Jim Henson
The Early Years

The following is from the book Jim Henson The Works

James Maury Henson-called Jimmy by his family-was born on September 24, 1936. He spent his early years in Leland, Mississippi, a small town less than a dozon miles from the Mississippi River. Jimmy's father, Paul, was an agricultural research biologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Paul's wife, Betty stayed home with Jimmy and his older son, Paul Jr.
Betty doted on Jimmy but was especially preoccupied with Paul Jr., a shy precocious boy. Jimmy was often left to amuse himself, and frequently sought out the company of his maternal grandmother-known simply as "Dear."
It was Dear who encouraged Jimmy to cherish the world of imagination. A painter and voracious reader as well as a prolific creator of quilts and needlework, Dear was in many ways the key early influence on the young Jim Henson. She taught him to appreciate the power of visual imagery and to value creativity. She encouraged him to strive to be the best in whatever he did. And her interest in "young people"-her desire to hear about everything Jimmy had done, about what he thought-bolstered his self-confidence.
on the surface, Jim had a traditional, small-town American childhood. Jim, his brother Paul, and his cousins Will and Stan spent their time swimming and fishing in Deer Creek, the local tributary of the Mississippi. In common with millions of other young Americans, Jim quickly discovered the twentieth-century delights offered by the movies and by radio-still in its golden age. The first film he saw was The Wizard of Oz (he later reported being terrified by the MGM lion), and as an adult he would recall hurrying home after school to tune in to serials like The Shadow and The Green Hornet. He also loved the comedians of the radio era, especially ventriloquist Edgar Bergen with his famous dummies Charlie McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd.
When Jim was in fifth grade, his father accepted a new job that entailed moving to Hyattsville, Maryland, a quiet suburb of Washington, D.C. It was there that Jim completed his education and discovered television.
In 1946-when television broadcasting resumed after World War II, shortly before the Hensons' relocation-there were approximately 7,000 television sets in the entire United States. By the end of 1947, the American television audience was estimated at a million. Just three years later, it was reported that the citizens of Baltimore-just twenty miles from the Henson home-had become the first in the nation to spend more time watching television than listening to the radio.
All this occurred primarily during Jim's tenure of junior high school; it placed him firmly in that generation for whom the medium had a magical potency that is difficult to explain to anyone who has grown up during the age of MTV and CNN.
According to Jim's recollections, his family bought its first television set around 1950. "I badgered my parents into buying a set," he later said. "I absolutely loved television....I loved the idea that what you saw was taking place somewhere else at the same time....I immediately wanted to work in television."
Jim was twelve when Burr Tillstrom brought Kukla, Fran and Ollie to network TV, thirteen when Bil Baird's Snarky Parker rode into American living rooms aboard his faithful steed, Heathcliffe. These shows were among Jim's favorites and may well have alerted him to the possibilities offered by puppets on the small screen. They were far from being his only influences of the period, however. He loved Ernie Kovac's hip, off-the-wall, surrealistic humor and the way the comedian used camera tricks and the imaginative visual gags to bring his material to life. He was impressed by comedian Stan Freberg's distinctive delivery-sometimes dry, sometimes manic. He enjoyed the down-home comedy of Homer and Jethro and the irreverent musical buffoonery of Spike Jones.
Along with these and other broadcast favorites, Jim eagerly followed the comic strip adventures of Walt Kelly's Pogo, which went to national syndication at about the time Jim began high school.
Above all, though, Jim was fascinated by the medium of television itself. "When I was old enough to get a job-sixteen-I went out and approached all these little studios in Washington," he later recalled. These first efforts came to nothing. But two years later, in 1954, during the summer after he graduated from Northwestern High School, Jim heard that one of the local stations, WTOP, needed some puppeteers for it Junior Good Morning Show. WTOP didn't want to pay much-$10 a day was what they had in mind-so they went looking for students.
Jim's performing had been limited to school plays, but he and a friend named Russell Wall built some puppets-a character called Pierre the French Rat and a couple of cowboys named Longhorn and Shorthorn. They took them over to WTOP to audition.
They were hired.
"The show lasted only a few weeks," Jim remembered later, "but we were mentioned favorably in a couple of newspaper articles, so I took the puppets over to NBC and they started putting me on these little local shows. It was interesting and kind of fun to do-but I wasn't really interested in puppetry then. It was just a means to an end."
The following fall, Jim enrolled at the University of Maryland and began to take studio art classes there, thinking that he might eventually become a commercial artist. A good deal of his artwork from the period has survived, and it indicates that Jim had a lively visual imagination, a considerable facility with color, and an impecable eye for detail. The strong, simple images he produced anticipated the effective simplification of the puppets he would later design.
In addition to the various allegorical paintings and cartoons that Jim made during time, he also began a successful business producing silkscreen posters for college events. But the business was so successful that it began to take up too much of his time and he eventually gave it up to concentrate on his real interest-his television career. He had continued to perform with his puppets and was starting to develop a reputation in the Washington, D.C. area. Soon he reduced his college courseload, although he did complete his degree, arriving for his graduation in a secondhand Rolls-Royce that was one of the fruits of his early success.
In September of 1954, when Jim was still a Freshman, he met Jane Nobel, a fellow student at the university. She would become his first important performing partner and eventually his wife, and her rold would be crucial to the evolution of the first phase of Jim's career.
Eighteen months later, in April of 1956, Jim's brother, Paul-who had shared many of his enthusiasms-was killed in an automobile accident. Paul had been more reserved than Jim and had displayed a scientific rather than artistic bent. But the two had been very close, and Jim was profoundly affected by his brother's death. Deeply tied to his family, he must have felt a renewed sense of responsibility now that this tragedy had made him an only child. Perhaps Paul's death even motivated Jim to work harder.
At any rate, Jim had already begun to set television and puppetry on new courses-enhancing both in the process. And he was also on the verge of creating a group of characters familiar to people around the world.
These characters would become known as the Muppets.

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