Do yourself a favor and scroll down to read this from the beginning. Here is Jennifer after arriving at her new home with the Juro Jerry Mahoney I also fixed to show how small she is. The customer was elated with her transformation.

I re-carve her hands as well to make them less monkey like and add a small amount of detail.

I re-carved her face, repainted and re-wigged, made her new soft figure style legs and added "real" 1.25 blue eyes I bought from Mike Brose, after hollowing out much of her head and added a "spitter" to her mechanics.
Yes, I know her eyes are now off in the opposite direction they were before but it is the shape of her face that makes this happen. I chose to have her looking to her left rather than her right.

These are Jen's simple inner workings and I must say they were flawless in performance many years after she was made.

She looks like a victim of a severe car crash to me!

This is Jennifer as she looked when she arrived to get her makeover.

I'm thinking Foy Brown was making a monkey and when asked for a little girl by Tommy Atkins her converted her to what you see here.

Can you say UGLY boys and girls?

These are Tommy's figures, they seem to all be Foy Brown figures.
This blog is about the fate of the little girl "Jennifer" who is sitting in the front in the pleated gingham dress.

This is a picture of Tommy Atkins who I used to go see
perform at Lake George in upstate New York.

Mrs. Claus

So one of my hobbies is a Santa's Workshop dollhouse I started in 1981. Well this year my wife said she would like to have a Mrs. Claus and a kitchen room added to the Santa Workshop we have had all that time. So I scuplted a Mrs. Claus out of Sculpy clay.

 
Here Mrs. Clause is in front of the Workshop.

She kinda cute don't you think?

 
This is a reproduction I made of my Gramma's (grandmother's) own drop-leaf kitchen table. the sides fold down if you want them too.

 
While this is the reproduction of my Nana's (Great-grandmother's) 1954 Philco V Handle refrigerator

 
On the real one, whatever side of the handle you pulled down is the side of the fridge that opened. It was cool!

It does light up when plugged in. It's body is made of basswood. I made the freezer door, vegetable & fruit door and drawers and door shelves with a VAC-U-FORM.

 

Jerry McGee is home were he belongs

When I returned Jerry to Bill Fetzer and his wife they had nothing but nice things to say about my work and how Jerry worked and looked. Bill had sent his brother this blog to view Jerry and this was his response.

Dick Fetzer to his brother Bill Fetzer (Jerry’s partner):

“Wow! This guy is good! It is amazing what the years did to Jerry. (We’re not going to mention his friend Bill) You have sure given Jerry a new lease on life! I could tell from the commentary that this guy is a great restorer. You found the right person for the transformation. It is almost like welcoming a new child--congratulations! Have you let him make his debut yet? I wonder what your friends at the Aquarium will think?

Dick"

Vent Figure PVC Control Stick with Brass Control Rods

My friend Al Stevens is well known for his Fred Project WebPages. http://www.alstevens.com/ventriloquism/fred.html

Since those were published Al has changed the way he makes a control stick and graciously taught me how it is done. With Al's permission given, I am passing the information on to all of you. For those of you who don't use PVC to make your control stick, which allows you to easily use all brass control rods to operate your figure, here are scale illustrations of the hardware and one of how it is assembled to help you should you decide to give this style a go.

Fixin Jerry McGee

Jerry McGee is a sixty-five years old Turner figure owned and still operated by his partner Bill Fetzer. Bill and Jerry have been together Jerry's whole “life.” Bill and Jerry still entertain guests at the South Carolina Aquarium in Charleston.

This is a picture of Bill and Jerry in their early days.

This is Bill and Jerry at the Aquarium last year.

This is Bill and Jerry with Doctor Cookie Jensen at the Vent Haven ConVENTion 2009.

Bill approached me a Vent Haven about giving Jerry some TLC. It seems a previous repair resulted in a few problems. Jerry controls were dragging when Bill operated them and the reason was obvious to me the last person to fix Jerry used picture wire instead of string on his controls, so they were slowly sawing their way into Jerry’s control stick.
Another issue Bill had with the repair was that Jerry’s eyeholes had been made smaller and he wanted them opened up somewhat and his eyelashes had been reduced to singular looking ‘hairs’ instead of the thick eyelashes Jerry had back in the day. I agree with both their aesthetic views of the eyeholes and tried for a happy medium I hope Bill likes it.

Also Jerry started out as a redhead and somehow he had morphed into a dirty blond. After I went searching for a new red hairpiece I found out why Jerry was sporting a different color; attractive red wigs are hard to find!

