Jim and Friends
The life, the legend and the characters inspired by his Delta boyhood

by Noel Workman


When James and his good buddy Kermit spent lazy afternoons exploring and frog collecting along Deer Creek in the 1940s, nobody could have predicted how James, Kermit and those frogs would be remembered today.

James became Jim Henson, the world’s foremost puppeteer. His friend Kermit Scott lent his name, if not his persona, to Henson’s premier puppet. And Kermit, the Frog, became eternally a part of the Henson magic.

Henson was always bringing home pets...frogs, turtles, snakes and the like. His mother Betty and grandmother Sarah Brown were always careful to look before sitting, since there might be a turtle in the chair, according to Jim Henson, Young Puppeteer of the “Childhood of Famous Americans” series.

“Jim swam, fished and explored Deer Creek, given his fascination with reptiles, amphibians and birds,” Turk points out. “He collected pictures of birds for a scrapbook, to draw them as lifelike as possible...and then drew birds that were his own creations. As a pre-schooler, he kept telling his grandmother that he needed to get to school in a hurry to learn to write his name...to sign his art.”

“It wasn’t long before he was using puppets to entertain fellow Cub Scouts where his mother and Jessie Mae Baggett were den mothers,” Turk explains. “The young Henson was fascinated with movement. Natural movement of animals, insects, anything living. He spent years coming up with characters that had similar movements.”

In many ways, Henson’s was a simple, Delta childhood. But with a twist. Jim and Paul Jr., his older brother, loved to lie on the ground, gazing at the clouds. They weren’t trying to imagine recognizable shapes, as so many children do. They were classifying them...cumulus, cirrus and the like. Their scientist father had taught them cloud classifications.

“James and Paul were always making something,” remembers classmate Royall Frazier, a retired geophysicist and Merrill Lynch executive. “They made a crystal radio that we could actually hear WJPR on!  And one time we went to the only place in Greenville where books were sold. It also sold model airplane motors. I wanted a book, but Jim was always looking at the motors,” Frazier says.

Like others raised in the 1940s and ’50s, Henson remembered the arrival of the family’s first television as “the biggest event of my adolescence.” He was greatly influenced by radio ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and the early television puppets of Burr Tillstrom (on Kukla, Fran and Ollie).

And what about the original Kermit? The late Kermit Scott was the son of Pearl and Leland Mayor T.K. (Theodore Kermit) Scott. The Scotts moved to Leland when Kermit was in fifth grade. “I knew him as James Henson,” his friend recalled in a 2006 interview with Delta Magazine. “His father was at Stoneville. I would go out there and spend time with him. There wasn’t a whole lot very remarkable about it. We were just grade school kids doing what kids do. We did a lot of frog collecting down on the creek in front of his house. And we were in the Cub Scouts together. He left after the sixth grade. We were close friends only for those couple of years,” Scott said.

In 1970, The New York Times published Henson’s comments about the origin of the name of his famous frog. “That was the first time that I had any idea,” Scott explained. “I knew him as James Henson, not Jim Henson. It never crossed my mind this was the same guy.” “Jim was known in our class as James,” recalls Frazier. “We had three Jimmy’s in the fourth grade, and Maude Wilson, our teacher, decided arbitrarily that one would be Jim (Carr), another would be Jimmy (Childress), and Jim Henson would be James. James he became and James he remained until he left,” Frazier says.

In 1948, the Hensons moved to Hyattsville, Maryland, near Washington, D.C. The following summer, Frazier, Tommy Baggette and Jules Martin visited the Hensons there, “and had a great time,” Frazier remembers. “That was the last I saw Jim, but over the years, we made contact from time to time.”

While in high school, Henson began working for WTOP-TV creating puppets for a children’s show. In 1955, the first Kermit was made from his mother’s old spring coat, complete with a cardboard mouth and ping-pong ball eyes. It’s now in the Smithsonian Institution, resting next to a later green one that had been “froggified,” as Henson described it.

Henson entered the University of Maryland as a studio arts major, thinking he might become a commercial artist. A puppetry class offered in the applied arts department introduced him to craft and textiles courses in the College of Home Economics, and he graduated in 1960 with a B.S. in home economics.
 
As a freshman, he created “Sam and Friends,” a puppet show for WRC-TV. The characters were already recognizable Muppets, and the show included a primitive version of what would become Henson’s most famous character, Kermit the Frog.

Henson said the word “muppet” was created by combining the words “marionette” and “puppet.” However, he also said that it was just something he liked the sound of, and made up the “marionette/puppet” story while talking to a journalist because it sounded plausible.

When Henson began work on “Sam and Friends,” he asked fellow student Jane Nebel to assist him. The show was a financial success, but after graduating from college, he had his doubts about a career as a puppeteer. He wandered off to Europe for several months. European puppeteers, who looked on their work as an art form, inspired him. Henson returned to the United States, and he and Jane married in 1959.
 
