Jim Henson: The Biography Read Online Free Page A

in the gospels. Cronin delighted in engaging students with trivia questions and awarding prizes for the quickest correct answer, and for one particular contest announced that the student with the first correct answer would receive a softball bat while the runner-up would get a softball. “Jim found it just before I did and so Jim had first prize and I had second,” Frazier recalled. “But Jim already had a bat[so] he went ahead and said, ‘No, I’ll take the ball,’ and he let me have the bat, just because I wanted it so badly.” That was characteristic of Jim, said Frazier warmly. “He was a good friend.”
    If Sundays were for church, however, Saturdays were for Temple.
    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 ofhis 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 makeregular 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