This is Jerry when I started with him.

Here are the picture wire control ‘strings.’

And the inside of Jerry head showed up with some age problems as well. There were cracks in the top of his head and under his control stick, so he was starting to split in half on the inside.

The ‘spitter’ tube in Jerry’s head was jammed into the hole and held in place by electrical tape and so I added a brass tube and used Apoxy Sculpt to hold that in place as well as clean up the hole in his lip.

The former repairman had added some plastic foam to the TOP of Jerry’s head to make his wig fit better but Bill felt it made him look to different from his original Turner flat headed design.

After removing his wig I found Jerry head was covered in many different layers of glue some of which were still tacky and his head looked like he was a burn survivor. I scraped and sanded all the glue from his head. I also added a little Apoxy Sculpt to one side of the end of his nose since it was cockeyed most likely from years of paint but I wasn’t going to start scraping off years of paint to find his old nose. All this sanding and the eyehole enlargement meant that there was no getting away from a repaint of Jerry’s whole head.

I removed that foam but added wood to the BACK of Jerry’s head to round it off a little to try to help the wig fit better.

The new wig was cut in a woman’s style so Jerry needed a haircut and my friend Shawn stepped up to give him a professional look.

Jerry McGee
2009

My Howdy in Doodyville!

Those of you who have been following this blog will be relieved to hear that Howdy Doody is finished. After I changed the eyes in the first Howdy head I made I constructed a NEW body using the measurements given to me by Alan Semok. I made all his clothes and carved his boots this time using canvas to make the top part. Howdy stands about twenty-eight to thirty inches tall depending on his position when you measure him. I finished Howdy in time for the Vent Haven ConvVENTion in Kentucky this year and took him with me.

I brought him out to show to Alan Semok not realizing the fuss that would be made by others who were seeing their childhood friend in person for the first time. Jay Johnson (SOAP) thought he was great looking as did everyone who came to see him. Bob Abdou (Mister Puppet) couldn’t say enough positive things about Howdy. But the biggest compliments came from Alan Semok who not only said I did a great job with the sculpture but he said I nailed it and that Howdy worked well and was well balanced and functioned as he should.

When I returned home I called my friend David Eaton (one time Bozo the clown) a renowned puppeteer and co-founder of Pinocchio’s Marionette Theatre and asked him to set up a meeting so Pady Blackwood could give me his opinion. He set it up for the next day! And last night Pady was thrilled and impressed with my Howdy and I was thrilled and awed in return when he sat and told me stories about Buffalo Bob Smith and Lew Anderson (Clairabell the Clown).

This is a photo of my Howdy and Alan Semok, Howdy Doody’s official personal physician.

These are pictures of my Howdy with Pady Blackwood, Howdy’s official puppeteer from when the show was revised in the 1970’s.

ANOTHER HOWDY?!! Not really, this is a photo of the first Howdy head I made with the eyes fixed. I think I like him better than Howdy number two.!

Before and After

The second Howdy head now resides on the body. I hope to get some help from someone to make sure he is strung properly.

Howdy Doody Too

Well I was told that the first Howdy head that I made had something wrong with his eyes, so I took up the challenge to figure out what was wrong and fix it. Now I wasn't going to mess with the first one cause if all did not go well I would have no head at all for my marionette. So I made another. Let me know what you think.

Mean John Dean

Real Howdy

My First Howdy My Second Howdy

Some comments about my Howdy from some friends and acquaintances

"He looks really good, John."
Al
Al Stevens
Ventriloquist and vent figure builder
http://www.alstevens.com/


"He is unbelievably beautiful, okay I know you are a stickler for words, "Handsome"."
Hugz
me
Margaret Davis
Ventriloquist
http://www.talkinghand.net/


"Whoa dude, you are the man!! He looks awesome, great job! Hope to see you at a festival or something."
Jonathan
Jonathan David West
Puppeteer Marionette builder
http://www.westpuppets.com/


"Great, John! Really first rate. Congrats. I so want to display him at Pinochio's when it re-openings."
Bestest, Dave
David Eaton
Master Puppteer and former Bozo the clown
http://www.pinocchios.net/

Great job, John. I'm thinking of hiring you for my figure.
Donald
Donald Woodford
Ventriloquist
http://www.woodynfriends.com/

John,
I am very impressed with your accuracy of detail in capturing Howdy's likeness. A great job and something you can be proud to say you created.
Dan
Dan Willinger
Figure Collector
www.ventriloquistcentral.com

Howdy is done!

