Vent Haven Museum in Fort Mitchell, which touts itself as “the world’s only museum dedicated to ventriloquism,” is seeking a new curator.
The museum has roughly 1,400 dummies and puppets in its collection, plus thousands of books and photographs.
“We still get about 20 to 25 donated a year, and so it’s a constantly growing collection,” said Lisa Sweasy, the current curator, who is retiring.
Sweasy’s primary profession is actually teaching, but she began working at the museum in 2000. She’s served on the museum’s board of directors for 13 years and will continue serving on the board once she steps away as curator. The curator position is officially the only employee of the museum.
As curator, she has to “wear all the hats of caring for the residence, which is here on site, and the building itself, caring for the collection, cataloging all of the items,” she said. “I’m a librarian, and I’m a documentarian, and I do preservation of everything. I’m also the public face, so I’m the one giving the tours.”
The museum is open from May through September every year, and admission is entirely tour based; there are no walk-in hours.
“I give tours four days a week, usually two a day,” Sweasy said. “I get people from all over.”
The collection was started by a man named W.S. Berger, a commercial tile maker who died in 1972. He’s buried in Highland Cemetery. He was not a professional ventriloquist himself, but his father was a stage actor. Thus, Berger had been exposed to Vaudevillian entertainment, including ventriloquists, throughout his youth. He bought his first dummy from a New York magic shop in 1910 and by the time of his death he had amassed a collection of about 500 dummies and puppets, plus other materials that came with them.
Berger had hoped to bequeath the collection to his grandson, but his grandson actually died before he did. So, the collection went to his attorney, John Brooking, who helped set up a charitable trust to manage Berger’s assets. The museum itself opened in June 1973.
The collection has only grown since Berger’s death. Today the total count of dummies and puppets stands at 1,377.
“[Berger] kept carbon copies of his own letters, so we have all of his correspondence for acquisitions,” Sweasy said. “We have a library of over 2,000 books on ventriloquism and magic. We have 27,000 photographs in our database. It’s just this massive collection.”
“It’s such a unique situation, and it’s a little gem in Fort Mitchell,” said Annie Roberts, who formerly served as curator and is now on the museum’s board of directors.
Like Sweasy, Roberts has a background as a teacher and compared the position of curator to being an educator.
“We’re looking for someone who maybe has a teaching background to teach the public about ventriloquism,” Roberts said, “but also someone who has organization skills because behind the scenes there are the museum tasks of archiving and organizing the databases and maintaining the collection.”
Full disclosure: The position isn’t paid, but the curator is provided free housing, a four-bedroom house in Fort Mitchell, no less.
“We’re looking for someone who is excited to learn about ventriloquism [and] excited to share how awesome this collection is with people who don’t know anything about it,” said Roberts.
You can learn more about the museum, book a tour and read the full job description for the curator position at venthaven.org.
