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Authors: Brian Jay Jones

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On the corner of Broad and Fourth in downtown Leland stood the town’s sturdy brick movie theater, the Temple, built by the local Masons who used its spacious upstairs rooms for meetings. The name was appropriate, for here an eight-year-old Jim Henson would spend countless Saturdays sitting with his eyes cast reverently upward in the darkened theater, engrossed in the flickering images on the screen. “
We’d always go on Saturday to watch the double feature cowboy movies,” Baggette said. For fifteen cents, Jim and his friends could each get a bag of popcorn and spend an entire day soaking up serials, newsreels, cartoons, and the latest comedies or action films. Jim particularly liked films with exotic locations and costumes, whether it involved the American West or the Far East, and he and his friends would spend the rest of the week reenacting what they’d seen on screen, stalking each other through the pecan trees near Jim’s house, building elaborate props, and putting together costumes from old clothing and materials salvaged from linen closets.

Sometimes neighbors would see Jim sitting swami-style on the front lawn of the Henson house, bunched up in a sheet with his head wrapped in a makeshift turban, pretending to snake-charm a garden hose. That was typical; whether it was figuring out how to make clothespin guns that fired rubber bands or building miniature slingshots, Jim could almost always come up with a clever or creative way to make their games more fun. “
A child’s use of imagination and fantasy blends into his use of creativity,” Jim explained later. The trick, he said, was to “try out whole new directions. There are many ways of doing something. Look for what no one has tried before.” As he would demonstrate many times throughout his life, sometimes the cleverest solutions to a problem were also the simplest—and usually lying in plain sight, provided you could see a thing differently.

Jones, for example, remembered being fascinated with the 1944 Columbia serial
The Desert Hawk
, a swashbuckling Arabian adventure in which Gilbert Roland played twin brothers, one good, one evil. “
The good guy had a birthmark. It was a black star on one of
his wrists,” Jones recalled. “So Jim brought me a little cork he had made—he had cut it out and made a star and charred it so that I could make a little black star on my wrist if I wanted to, which I thought was just absolutely great. It hadn’t occurred to me to make that thing or even figure out how to do it … but he was always coming up with simple little things that others didn’t.” Even at eight years old, Jones said, Jim “had something the rest of us didn’t have—an unusual degree of originality.”

But Jim had something else, too. He had Dear.

Even with her daughter Betty living more than a thousand miles away, Dear continued to make
regular trips from Maryland to Mississippi, usually traveling by train, with daughter Bobby for company. Perhaps because Betty tended to indulge the more fragile, less independent Paul Jr., and often left Jim to entertain himself, Jim was exceptionally close to Dear—they even shared the same birthday—and on her arrival, Jim and Dear would immerse themselves in paint and pencils and crayons and glue. Like her mapmaking father, Dear was quick and sure with a pencil, and she encouraged Jim in his own drawings—which were often of loopy-eyed birds or wide-mouthed monsters—as Jim discovered how the placement of two dots for eyes could convey emotion, or how a slash could make an angry mouth. It was the same simplicity that he would later bring to his sense of design for the Muppets.

Dear was equally certain with a paintbrush—she had oil-painted a picture of the roses Pop had given her when he proposed, for example, which remained a family heirloom until it fell apart in the 1970s—and had a knack for crafts and delicate woodwork, including carving and sculpting, all skills she had also learned from Oscar Hinrichs. “
[He’s] the one who taught our mother to do the handwork things she did,” said Attie of her grandfather—and Dear nurtured the same talents and enthusiasm in her grandson.

Apart from her considerable painting and drawing skills, Dear excelled with needle and thread. Her sewing ability, in fact, was the stuff of family legend. Enormous quilts and needlework decorated her home, and Dear had made not only all of her own clothes, but all of her daughters’ clothes as well. Attie recalled with awe Dear’s ability to sew with nearly any material, including a coat she had sewn
from a heavy, scratchy army blanket. “How she sewed that material,” Attie said, “nobody knows.” This skill, too, Dear would cultivate in Jim, who would later build, sculpt, and sew his puppets out of nearly any materials he could find lying around.

