever reached America went out under his name.^[6] The man who founded the museum was, at the same time, one of the biggest dealers the art ever had.

The Rogues Gallery, and the world's first census

In 1948 he ran a want ad in the Grapevine News that tells you exactly how his mind worked. He didn't just say "send me stuff." He named three specific performers whose photographs he still lacked, two specific playbills, four specific books, and asked, by name, for old figures, Marshall figures, and McElroy figures. At the bottom: "For the Rogues Gallery of Vents will exchange photos."^[6] That's not a hoarder. That's a man working a checklist.

He compiled the first Directory of Ventriloquists in 1953, straight out of his own files, the closest thing this art ever had to a census. In January of that year he spent a week in Frank Marshall's Chicago shop, mining Marshall's customer files for names for that directory while he was at it, and Marshall had him stand in for the shop's new catalog photos.^[23] When he found something he wanted and it wasn't for sale outright, he'd write ahead with a specific checklist, crepe hair or natural, what kind of eyes, how many controls, wood hands or not, before he'd spend a dime.^[14] He didn't always win. He once paid six pounds ten shillings for a figure called Granny, sight unseen from Scotland, and she arrived with a broken nose and a broken smoker. He wrote that he felt "pretty blue" about it and called the figure "a pile of junk." He kept her anyway. She's still at Vent Haven.^[14]

By 1948 he'd been elected President of the International Brotherhood of Ventriloquists, a job he held for twelve years while also editing its magazine, The Oracle, after its previous editor died suddenly in 1958. Membership more than tripled on his watch, from around 300 to over 1,000.^[4][20] Read enough issues of The Oracle and you start to hear the man plainly: proud, a little tired, always careful about the difference between what he'd verified and what he'd only been told. Writing a memorial to Lester, a man he loved, he still wrote that Lester only "claimed" originality for certain routines, because that was the honest word and Berger used the honest word even when the generous word would have been easier.^[4]

Jacko, on the installment plan

Ask anybody who's toured Vent Haven what they'd take home if they could take just one figure, and a lot of them will say Jacko. He's a forty-two inch chattering monkey the McElroy brothers built for Berger between 1939 and 1941, nine separate movements including eyes that cross, ears that wiggle, and a smoking attachment, dressed in dyed rabbit fur with an upper lip made from a lady's kid glove.^[14] Berger paid $125 for him in five monthly installments of $25 each, which tells you plainly what a McElroy figure cost even the wealthiest collector in the trade: more than he could write one check for.^[7] He was built for an organ-grinder bit with a hurdy-gurdy, and at first Berger just called him the Mechanical Monkey.^[14] Muzz claimed him for her own. She called him "my monkey."^[15] His thumb got broken in shipping to a convention in 1954, and the McElroys themselves fixed him up twenty years later, in 1974, two years after Berger was gone.^[14]

Berger and Frank Marshall

Chicago, 1953. Berger spent a week in Marshall's shop as, in his own words, "office boy and typist," mining Marshall's customer files for names for his Directory of Ventriloquists.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

The Rogues Gallery ad

Berger's own 1948 want ad. Three named performers he needed photos of, two named playbills, four named books, and old figures, "also Marshall and McElroy."

Photo via Ventriloquist Central Blog

The library, 1945

Berger among the filing cabinets he called his "ventriloquiana." His wife told a reporter that if the collection grew any bigger, she'd have him move it out into the street.

Photo via Ventriloquist Central

A trove like his

Playbills, photographs, programs, the kind of paper Berger chased by the letter, one performer at a time. A comparable lot crossed the block at Potter & Potter in 2025.

Photo via Potter & Potter Auctions

The circle

The promise

Here's the rule that outlasted him, and it's the one I think about most. Berger did not want a ventriloquist working at his museum, ever, and every curator hired since him has been asked that exact question at the interview: are you a ventriloquist? The right answer has always been no.^[16] He made a promise to every performer who sent him a figure, that when it came to Vent Haven it would be cared for, cataloged, dressed, and kept, and that nobody would ever try to make it speak again. "You never handle someone else's dummy," the museum still says, "and you definitely don't animate it. Only those ventriloquists who have developed these characters can give them a voice."^[1] That single promise is why performers spent thirty years being fêted in that house, handling the collection, drinking Berger's hospitality, and then, when they retired, willing him their partners. As one later collector who tried to copy the method put it, wishing he had Berger's gift for it: what better place would there be for a figure to rest.^[7]

No heirs, and a building he never saw

He outlived both his sons and a grandson. With no one left to leave it to, he incorporated the collection as a charitable trust in 1963, nine years before he died, precisely so it couldn't be broken up and sold off the way so many private collections in this art have been.^[1] He died in 1972 at ninety-four, having left the whole thing in the hands of his attorney and a small board of advisors, mostly working ventriloquists.^[8] On June 30, 1973, the museum opened to the public for the first time, and Edgar Bergen and Jimmy Nelson performed for the crowd off the back of a flatbed truck pulled into the street in front of the building.^[8] Berger never got to see it. He'd have loved it anyway.

Near the end, a sixteen-year-old visitor asked him if he had any parting advice. Berger told the kid he was getting close to pulling the final curtain, and that he wanted four words on his gravestone: "The rest is silence." Hamlet's last line, chosen by a man named after Shakespeare whose own father had been an actor.^[5] Fifty years later, that same visitor gave the only answer that's ever mattered: the rest isn't silent at all. His work goes on. He made sure of that.

Twenty years in a drawer and he still only used Tommy Baloney once. I have known understudies with better luck.— Freddy Fiddlesticks, spokesdummy