Shirley Dinsdale at 100 and Her Lost Performances

100 years ago, or Halloween 1926 is famous as the day Harry Houdini died, however on a much brighter note it was also the day that Shirley Dinsdale was born. 

Shirley Dinsdale (1926-1999) was an American ventriloquist, radio performer, and television pioneer who is most famous today as the first performer recipient of an Emmy Award Her award for “Most Outstanding Personality” awarded in 1949 in Los Angeles while she performed with her puppet “Judy Splinters” on the same titled program. 

Dinsdale remains fascinating for many reasons beyond her historic Emmy win. Her career which began as a teenager bridged the Golden Age of Radio, the experimental/pioneering beginnings of American television, and even a later career in healthcare. Her life and career in many ways predates Shari Lewis, Paul Winchell, and Darci Lynne Farmer as a young ventriloquist, catapulted to fame over the airwaves, with a later interest in the health sciences. 

Shirley Dinsdale was born on October 31, 1926, in San Francisco, California. As a young child, she suffered severe burns in a household accident and spent a lengthy period recovering. Her father, who made ventriloquist dummies for department stores, gave her a dummy named Judy Splinters, which became her performing partner.

With help from professional ventriloquist Lawrence Johnson, she developed her skills and began appearing on San Francisco radio as a teenager. Her early program, Judy in Wonderland, began in 1941 on local station KGO and subsequently KPO.  In late 1942, she moved with her family to Los Angeles and obtained a spot on comedian Eddie Cantor's Time To Smile program. She appeared on other prominent radio programs throughout the mid 1940s. , including Nelson Eddy's The Electric Hour on CBS. Following her success with Nelson Eddy, she undertook an extended tour that included visits to military hospitals and participation in more than 500 USO shows. These tours may have had a lasting impact on Shirley considering her later career in healthcare.

After the war, Dinsdale began working at KTLA the historic TV station in Los Angeles in 1947. Her early appearances included announcements, birthday greetings for children, and brief programs at the station. It was these performances that earned her the historic Emmy on January 25, 1949. This win led to her own program called "Judy Splinters" from station KNBH until 1950. She later hosted series in New York and Chicago. 

In 1953, Shirley married engineer Frank Layburn, retired from show business and raised 2 children. 17 years later Dinsdale enrolled at the State University of New York at Stony Brook as a student in  respiratory and cardiopulmonary therapy. Shirley Dinsdale Layburn graduated in the class of 1972. Mrs. Layburn served as the head of the Respiratory Therapy Department at John T. Mather Memorial Hospital in Port Jefferson, New York. After 12 years she retired for in 1986. 

Her career in healthcare is comparable to the achievements of ventriloquist Paul Winchell who was also received the first U.S. patent for an implantable mechanical artificial heart, among other medical devices. Dinsdale and Winchell reveal the spectrum of intelligence and talent of ventriloquists and others in the entertainment industry. 

85 years after her radio debut and on what would have been her 100th birthday, very few of Dinsdale's performances are available today. From research for this post, none of her KGO radio episodes have survived. No complete episode of the KTLA TV segments that earned Shirley that historic Emmy are available publicly. Does a kinescope of her KNBH series exist? A black and white clip of her and Judy Splinters can be seen in a KTLA retrospective, but it is unknown from which archive this clip came from. 

Appearances on the Eddie Cantor and Rudy Vallee programs may exist, but it will take time to review each surviving episode. Some of her broadcasts with Nelson Eddy and on “Command Performance” are online.

The best available scenes of Dinsdale and Judy are here interview for the KTLA documentary and her guest appearance on a 1958 episode of  "To Tell The Truth”. Both are on YouTube.