Perhaps most important, Dear was Jim’s best audience. She encouraged Jim in his play and in his dressing up and prop making, coaxed stories from him and indulged his fondness for puns and practical jokes. A voracious reader, Dear also inspired a love of reading in Jim, whether it was L. Frank Baum’s
Wizard of Oz
books or the comics pages of the newspaper. And with her proud Southern heritage—“
the Brown girls were never allowed to forget they were Southerners!” said Bobby—Dear instilled in Jim a similar sense of genteel self-importance. It wasn’t arrogance, but simply a conviction that he could do and be anything he wanted—a confidence and self-awareness that, for the rest of his life, family and colleagues admired and found reassuring. “
He was convinced he was going to be successful,” his wife, Jane, said later. “I think he knew he was extraordinary. But it was in a quiet way where he just quietly knew that he knew things.”

With such encouragement at home, it was no surprise Jim found school relatively easy. While he wasn’t the best student in class—that distinction fell to Jones, who later became a physicist—Jim was ranked in the top three. Jim’s classmates remember him as being very clever, but never seeking the spotlight. No one could recall Jim taking an interest in school productions, apart from obligatory supporting roles in chorus or Christmas plays. It was perhaps just as well, for Jim was so soft-spoken that audience members would likely have had to strain to hear him.

While Jim was taller than most boys his age, he was neither gawky nor an athlete, though Kermit Scott admitted that Jim was “
a little bit more of a nerd” than the rest of the gang. Still, Jim could surprise his classmates by exhibiting the same brand of toughness that had sent his paternal grandfather rumbling wildly into the Cherokee Strip. One evening out at Jones’s farm, Jim and his friends took part in a boxing match—a sport at which the well-built, and slightly older, Tommy Baggette excelled. The boys took turns putting on the gloves and fighting one-on-one, but when it came time to
find an opponent to take on the good-natured but solid Baggette, all eyes went downward. Finally, Jim stepped forward. “
[He] would do things like that,” Jones remembered. “He had guts … if somebody else wouldn’t do it, he would—and … he’d just go ahead and make the best of it.” The result? “Tommy hit him with an uppercut and knocked him down,” Jones said. “But I just remember thinking how much nerve it took for [Jim] to put himself in that spot.”

Still, there were no hard feelings between Jim and Baggette, whose mother, Jessie Mae, served as one of the den mothers for their Cub Scout troop. It was in Cub Scouts, in fact, that Jim got his first taste of performing, putting on a kind of pantomime with Gordon Jones as part of a troop skit night. As Jones stood with his hands clenched behind his back, giving a short speech in a deadpan manner, Jim stood pressed up behind him, poking his arms through the crook of Jones’s arms to perform the speaker’s hands. “
He’d reach out his handkerchief and pat [Jones’s] forehead, doing all these kinds of things which we all thought was hilarious,” Frazier remembered. It was no accident, Jones said later, that Jim performed the expressive hands, which was the part of the skit “calling for originality and showmanship.… Jim was the showman.”

Betty Henson also served as a den mother for Jim’s Cub Scout troop. As it turned out, the Henson home was a favorite gathering place, not only because Betty was known to serve warm pecan pies at Scout meetings, but also because the Henson household was a genuinely warm one. Everyone liked each other and a good sense of humor mattered. The Hensons, said Jones, “
were very quiet people.… But they all had a sense of humor and they would say things that were funny. But there was no loud-voice laughing. Everybody was very merry, and they did a lot of wordplay and things of that nature.”

While Paul Sr.—“Dr. Henson,” as the boys respectfully called him—was perhaps the quietest member of the family, he was known around the Stoneville compound for his way with a story.
During the almost weekly summer fish fries at the Experiment Station, a crowd would gather around Paul as he launched into one funny story after another. As for Betty Henson, she was “
absolutely delightful,” said Jones, with “a bright, witty sense of humor.” She took great delight
in gently teasing the boys, pouring a glass of milk to overflowing, for example, if the boys didn’t literally say “when.” “I’d say ‘Okay, that’s enough,’ and she’d keep pouring!” laughed Jones. “
His mother was great for jokes,” agreed Frazier, who recalled Betty trying to convince him that a blurry baby picture actually showed Jim with six toes. “She said, ‘You never noticed he had six toes?’ … And I kept saying, ‘Take off your shoe, Jim!’ ”

Jim, it seemed, could see the humor in almost any situation. For a while, the Hensons owned a horse named Peggy, a volatile creature that Jim and Kermit Scott would attempt to ride among the pecan trees near the Henson house. Instead, Peggy would bolt for the low-hanging branches to knock Jim, or anyone else, off her back. While Jim howled with laughter at the nerve of the horse, Scott was less amused. “
Both of us nearly got killed,” he grumbled.