She has visited the museum in Leland a number of times, bringing some of the materials on display there. Their children, Lisa, Cheryl, Brian, John and Heather, have also visited the Delta. Leland Mayor Perrin Grissom invited Henson to the city’s 100th birthday party in 1986, but Henson never returned to his childhood home.

Jane has said that Jim was so involved with his work that he had very little time to spend with her or their children. All five of his children began working with Muppets at an early age, partly because, daughter Cheryl remembered, “One of the best ways of being around him was to work with him.”

The popularity of Henson’s work on “Sam and Friends” in the late ’50s led to a series of guest appearances on network talk and variety shows, including “The Ed Sullivan Show.” These talk show appearances bore fruit when he devised Rowlf, a piano-playing anthropomorphic dog that starred in Purina Dog Chow commercials. Rowlf became the first Muppet to make regular appearances on network television when Jimmy Dean spied him in the Purina spot. Rowlf was a regular on “The Jimmy Dean Show,” from 1964 to 1968.

In 1969, Joan Ganz Cooney from the Children’s Television Workshop asked Henson to work on “Sesame Street,” a visionary children’s program for public television. Part of the show was set aside for a series of funny, colorful puppet characters living on Sesame Street, including Oscar the Grouch, Bert and Ernie, Cookie Monster and Big Bird.

Henson often downplayed his role in “Sesame Street’s” success, but Cooney frequently praised his work and the Public Broadcasting System called him “the spark that ignited our fledgling broadcast service.” The Sesame Street success also allowed Henson to stop producing commercials. He later remembered, “It was a pleasure to get out of that world.”

Henson and his team targeted an adult audience with a series of sketches on the first season of “Saturday Night Live.” He recalled, “I saw what [creator Lorne Michaels] was going for and I really liked it and wanted to be a part of it, but somehow what we were trying to do and what his writers could write for it never jelled.”

SNL writers never got comfortable writing for his characters, and frequently disparaged Henson’s creations. One memorably quipped, “I won’t write for felt.”

Unable to interest American producers in his next project, Henson moved his creative team to England in 1976, where “The Muppet Show” began filming. The move was triggered by British impresario Lord Lew Grade, who purchased 24 episodes of the new show. Those first 24 turned into more than five years of the most widely watched television show in the world as Grade placed it in 108 countries. The show featured a variety of memorable characters including Kermit, Miss Piggy, Gonzo the Great and Fozzie Bear. 

Henson’s role in the productions was often compared by his co-workers to Kermit’s role on “The Muppet Show”...a shy, gentle boss with “a whim of steel” who “[ran] things as firmly as it is possible to run an explosion in a mattress factory.” Henson recognized Kermit as an alter ego, though he thought that Kermit was bolder than he was; he once said of Kermit, “He can say things I hold back.”

Three years after the start of “The Muppet Show,” the Muppets appeared in their first theatrical feature film, “The Muppet Movie,” a critical and financial success. A song from the film, “The Rainbow Connection,” sung by Henson as Kermit, hit #25 on the Billboard Hot 100 and was nominated for an Academy Award. In 1981, a Henson-directed sequel, “The Great Muppet Caper,” followed and Henson decided to end the still-popular Muppet Show and concentrate on making films. From time to time, the Muppet characters continued to appear in made-for-TV movies and television specials.

In the late 1980s, Henson worked on a feature film starring animatronic dinosaurs with the working title of “The Natural History Project.” In 1991, news stories written around the premiere of the Jim Henson Company-produced “Dinosaurs” sitcom highlighted the show’s connection to Henson, who had died the year before. “Jim Henson dreamed up the show’s basic concept about three years ago,” said The New York Times.

While busy with these projects, Henson began experiencing flu-like symptoms. On May 4, 1990, he appeared on “The Arsenio Hall Show.” At the time, he mentioned to his publicist that he was tired and had a sore throat, but felt that it would go away.

Four days later, he and his daughter Cheryl visited his father and stepmother in North Carolina. The following day, feeling tired and sick, he returned to New York and canceled a Muppet recording session scheduled for May 14.

Henson’s wife Jane, from whom he was separated, visited, talking with him throughout the evening. Early the next morning he was having trouble breathing and began coughing up blood. He suggested to Jane that he might be dying, but did not want to bother going to the hospital. 

She later told People magazine that it was likely due to his desire not to be a bother to people. Others suggested that his Christian Scientist upbringing played a role in his reluctance to seek medical attention. Henson’s mother and grandmother were also Christian Scientists, although the family attended Leland Methodist Church while living in the Delta, Turk says.

He finally agreed to go to New York Hospital but by the time he was admitted, he could no longer breathe on his own and had abscesses in his lungs. His condition deteriorated rapidly into septic shock despite aggressive treatment with multiple antibiotics. Barely 20 hours after Henson was admitted, he died from organ failure at the age of 53.

Several months before Henson died, Frazier was working in London and “I read that he was there, called his office, and we finally did speak, agreeing to get together on his return to London in the summer, but of course, he died before we got together.”

But for his fans in Leland—and around the world—Jim Henson lives through his Delta-inspired characters. DM