There’s just one Northern Kentucky race in which a dummy calls runners to the starting line.
That would be the fourth annual Dummy Run, a 5-kilometer run/walk June 30 at the Vent Haven Museum on West Maple Avenue in Fort Mitchell.
“It’s right through old Fort Mitchell here…It’s a lovely neighborhood,” Lisa Sweasy, the museum’s curator/director, said. “So we have people who walk it and run it, some who run competitively, some push their children in strollers. It’s really a lot of fun.”
Denny Baker, a Cincinnati Fire Department firefighter and paramedic, is also a professional ventriloquist. His figure, Skeeter, calls the race – which Sweasy said makes the race unique.
“I don’t think that’s happening at any other 5K,” Sweasy said. “And also, in the registration packet, there is a photo of one of the dummies here and its backstory. And people are basically running for their dummy, and if they win in their division, they don’t get a trophy, but their dummy does.”
Baker, 49, has been a ventriloquist for some 40 years. (He performs at corporate events.)
He started with a correspondence course as a 10-year-old growing up in Delhi Township and learned from others.
“It’s like anything else,” he said. “You can learn to shoot a basketball, but unless you practice, practice, practice, you’re not going to improve.”
Sweasy said around 100 ran or walked last year; she said runners from Germany and Canada competed virtually.
According to venthaven.org, Cincinnati native William Shakespeare Berger – W.S. to his friends – purchased his first figure, “Tommy Baloney,” in 1910. Nearly 1,200 dummies are in the collection now.
“At first, (Berger) kept the figures in his home in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, but the collection grew rapidly in the 1930s and 1940s,” the website stated. “In 1947, he renovated his garage to house the dummies, and in 1962 he built a second building.”
Race profits benefit the museum, which opened in 1973. A new $1.2 million building was finished last year; it includes museum-quality lighting, climate control and the Jeff Dunham Theater, a performance and education space funded by the legendary ventriloquist and longtime Vent Haven devotee.
The museum’s next project is digitizing the 10 four-drawer file cabinets full of Berger’s correspondence; some 12,000 photographs are already in the system. Much of the carbon copies were made on fragile onion skin paper.
“His method of acquiring the pieces here was letter-writing,” Sweasy said. “He contacted at least 5,000 people around the world, and he did this on his typewriter. He kept carbon copies of all the letters that he wrote plus all of the responses.
“If (Berger) were alive today, he would be an internet guru, I’ll tell you. He was determined to move forward with all technologies, but he was also too frugal to use the phone – he wouldn’t make long-distance phone calls in the ‘50s and ‘60s; it was too expensive … We would like (the letters) to be digitized and then available online for people to read.”
Registration is $35 before the race and $40 on race day. A t-shirt, race bib and a chance to check out the museum’s new exhibits are included. The museum is located at 33 West Maple Avenue in Fort Mitchell. For more information about the race and the museum, visit venthaven.org or call 859-341-0461.