Howdy Doody dressed and ready

Howdy's boots are made of black leather over carved pine shoes with real shoe sole on the bottom and white leather tops over cardboard tubes as well.

You can almost hear him saying "Ho Ho! It's great to be here!"

Making a Howdy Doody head

Okay this is going to be a long blog the process takes place over a month’s time.

I was supposed to go to work soon with a puppeteer named Pady Blackwood. Pady was the puppeteer on "The New Howdy Doody Show," the revised version that was done back in the eighties. David Eaton informed me that he and Paddy would teach me how to operate a marionette properly. Not being a “Marionettist”, not a real word, I decided I wanted to make myself a marionette to practice with and so I made a cartoon-ish and simplistically styled Clarabell Hornblower. It came out cute if not exactly functional.






I went to see Pady Blackwood give a talk at the Orange County Public Library's main branch. Pady performed a little but with a clown puppet who, while very handsome, was not Howdy Doody. Pady explained he no longer owned a Howdy, so sorry to disappoint.


Around that time a ventriloquist friend of mine, Margaret Davis, gave me a magazine with an cover article about Velma Dawson the person who sculpted Howdy in a hurry back in 1949. Howdy's creator was not the Roses, as many people seem to think. At any rate, I have fashioned soft figures from material and hard figures Brose kits and made a few from scratch with Al Stevens with whom I also made repairs on a few Marshall and one Mack figure. But I wanted to make one from scratch basically on my own. But I had no reason to make a hard figure; I mean what character would I make that I would enjoy owning, especially since ventriloquism has always been my direction. I have seen a few Howdy Doody puppets made by people and they always seemed a difficult choice due to the familiarity of face and figure. Oh wait did I just mentally challenge myself? I did! So Howdy Doody it was.



So I had some clay and I started to sculpt, well not exactly, first I made an armature out of two Styrofoam spheres. Not the best idea I ever had and knowing that I did it again but more on that later. So I sculpted in the flesh colored clay that I got from Al Stevens but it just seemed too “cartoon-ish.” And I realized the head I was making was too large, an honest mistake for someone used to making vent figures even if they are usually made from foam. So I stopped and started scouring the Internet for as many pictures of Howdy, from as many angles, I could find.





It was an interesting face so I kept it and went out and bought more clay, flesh colored as well, and started anew with a new foam form made from a Styrofoam block rather than spheres. Still not a good idea you see Styrofoam sheds bits constantly and picking them out of the clay is time consuming and frustrating. Still cartoon like but closer than the first attempt I could see Howdy but still knew it was all wrong. Howdy was mocking me, letting me know he would be as illusive as possible right from the word go.





Then I thought I had a wonderful idea and started blowing the bits off the clay with the keyboard air blaster stuff. Well I have a tendency to lick my fingers and smooth the clay in areas and well they put stuff in the “air” to keep people from inhaling the stuff. Who knew? It made me so sick with cramps I couldn’t do a thing for days.







Now, I know I said I wanted to do this ALL by myself but I needed help; my vision was skewed by the fact that using flesh colored clay gives the sculpture an immediate resemblance to a finished face. I had royally messed up! I started sending pictures to friends asking their opinion and a funny thing happened, looking at the photos I sent would clue me in to the errors I had in the face so that I often had fixed what my friends’ feedback told me was wrong. I could see the mistakes in the photos but not when I looked at the sculpture! I took the pictures with a photo of the real Howdy on my computer in the background so they could compare them but it helped me do it on my own more often than not. Somewhere in this process I realized that the jaw was too heavy to stay on so I used my pasta maker to make a smooth thin layer of Apoxie Sculpt over the jaw front to make a lighter version.





Then too was the problem of casting I had never been present for the whole process and while Al Stevens would give me the material to do the job he insisted I do this myself. It was kind of fun and fascinating but boy does it take a long time for this silicone stuff to set up. Allot of waiting with little to do but annoy Al and stand outside smoking. I know shame on me; I’m working on that, not hard, but I’m working on it.

