Classic pitchman returns for holidays

By DAVID GUNTER

Feature correspondent

SANDPOINT — Maybe you missed the Hooey Man, emerging as he did some 40 years ago to craft a legend that preceded the arrival of many local residents. Or maybe you just miss the Hooey Man and the way he used to plop down his wooden box and climb aboard to cry, “Ladies and Gentlemen!” as the preamble to his pop-up, one-man medicine show.

Either way, the magic and mystery will be revived this holiday season, when a decades-long hiatus comes to an end and the consummate pitchman returns to his roots.

To be fair, he never really left, but his creator, Jerry Luther, hung up the embroidered overcoat — complete with sewn-in pockets to display his hand-made Hooey Sticks — and plied other artistic paths for a good, long time. Those chapters included a stint as operations manager for a wood manufacturing company, a detour into corporate training and, most memorable of all, the creation of a new character called the Dancing Duck Man, who seemed to magically appear with his troupe of choreographed ducks to steal every show within reach.

But it was the Hooey Man who started it all, so let us begin our story there.

After an illustrious but wholly unsatisfying career in sales down in L.A., Luther had a conversation with a friend who came back from Arkansas and told him about a marvelous, little toy called the Hooey Stick. Basically a ribbed piece of wood with a propeller on the end and a separate stick for scraping, the gadget has a long folk history and an even longer list of names, depending on the region.

“That’s the Hooey History,” the pitchman said, reaching over to unfurl a rolled up sheaf of posters and peeling one back for viewing. “And this is the Hooey science.”

The science of “odd harmonics” he explained in character, as he pointed to the acoustic waves and arrows and bullet points on the chart. It all looks very official, but one never knows when one is dealing with the Hooey Man.

“That’s the deal,” said Luther, breaking into a laugh. “That’s the whole deal.”

Anyway, back to L.A. Luther fabricated his own Hooey Stick and, by chance, figured out how to make it do its trick of reversing propeller direction on command. His first performance was a guerilla show in the lobby of a Bob’s Big Boy restaurant, where he did the trick, drew a crowd and promptly decided to go into production with his buddy.

“It was going to be big,” he said. “We were going to make millions.”

But life — as life is wont to do — intervened in the late-70s and upset the apple cart. So much so, that Luther found himself leaving a relationship and a corporate job at the same time — a stage of life he described as dropping his city skills to “go rural.”

The transition brought him first to the Spokane area, where he upped his hawking skills by practicing on friends. At a Thanksgiving dinner, he had the gathered throng entranced — and he was hooked, too, at the prospect of having this much fun and maybe, just maybe, making a few bucks in the bargain. That experience resulted in an invitation to attend the Holiday Crafts Fair at Sandpoint Community Hall a couple weeks later, where Luther showed up to sell the wooden plant boxes he had been making.

The fair was slow and the boxes were languishing, when he made a move to the center of the room and called out for the attention of all attending.

“I set the box in the middle of the floor and put the coat on,” he said. “Then I opened the coat and told them I had some magical devices. I did my Hooey Man rap and sold out of Hooey Sticks — and that started it all.”

Back in Spokane, Luther started pitching the magical stick on street corners, where he soon drew the notice of television news crews, who made the Hooey Man a regular part of evening broadcasts.

“I would end my riff by closing up my coat and saying, ‘The cops are coming!’ and dashing off down the street,” he said.

The movement gained steam as Luther was invited to do his thing on talk shows and radio programs, further building on his character’s natural attraction. Sensing that the Hooey Man had more to offer, the creator began to study acting in earnest, diving deep into books such as Konstantin Stanislavski’s classic, “An Actor Prepares” for ideas and inspiration.

The next big event happened when he hitchhiked to Seattle’s Fremont District for the Fat Tuesday celebration — a gathering that promised ample opportunity to practice drawing — and keeping — a crowd among throngs of professional street entertainers who did this type of thing for a living.

“I got on the freeway with a couple hundred Hooey Sticks and $5 in my pocket,” said Luther. “And I hitchhiked back home from Seattle with enough money to make the rent.”

He also ran into several old-timers who came up to share stories of having seen and played with the same kind of device in different regions of the country and learned that the original stick was called the “Gee-Haw Whimmy Diddle” in the Appalachians, “Muckley Chucks” in other parts of the south, the “Wahoo Stick” in Arkansas and Kansas and the “Aba Daba” stick up north in Boston.

