Interview With David Pendleton - Part 8

The start of this video flashbacks to our last conversation about David Pendleton obtaining a McElroy figure. In the event of someone seeing this without watching Part 7, I wanted them to have that background. The follow up story is a lot of fun. We also talk about the mechanics of the figure and David discusses the learning curve of working with the character.

David also shares some great manipulation skills. Definitely worth your time to schedule that type of practice.

Video Transcript:

After the show, a woman came up to me and told me that her grandfather was a ventriloquist, and that she now had the figure he used in his act. Of course, I wasn’t thinking anything about the possibility that it might be an original McElroy.

Her grandfather was Wayne Felius, and he used the figure dressed up in a policeman’s outfit. His name was Jerry McSafety, and he did safety programs for kids.

Now, one of the really fun follow-up stories to that is from that same year. I went to Las Vegas for the ventriloquist convention. Tom Ladshaw was there, and I hadn’t yet told him about my find and what I now owned. I approached Tom, and he had his little table where he was selling ventriloquism memorabilia. I walked up and said, “Hey Tom, what do you have here that’s McElroy related? Anything?”

He said, “Well, I’ve got some photographs here. Some old photos of ventriloquists that used original McElroy figures.” He starts thumbing through this box of 8×10 black-and-white pictures, and the very first one he pulls out he says, “Oh, here’s a picture. Relatively unknown ventriloquist. He had a McElroy named Jerry McSafety. His name was Wayne Felius.” Then he handed me the picture.

I looked at it and said, “You’re not going to believe this, Tom, but I actually now own that figure.”

Tom looked at me and said, “How did you find it?”

I said, “Oh, I didn’t. I had no idea that figure was even out there. But I met the granddaughter of the ventriloquist, and that’s how I came in contact with it.”

So, kind of a fun story. The very first photograph Tom showed me was the picture of Jerry McSafety.

That’s great. That’s a great story, and I appreciate you sharing that. When I heard it, I thought you’d lived every ventriloquist’s dream.

And trust me, I do not deserve it. I really don’t. I’m still stunned that actually happened to me. Just unbelievable.

You do deserve it, because I’ve seen you on video working with that figure, and the joy you bring to people by bringing him to life. You deserve that.

Well, thank you. Thank you. I think I’m better at using Mac now than I was when I made that video, if I do say so myself.

The McElroy has so many different movements to it. I know Greg Clawson wrote the book on the mechanics, and I have the book. But being a non-mechanical person, I never really had the ability. I had the desire to build one at one time but never proceeded because I knew darn well I’d mess it up. I bought Greg’s book because I thought if I ever did decide to build a figure, I’d want to see what they did.

I looked through it briefly. It looks like there’s a keypad on the back there?

“Yeah.”

Yeah, so that’s got to be a major learning curve to operate one of those.

It took me a good solid couple of months to finally get comfortable enough to feel like I could actually introduce him into the act. Prior to using Mac, I had another figure built for me when I was 12 years old by Craig Lovik. I was thoroughly used to that figure, and of course, the mechanics were entirely different. That one had an index finger operation for the mouth.

Of course, with the McElroy, I had to get used to using my thumb to control the mouth. I wondered if I’d ever get used to that. But I literally just shut myself in my little practice space at home, down in the basement, and practiced every day with that guy—just going through the paces and running through my act.

Sometimes I’d play music just so I could isolate manipulation. I don’t know if you’ve ever done that, but you just put on a song you know, and the puppet lip-syncs to the song. For me, it was an exercise in puppet manipulation, so I wasn’t thinking about saying anything. I was totally isolating just that skill.

So, there were all kinds of things I did to put myself through the paces of learning how to manipulate that figure. And frankly, I’m still in that process. It’s one of those things, as you well know, that you never completely master. You just continue to perform and sharpen your skills as you go.