So I made the mold and it was time to make what is called a mother mold. A mother mold holds the silicone mold ridged so when you cast the item it’s not distorted. I used what are presumed to be plaster bandages, and then when I thought it was dry enough I added plaster to the outside to thicken the mold. BAD idea! I would be willing to bet that what comes on the bandages is NOT really plaster because when I added plaster to them the bandages came apart! The back was salvageable but I had to redo the front part from scratch. I was right about one thing I did need the mother mold to be thicker cause when I made my casting it didn’t fair well. I decided to cast in paper maché like the real Howdy was made in but the pressure of pushing the stuff into the mold was a little more than the thin bandages could handle and I noticed some slight distortion after it was removed from the mold.


And I wanted this thing out of that mold, all I had to do was wait a few weeks, yes I said weeks!


No way was I waiting that long so again I went on line and found that you could remove this stuff from the mold in hours if you freeze it. Yes I said freeze as in lying in the freezer for five hours. But it worked, when I took it out of the silicone mold it looked like it was going to talk to me.


Now I had to dry it in the oven. You may be thinking “John, your putting paper in the oven?” Well not only did I put it in the oven at 300 degrees but I fell asleep waiting and the buzzer was beeping away three hours later. But it was dry, or so I thought, and I set about fixing the visible flaws from the unsupportive mother mold. Not bad ones really! I thought the back of the head was flat and I used thickly mixed “Durham Plastic wood” to cover the back with a coating to alleviate the problem. Then I set out to fix the slight divots in the face, with Apoxy Sculpt, that paper maché will leave behind. When I finally picked up the back of the head again something was amiss. The paper maché continued to shrink while the Durham has the property of expanding just a wee bit. Ergo they were separating from each other by the hour. So I tore the Durham off and mixed up some Apoxie Sculpt, pulled out my pasta maker again to make smooth even layers and fixed the back of the head AGAIN.


I love Apoxie Sculpt and should have made the whole thing out of that but I had dismissed the idea as expensive. Maybe I should have considered the time saving value of the medium.

I fitted the jaw in place and the face to the back of the head with a rubber band to see how the fit was and it was great, just one problem Howdy’s mouth would never work like this. What was wrong with this thing! Now early on I had noticed a feature of Howdy’s head that I then totally forgot about. When I sculpted the head I made the head then added the neck at the end using stacked wood pieces, you know “round Tuits” the part left over when you cut a hole in a board. But Howdy’s neck is set back from his jaw. His jaw over hangs forward, the neck, connecting under the ears. So I took my Howdy to the bands saw and cut off his neck. Nerve-racking move I must say. Then after putting the front and back halves of the neck together I attached it to the back half of the head with what? Apoxie Sculpt of course.


Howdy’s eye are made from spheres painted white with blue paper pupils glued on and covered with clear acrylic. He has Apoxy Sculpt teeth.


It was at this point that an in scale casting of Howdy Doody original sculpture from the hands of Velma Dawson appeared on eBay and I considered buying it to start over but that would be just cheating and stupid. I did however glean the actual dimensions of Howdy Doody’s head from the sculptures posting: Howdy’s head is 7 " tall, 4 1/2" wide and 5 1/2" deep

I was close but his jowls were too long and I needed to fix that. I needed some pictures of Howdy from the side but there seem to be a real lack of those out there on the web. I got three responses to a call for help with that from Mike Brose, Les Lamborn and none other than Alan Semok, Howdy Doody’s personal physician!


The jowls fixed and Howdy’s eyes, teeth and jaw made, I primed the whole thing. Now I have been working with Al Stevens for a while and let me say that you find more mistakes and problems once you paint a head bright white then at any other time. Howdy was no exception to this rule. His nose was uneven, one nostril was higher than the other and his cheeks, while incredibly cute, were not accurate in that Howdy has a peak along his cheeks. Also his ears needed to be a little more rounded at the edges. All a total surprise to me till the paint dried.



Having fixed those discrepancies it was time to paint him. Howdy’s hair is darker than his lips in most of the pictures we see on-line. Howdy has 49 freckles, one or each state in the Union when the original show was on the air and there are two different patterns to those freckles; one from Velma’s early broader faced Howdy and one from Velma’s second version’s paint job. The early ones are heavy and vary more in size and while I was not making an exact copy I attempted to follow the simpler second pattern. She also changed the way Howdy is strung in that his head strings originally attached to his temples then on the later version they attach to his ears.


I’m working on the control bar and I plan to build a body; I already made a blue gingham seersucker shirt, red bandanna, and hands of real leather/suede and am attempting to carve the boots in Basswood.


It is so incredible to look at Howdy’s head in my workroom perched under my version of Grandfather Clock from Captain Kangaroo.

Merry Christmas from me and Howdy!