Wild horses aside, Jim and Paul Jr. were always tinkering with something. While Paul was more mathematically inclined, working on detailed projects with small parts, Jim was the more ambitious of the two brothers, often taking on big, messy projects that required a great deal of space.
While Jim and Paul were four years apart, they remained close—given his slight build, Paul was more comfortable playing with Jim and his friends than boys his own age (Paul Henson would, in fact, remain of slight build for the rest of his life)—and he and Jim would spend hours together in their side yard, hunched over model airplanes and crystal radio sets.
Jim would always be a gadget freak, a passion he had likely inherited from his great-uncle Ernie, Dear’s younger brother, who had built his own crystal radio in the 1920s so he and Dear could listen to
Two Black Crows
together on the radio’s earpiece. To Frazier’s delight, Jim’s radios worked, too. “
You could get one radio station very faintly,” said an impressed Frazier. “But it worked!”

As much as Jim liked building radios and knowing how they worked, he loved listening to them even more. “
Early radio drama was an important part of my childhood,” Jim said fondly. “I’d go home at four-thirty or five in the afternoon to hear shows like
The Green Hornet
,
The Shadow
and
Red Ryder …
and of course I loved the comedians.”
Fibber McGee and Molly was one of Jim’s favorites, as was Jack Benny.
But most of all, Jim lived for Sunday evenings,
when NBC radio aired
The Chase and Sanborn Hour
, featuring ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy.

Bergen was that oddest of phenomena—a ventriloquist who had rocketed to success on the radio, where no one could see the performance. Those watching Bergen live in the studio might have argued that was for the best, as Bergen’s ventriloquism skills could often get sloppy, his lips visibly moving when he spoke through his dummies. It was a charge Bergen shrugged off; to Bergen, the technique was secondary to the characters—and Bergen excelled both at creating memorable characters and bringing them to life almost purely through the sound of his voice. Bergen engaged his characters in rapid-fire banter so nimbly—rotating flawlessly between his own voice and the voices of his impish sidekick Charlie McCarthy or dimbulb Mortimer Snerd—that radio listeners were convinced they were real people. Jim Henson, for one, was certain of it. “
I wasn’t thinking of any of those people as puppets,” he said. “They were human to me.”

But it went even further than that, as Jim would explain years later; using a dummy allowed Bergen to do something indefinable. “Edgar Bergen’s work with Charlie and Mortimer was magic,” Jim enthused. “Magic in the real sense. Something happened when Edgar spoke through Charlie—things were said that couldn’t be said by ordinary people.” As Jim would discover, there
was
a kind of magic, a wonderful kind of freedom, involved in letting a character at the end of your arm give voice to sentiments one might not feel comfortable expressing while wearing the guise of, as Jim called them, “ordinary people.”

I
n 1948, the U.S. Department of Agriculture sent the Henson family back to Maryland, where Paul returned to work at the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center.
The family purchased a cozy new 1,500-square-foot house at 4002 Beechwood Road in the recently incorporated town of University Park, only a little more than a mile from the University of Maryland. It had been hard leaving Leland, not only for twelve-year-old Jim, but for his circle of friends as well. “
I was really sad and upset that he was getting ready to move,” said
Gordon Jones, who would also move from Leland a short time later. But being back in Maryland did bring with it one major blessing: it meant being close to Dear, who still lived with Pop in the house at 4306 Marion Street in Hyattsville, less than ten minutes away. Now, instead of gathering as a family perhaps once every three months, the Hensons and the Browns could get together every week to eat large family dinners around Dear’s meticulously set table, then
retire to the porch to talk and tell stories as they rocked in rhythm on squeaking metal gliders. Those gatherings would always be some of Jim’s fondest memories. “
There was so much laughter,” he said, “because everyone was always telling jokes and saying funny things.”

BOOK: Jim Henson: The Biography
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