This month we have a special edition of Spotlight. We are featuring John Osborne, one of our founding members that passed away recently.
Club member Ming Louie has compiled this about John.
John Edward Osborne was born June 13, 1939, in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and died peacefully after a long illness at the age of 83 on Monday, October 24, 2022. He is survived by his older brother Raymond, Raymond's wife Judith, their two boys and one daughter, and a cousin Mary Lou.
A founding member of IBM Ring 210, John spent his entire life performing as a ventriloquist with his self-made dummy Clancy, as medicine show pitchman Doc Robin Steel, as a Punch & Judy puppeteer, and as a Magician. He had his own school assembly booking agency in the 1960s and performed for fairs and trade shows throughout Canada, and the United States, including the Canadian National Exhibition, Detroit Auto Show, and Petrochemical shows in Texas, and over 30 states throughout the United States. John received his Bachelors of Science degree from Wayne State University and he completed graduate science studies at the University of Detroit.
John wrote books on comedy, double-talking, building puppets, and vent dummies. Much of his creative output was published and sold by Abbotts Magic in Colon, Michigan and some of it is still available today for purchase.
John was a friend and acquaintance to the greats and near greats. A young Jeff Hobson worked as a roady for John during his medicine show days, along with Jason Magic and others. John often made a foray into the world of working a day job such as teaching public school or the skilled trades, but none of it seems to have had much appeal; he was always drawn back to the romance of the road and the sirens' song of entertainment and performance.
My wife Barbara and I first met John Osborne on Memorial Day weekend in May of 1988 in the sleepy little town of Manistee, Michigan. We were in the middle of a boiler room tour for a Florida booking agent name Victor Lewis, and John was brought in as the new Master of Ceremonies replacing Paul Lennon from Texas. Our intrepid ensemble of performers consisted of comedy juggler Jim Oakley, silent manipulation magicienne Lucy Smalley (also of Ring 210), a live band, illusionists Scorpio & Fantasy, ourselves performing "Chinese" magic along with our dancer Krystan Lim and of course, John. Victor paid us in cash each day from a briefcase of $100 bills; those were halcyon days indeed!
John had the least amount of props among us and worked out of a small suitcase with Clancy, his vent dummy, corny jokes, passe' passe' bottles, a die box, and all the tricks you would expect in a child's magic set. But what he had in abundance was a compelling personality, one-liners, jokes from the dawn of civilization, and an infectious smile; as an audience, you liked him right away.
I was in awe of the reaction he received from the crowd with such small, simple tricks. We often played very large venues with huge audiences, such as the Masonic Temple in Dayton, Ohio, where we drove our full-size van into an elevator and onto the stage to then be unloaded by unionized theater people. A theater that saw the likes of Jim Nabors, Beverly Sills, Kathleen Battle, and others, and now John was before an audience of over a thousand people enjoying themselves and laughing uproariously as he performed.
He was a master of the trade!
