Jim Henson: The Biography Read Online Free Page B

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 sewnfrom 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 tofind 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