About
Sixty years with a puppet on his arm.
It started in a fifth-grade gymnasium in Baltimore, Ohio, because a principal found out what the quiet kid was doing with library books.
The beginning
Twelve years old, in front of a television.
Mark Wade was born in Dayton, Ohio in 1950 and raised in Baltimore, Ohio, a small town outside Columbus. He was twelve when he saw the ventriloquist Jimmy Nelson on television, and that was that. He was already an avid reader; now he checked every book on magic and ventriloquism the library had, took them home, and started building an act.
In fifth grade his principal found out. He called a school-wide assembly, walked every student into the gymnasium, and put Mark on for thirty minutes. That was the first show. Sixty years later he is still doing it.
The leap
He was supposed to be a schoolteacher.
Mark graduated from Ohio University and began his career teaching elementary school — which turns out to be the single most useful thing that ever happened to his act. He knows what a room of children does at minute four, minute twelve and minute thirty, because he stood in front of one every day.
The weekend shows kept growing. Before long the ventriloquism was out-earning the teaching, and he had a decision to make.
“I took a leap of faith and bet on myself.”
He went full-time and stayed full-time for roughly forty years: theatres, fairs, festivals, corporate dates, churches, and a very great many schools and libraries — across the United States and Canada, and out to Japan and the United Kingdom.
The career
What forty years looked like.
- International Ventriloquist of the Year, 1980.
- Eight national television appearances, including Good Morning America, CBS Evening News, Entertainment Tonight, Real People and PM Magazine.
- The correct response on Jeopardy! — the clue asked for America's #1 children's ventriloquist. “Who is Mark Wade?”
- Opening act for Garth Brooks, Reba McEntire, Trace Adkins, Marie Osmond and The Oak Ridge Boys, among hundreds of others.
- Two books — Kidshow Ventriloquism and Kidshow Ventriloquism Encore — used by performers in twenty-six countries, including a Japanese-language edition.
- A weekly column on the craft, plus articles for entertainment journals in the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom.
- Character-education school assemblies on honesty, respect, responsibility and trustworthiness, performed for schools across the country.
The convention
Twenty-three years running the largest gathering of ventriloquists on earth.
Mark joined the Board of Advisors of the Vent Haven Museum — the world's only museum of ventriloquism — in 2000, and took over as Executive Director of the Vent Haven International Ventriloquists' ConVENTion. He held that post for twenty-three years, through 2023, bringing roughly six hundred performers a year from around the world to Kentucky.
It meant that for more than two decades, essentially every working ventriloquist alive walked across his stage — the headliners, and just as importantly the open-mic performers he made a point of programming, because that is where the next generation comes from. Very few people have watched this much ventriloquism this closely.
In 2024 the ConVENTion honoured him and named him Executive Director Emeritus. He continues as Senior Advisor. At the end of 2013 he reopened Maher Ventriloquist Studios — the oldest school of the art — with Ken Groves and Tom Crowl, and relaunched Clinton Detweiler's North American Association of Ventriloquists as the International Ventriloquist Society. Mark had been on the cover of the NAAV's journal in 1981, long before he was running it.
The hard part
Then his hands stopped working.
Essential tremor is genetic. It caused Mark's hands and other extremities to shake uncontrollably. For a man whose entire livelihood runs through his hands, it was close to the end of the story.
He went looking for a solution and found one: deep brain stimulation — electrodes implanted in the brain and wired to a generator. It worked. The hospital filmed the procedure so that other patients could see what was possible.
Mark being Mark, he found the funny in it, and turned the whole ordeal into a keynote about perseverance that he now delivers to companies and civic groups.
Now
Passing it on.
Mark and his wife Jody live in Barefoot Bay, Florida. He is semi-retired from the road, still performs, still speaks, and is a member of the Rockledge Rotary Club. He collects pre-code horror comic books from 1950 to 1955, which explains a certain amount.
What occupies him most now is coaching — working with ventriloquists one at a time. His own teachers were Jimmy Nelson, Edgar Bergen at a distance, and the kidshow master David Ginn up close. He is very clear that the art was handed to him, and that the handing-on is the part that matters.
