Jim Henson: The Biography Read Online Free

pair of binoculars, then thumbing through his thick book of birds to try to identify what he’d seen flutter past. Baggette remembered being impressed by a reference book Jim had made himself by pasting in pictures of birds cut from books and magazines, and filling the margins with his own drawings.When pressed, Jim would name the blackbird as his favorite, not only for its spunky personality, but also because he delighted in the sound of the bird’s less formal name: the grackle. It was the sort of deliciously sharp-sounding nonsensical word that Jim loved—a meaningless word that just
sounded
like it meant something.
    Jim and Paul Jr. were enrolled at the Leland Consolidated School, an elegant high-ceilinged, single-story brick building that backed onto the creek. Here Jim joined the Cub Scouts, and picked up with a regular group of friends, including the bookish Jones, the rascally Baggette, the colorfully named Royall Frazier, and a strapping young man named Theodore Kermit Scott. While the Hensons still referred to their youngest son as Jimmy, to Jones, Frazier, and most of Leland, he was hailed by the groan-inducing
James
, thanks to a fourth-grade teacher who needed a way to distinguish between three boys in her class with similar names. “Jimmy Childress was going to be Jimmy,” said Frazier later, laughing. “Jim Carr was going to be Jim and that meant Jim Henson was going to be James!”
    Sundays in Leland were for church—and even with its relatively small population, Leland had a number of churches, with Methodist, Catholic, Presbyterian, Baptist, and several separate black churches all represented by their own imposing brick or stone structures. Paul Henson was, for the most part, a nonpracticing Methodist, while Betty and her sons were among the few Christian Scientists in the entire Delta region—before the arrival of the Hensons,a religious survey of the town had located exactly two ChristianScientists—but Jim’s unusual faith was never cause for much conversation between him and his friends. Discussing his religious views years later, Jim was deferential to faith in general, a courtesy friends and colleagues deeply respected. “Over the years, I’ve evolved my own set of beliefs and attitudes—as we all have—I feel work for me,” Jim wrote later. “I don’t feel particularly comfortable telling others how to think or live. There are people who know more about these things than I do.” “He was not an evangelical at all,” agreed Gordon Jones, “and I wondered if it wasn’t more of an intellectual thing, something that his parents had put on him, because it wasn’t something that he seemed to really enjoy talking about or feel like he had to talk about.”
    Still, Jones, a Baptist, was curious enough to ask Jim about his religion at least once. “I remember he had pretty good answers,” Jones said. “I wanted to know ‘What happens when you get sick?’ and ‘Don’t you go to the doctor?’ And he let me know that a Christian Scientist’s faith would handle that kind of thing.” When it came to more serious illnesses, Jones said, Jim informed him that these were due to “a temporary lapse of faith.” At that point, “they would go to the doctor,” Jones said. “But generally, they depended on their faith to heal them.”
    With no real organized church of Christian Science in the area, Jim participated to some degree in the social opportunities provided by Leland’s many other churches. Some weekends, Kermit Scott and his family would pick Jim up in Stoneville and attend services at the white Spanish Mission–style Methodist church in Leland. Other times, the Fraziers would bring him to the brick Presbyterian church on the corner of Willeroy and Broad Streets, where Jim would attend Sunday school classes. Here the basement classroom was presided over by a local osteopath named Dr. Cronin, whose lessons were remembered more for their entertainment value than for instruction