“I got the complete oral history from these old guys and that’s how I perfected my spiel,” said Luther, flipping his charts to the Hooey History page to point out salient information.

A perfect spiel had become a necessity for Luther, who by now had completed his transmogrification from corner office sales whiz to counter culture pitchman.

“If I wanted to buy a cup of coffee, I had to sell a Hooey in order to get it,” he said.

Let’s scoot the story forward to the page where Luther was embraced by like-minded New Age Vaudeville performers such as the Flying Karamazov Brothers, who pulled the Hooey Man into the fold. Celebrated folksinger Utah Phillips also took a liking to Luther’s act and handed him a marionette Goony Bird that he thought should be part of the act. Tweaking the idea slightly, Luther created a new character and sidekick called Bruce the Duck, making use of the freight-hopping folksinger’s real first name as an inside joke between the two.

“I used Bruce to create the crowd,” he said. “I hit a note on the kazoo, Bruce pops out and when the crowd comes up, Bruce goes back into the bag, I open my coat and say, ‘Ladies and Gentlemen!’”

When another street performer complimented Luther on his “medicine man act” a light came on and he began a study of those traveling salesmen and how they used all manner of gimmicks to pull people in and — on a good day — lighten their wallets. An invitation to open for the Karamazov Brothers at the Oregon State Fair had the added benefit of introducing Luther to his future wife, Becky, and her son, Travis. An enduring love story and a family were born in the same moment.

The three developed a circus act that virtually guaranteed strong sales at their booth in various fairs, with Becky and Travis now part of a traveling troupe that included juggling, balancing and daredevil feats by Bruce the Duck. They sold all sorts of hand-made wooden items — now including duck marionettes and night lights to go along with Hooey Sticks — and picked apples during the off season to make ends meet.

Another nudge forward sends our story into the part when the family arrives in Sandpoint in the early 1980s, where they settled into a home at Garfield Bay and sold their goods from a cart on the then-new Cedar Street Bridge. The Hooey Man was as hot as ever, until two forces collided to end his reign.

“I was diagnosed with glaucoma and they predicted I would be blind within three years,” said Luther. “It was getting to the point that I couldn’t read faces or eyes in the crowd — I couldn’t do pitching anymore.

“And I was stuck in my character, which is a pitfall of Vaudeville performers” he added. “I had to get out of that.”

Enter the Dancing Duck Man — a mime character who was the very antithesis of the Hooey Man — with his ducks who marched and danced in formation while their silent handler tagged along with a boom box in hand or on his shoulder. From working crowds of adults, Luther went to putting smiles on the faces of children.

“I am the champion of the stroller-bound,” he proudly announced. “We serve the underserved kids on the ground — the little ones who can’t see up into the booths at a fair, but get to interact with the ducks at their own level.”

And so it went, as Travis got older and picked up the pitchman’s mantle — so effectively that his parents used to borrow money from him during the winter — and the booth de-emphasized wooden toys and moved higher margin items such as wooden lights center stage.

Which brings us to present day and the recent writing project Luther has undertaken to chronicle his life story in a series of poems.

“It’s a way of describing this wonderful odyssey,” he said. “But in incubating that, it reminded me that it has been 40 years since I came here and the Hooey Man emerged.”

The book of poetry, then, was the catalyst for the Return of the Hooey Man this holiday season.

“I haven’t figured out yet whether it’s a comeback or a relapse,” the creator said, slipping into his long, grey overcoat for a photo.

“It’s heavier than I remembered,” he said, shrugging his shoulders until the garment fell into place. Then he tipped his red cap and opened one side of the coat to reveal a heretofore hidden storefront with rows of Hooey Sticks lined up for hawking. Even without his pitch, the spectacle had drawn the attention of several folks sitting nearby. A smile crossed Luther’s face as his eyes — still working, for the record — twinkled and his character seemed to step forward out of the mists of time.

Hey, Hooey Man — it’s good to have you back.

Keep a close watch this holiday season, as you just might get a chance to see this traveling sales show on Sandpoint streets. If you’re lucky, Bruce the Duck will tip his Santa hat for good measure.

To see the Duck Man in action, visit YouTube or Facebook online and search for: Dancing Duck Man and Andorra.