Emancipator Impersonators

BURBANK —  Want to meet an honest guy in a stovepipe hat? Burbank was the place this weekend, when it hosted the fifth annual convention of the Assn. of Lincoln Presenters.

Who wants to dress up like a notoriously plain president who was assassinated before he was 60? At least 40 people, it turns out.

As Bill Peck, a Lincoln presenter from San Diego explains, “We’re really Lincoln impersonators, though we can’t really impersonate Lincoln because we don’t know what his voice was like or what his movements were like because we have no motion-picture evidence.”

Unlike Elvis impersonators, who use tapes and other guides to plumb their hero, Lincoln impersonators try their best to embody the greatest of American presidents--the author of the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation--with virtually no contemporary guidelines, except a few Mathew Brady photos.

Currently, the group numbers 111 Abraham Lincolns (10 of them in California) and 28 Mary Todd Lincolns. The latter is a particularly odd group. Lincoln wasn’t pretty, God knows (there was that unfortunate mole and that long, sad face), but his poor widow is best known for being one of America’s most notable manic-depressives. Who would want to bully one’s body into whale-bone stays and a hoop skirt to impersonate a pathological shopper?

Donna McCreary-Bowen, who was one of the Mary Todd Lincolns at this year’s convention explains: “This is my life.” The woman, who works as a Mary Todd Lincoln impersonator for the state of Indiana, feels that Mary has never truly recovered from a bad rap she got from the “many historians who maliciously maligned her.”

Mary Todd Lincoln may have been manic-depressive, but, Bowen argues, “She had a right to be,” given that she lost three of four sons and was splattered with her husband’s blood when he was gunned down as he sat next to her at Ford’s Theater.

Lincoln impersonators, or presenters, as they like to call themselves since many of them spend much of their discretionary time imitating the Great Emancipator for school children and others, sometimes find this a full-time job.

John Kendall is a substitute math teacher who discovered he can make better money impersonating Lincoln than explicating algebra.

It started, the 44-year-old Laguna Hills man explains, when “I put on a Halloween costume and went to my daughter’s kindergarten class. What I thought was going to be a one-time visit turned out to be a very big hobby.”

And a lucrative side-line business.

Kendall has made 120 appearances as Lincoln since the first of the year, most of them, of course, in February, the month in which Lincoln was born.

He charges $295 to appear as Lincoln at a school assembly ($425 for two), and more to impersonate Honest Abe for such corporate clients as Procter & Gamble and Boeing.

Although Lincoln was dead at 56, Kendall is at the covered-with-dew end of Lincoln impersonators, many of whom don’t have to simulate their icon’s well-earned wrinkles.

“When people tell me, ‘You look kind of young, Mister Lincoln,’ I respond by saying, ‘Time has a way of taking care of your looking too young.’ ”

Dan Bassuck founded the organization in 1990. A former academic from New Jersey, Bassuck is one of the shorter Lincoln impersonators. A great many people find their way to impersonating Lincoln because people think they look like him. And one of the things that was notable about the 16th president was his height--he was 6 feet 4--still our tallest president.

“I happen to be 5 foot 8,” says Bassuck, “but I have few, if any, shortcomings.”

Bassuck says he launched the organization because he knew he was not the only Lincoln imitator out there, and “I thought it was an appropriate time to start linking the Lincolns together.”

It is an enormously satisfying avocation, he says, but not a cheap one. He pays $100 to $300 apiece for his antique stovepipe hats.

The Lincoln presenters, who meet in even years at a place where Lincoln actually walked (the Burbank Airport Hilton isn’t one of them), are nothing if not hams. They stay in costume throughout the weekend. You should see the faces of civilians who find themselves walking into the men’s room with, not one, but several, Lincoln look-alikes.

Bill Peck, 69, was a booking officer in the San Diego jail before he became a Lincoln presenter. But Peck looked so much like Lincoln that everybody called him Abe--that was even the name on his ID tag. Peck says that he never had any trouble with an inmate in all the years that he worked at the jail, and he attributes that to Lincoln’s charisma.

Even the inmates, he says, “have their respect for the man, and it shows.”

Glendale’s H.M. Wammack, 73, plays Lincoln every year on the Great Man’s Birthday at Forest Lawn, Hollywood Hills. More than 3,000 schoolchildren saw him this year. Wammack began doing Lincoln a dozen years ago after he memorized Lincoln’s farewell address, along with dozens of poems, when his late wife was dying of leukemia. Like many other Mary Todd Lincoln impersonators, his current wife, Beth, fell into the role because there was a Lincoln impersonator in the family.

People want to impersonate Lincoln because he was a genuine hero. As one of the Lincoln group’s vice presidents, Patrick McCreary explains: “I almost feel, as I travel around the country, on a mission, if not a ministry, to reintroduce the real Lincoln as a role model and as an example of a true American.”

And, no, the Lincoln impersonators assure us, their convention has never, ever, been crashed by a John Wilkes Booth impersonator.