Editor Ira is here today to talk about puppets, and so much more:

You didn't ask for a guided tour of some of the weirder reaches of my psyche. You also didn't ask for more of me writing about celebrity puppets. [Fact check: I absolutely did — Editor Ruby.] Nevertheless, you're going to get both in today's installment of the Friday Know-It-All. You've been warned. Bear with me as we go on a stream-of-consciousness ramble through puppet-adjacent trivia.

Our journey begins with Editor Ruby researching a question about novelist Cormac McCarthy. He was born Charles McCarthy, but adopted a pen name to avoid confusion with Charlie McCarthy, the iconic dummy operated by ventriloquist Edgar Bergen. This was the first Ruby had heard of Edgar Bergen, including his status as the father of future "Murphy Brown" star Candice Bergen.

Growing up as an '80s kid obsessed with earlier 20th century pop culture, I was well aware of Bergen and Charlie. They had been huge stars in the radio era, despite the fact that an audio-only medium pretty much undercuts the entire hook of ventriloquism. From the 1920s through the 1970s, Charlie McCarthy was a star of movies, TV specials, comics, and other venues where, again, the entire appeal of a performer speaking through a puppet would seem to be lost.

Charlie was often accompanied in those ventures by Bergen's other signature character, the dimwitted Mortimer Snerd. In our editorial staff discussion, I remembered that as a very young child I often confused Mortimer Snerd with Bennett Cerf. That unsettled me, because an early childhood familiarity with Random House cofounder and early TV raconteur Bennett Cerf seemed weird even for me. (Not that being fascinated by dry-witted public intellectuals from the 1950s game show circuit would've been out of character for me, but that's really more of a middle school thing.) I had a faint idea that "Sesame Street" was somehow connected, so I did a brief bit of web sleuthing that revealed… what else? More puppets.

See, the early years of "Sesame Street" included at least two supporting characters named "Bennett Snerf." One of those was a fairly accurate physical caricature who appeared in the show's recurring "What's My Part?" sketches, a parody of the real Bennett Cerf's frequent appearances on the game show "What's My Line?" It seems one of the writers for "Sesame Street" in the '70s was Bennett's son Christopher Cerf, who wrote his dad into the show and emblazoned him onto the consciousness of an impressionable young Editor Ira. (Christopher Cerf also co-wrote a bunch of the earwormiest "Sesame Street" songs of the '70s and '80s, so he's the guy to blame the next time "Put Down the Duckie" pops into your head in the middle of the workday.)

One more personal puppetry sidebar inadvertently sparked by my coworker researching the author of "Blood Meridian": Looking at pictures of Edgar Bergen and his sidekicks triggered a memory of a terrifying poster that hung in my grandparents' basement which has haunted me since childhood. It was a picture of a very '70s-looking man smiling while surrounded by a trio of uncomfortably realistic puppets, and it had something to do with the venerable Twin Cities radio station WCCO.

The internet being the internet, I was able to track down the poster fairly quickly. Turns out it was a promotional ad for beloved Minnesota radio host Steve Cannon. Cannon was known for conducting interviews with a cast of colorful characters known as "The Little Cannons," all voiced by Cannon himself. Various radio station promos over the years featured visual representations of those characters, including the monstrosities that lurked in my grandparents' basement.

Those "puppets" weren't puppets at all, but rather papier-mache sculptures crafted by Twin Cities artists Lee and Mary Sievers. The Sievers maintained a long and successful career creating figure-based art, including those ghastly collectible figurines that were all over the shelves at your great aunt's house when you were a kid. As for the Little Cannons themselves, they're currently housed in the Pavek Museum in St. Louis Park, Minnesota, home of the Minnesota Broadcasting Hall of Fame. That means they live about 20 minutes from my house, making it entirely feasible that they could one night slip their bonds and wend their way to St. Paul to make good on all the implied horrors that kept me tossing and turning on my grandparents' hide-a-bed all those years ago.

So yeah, anyway, Cormac McCarthy changed his name so people wouldn't think he was a ventriloquist dummy. And that's all there is to know!