For the next few years, Pop and Dear bounced around with the Southern Railway, landing briefly in Missouri, Washington, Memphis, and New Orleans, and all while raising three daughters, Mary Agnes, Elizabeth, and Barbara—better known as Attie, Betty, and Bobby. Perhaps because they moved around so often, the Browns were an exceptionally close and good-natured family. “I just thought we had the happiest home that ever was,” Bobby said later. “And I remember what a shock it was when I would go to other people’s houses to sleep over and found out that all families weren’t as fun and nice to each other as ours!”
At some point in his youth, Maury Brown embraced Christian Science, a relatively new faith that had been formally established in 1879. Consequently, the daughters were all brought up as Christian Scientists, though moderate in their practice, likely through the influence of Dear. While the daughters might forgo most medical care in favor of prayer or homeopathic treatments—as a girl, Betty was dunked in alternating hot and cold water baths to combat a case of whooping cough—more serious injuries were almost always attended to by physicians. When Attie was badly hurt in a car accident one winter, the family immediately called for a doctor—and far from being concerned about compromising her faith, Attie remembered being more embarrassed that the doctor had to cut away her long underwear to set her broken leg.
Eventually, the Browns returned to the D.C. area for good, living first in a “perfectly awful” place near the railroad tracks in Hyattsville, Maryland—the house would shake violently as trains roared past—before settling into the much quieter Marion Street in 1923. Attie and Betty were expected to help pay the mortgage each month, and shortly after high school both found work as secretaries—Attie at an express company, and Betty at the nearby University of Maryland, where she, and her legs, soon caught the eye of Paul Henson.
Paul would woo Betty for the better part of two years, studying genetics and plant biology at the university during the week and attending regular tennis parties hosted by the Browns on weekends—and Paul quickly came to adore not just Betty, but the entire Brown family. It was easy to see why; Dear and Pop were devoted to each other, while the girls, both then and later, had distinct, almost Dickensian, personalities. Attie was the serious and straitlaced one and became a devoted Episcopalian. Betty was considered practical and no-nonsense, though she could show flashes of a slightly silly sense of humor, while Bobby was the happy-go-lucky one who worked to ensure that everything was “upbeat all the time.” All three, too, were excellent tennis players, having been taught to play at a young age by their dashing uncle Fritz Hinrichs, who also taught the girls to dance. Attie later admitted she “could’ve cared less” about tennis, but the parties kept the Browns in the center of a wide social circle, and their names on the society pages of The Washington Post.
In the spring of 1930, Paul completed work on his master’s thesis—on the “effect of starchy endosperm on the distribution of carbohydrates in the corn plant”—and received a master of science degree in June. He and Betty married on December 27, 1930—the same day Attie, still recovering from her car accident, married Stanleigh “Jinx” Jenkins, a good-natured high school teacher and Episcopalian minister. Although Paul was graduating during the first difficult years of the Great Depression, with his advanced degree and his background in soybean research, he found employment almost immediately as an agronomist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In early 1931, the USDA decided to post him not to the research facility at nearby Beltsville, Maryland, as perhaps Betty had hoped, but rather at the Delta Branch Experiment Station in Mississippi. The newlywed Hensons were off to Leland.
Despite the distance from home, even Betty Henson had to admit that Leland was an attractive place to start a family. The surrounding landscape was lush and green, brimming with wildflowers almost year-round. Cypress trees lined Deer Creek, keeping the shores shady and relatively cool even in the humid summer. The population was just large enough—hovering around three thousand—to support movie theaters, drugstores, and several churches and restaurants, while still being small enough to provide a small-town feel. Further, with the steady flow into Stoneville of college-educated scientists—most of them, like Paul Henson, with advanced degrees—the school in Leland was one of the best in Mississippi. The town, in fact, seemed immune to the Depression infecting the rest of the country. Near record harvests of cotton were ginned at Stoneville and packed into the railroad cars that regularly chugged through the Delta region. Construction was booming, and businesses were doing so well that local police fretted about the best way to manage the traffic that was snarling Broad and Main Streets on Saturday evenings.
Further, the government had gone out of its way to make the relatively remote Stoneville facility as attractive as possible to its scientists and staff. Most employees lived on the grounds of the facility itself—and, in fact, a home had been built specifically for the Hensons in early 1931, a four-room house just southeast of the new main administration building, erected at a cost of $3,093. Milk was delivered daily, free of charge, courtesy of the on-site dairy, and each year the facility would sponsor a Delta Days celebration where families would come from miles around to eat from enormous pits of barbecued chicken and pork and take part in pickup baseball games and other contests.
The Hensons would be in Leland only a little more than a year before they added their first child. In the autumn of 1932, with Dear and Bobby close at hand, Betty bore a son they named Paul Ransom Henson, Jr.—a small, sad-eyed boy on whom Betty doted. For the next four years, Betty would make regular and extended trips back to her parents’ place in Maryland—where the rest of the family could coo and fuss over their firstborn—while Paul Sr. settled into his position at Stoneville, escaping the stifling heat of the administration building each day by tromping the nearby fields of soybeans stretching steadily upward toward the Mississippi sun.
Four years later, the week of September 20, 1936, was an unseasonably hot one for the Delta region. Cotton plants wilted under a scorching sun, while a few scattered rain showers lamely soaked into the dry, brittle ground. On Wednesday evening—the 23rd—with thunderstorms still rumbling across the Delta, Paul Henson drove his pregnant wife the nine dusty miles from Stoneville to Greenville and checked her into King’s Daughters Hospital, a stern-looking building the locals called simply “The Hospital,” since it was the only one in the region. The following morning—at 11:40 A.M. on Thursday, September 24, 1936, with a Dr. Lucas attending—Betty Henson gave birth to her second child, an eight-pound, eleven-ounce, round-faced son with a shock of sandy hair. While their first son had been named for her husband, for their second child Betty looked to her side of the family—and perhaps intentionally employed the same trick Paul Henson’s own mother had used when naming him—using her father’s first name as her new son’s middle one. Betty and Paul Henson’s younger son, then, would be James Maury Henson—though his family would almost always call him Jimmy.
Only a little more than a year later, in early 1938, the Hensons moved back to Maryland, taking a house at 4012 Tennyson Road in Hyattsville. Founded just before the Civil War and straddling railroad tracks and the Baltimore and Washington Turnpike, Hyattsville was at an ideal location to funnel traffic and commerce between Baltimore and the nation’s capital. By the late 1930s, it was a bustling streetcar suburb with a thriving downtown—including a brand-new Woolworth’s—and like Leland, was already struggling with traffic and parking problems.
For the next five years, between the constant bustle of bridge and tennis parties at the Browns’ a few blocks away, Paul Henson would make the short daily commute up Baltimore Avenue to the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center and its newly established Bureau of Plant Industry. In 1940, he completed a course in cytology at the University of Maryland, and began researching alternatives for beef cattle feed, eventually publishing his findings in the respected Journal of Animal Science.
For his younger son, however, those first years in Maryl
and were a blur—no surprise, really, considering that Jim’s colleagues would later laugh that his ability to recall the past was almost nonexistent. “Jim hardly ever gets the past straight,” Muppet writer Jerry Juhl said. “That’s because he’s completely future oriented.” Jim did recall seeing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and The Wizard of Oz at this time—and while he would later cite The Wizard of Oz as his favorite film, given that he would have been barely three at the time of its 1939 release, it’s little wonder that what he remembered most was being terrified of the roaring MGM lion before the film’s opening scene.
Perhaps one of the most important and lasting impacts of these early Maryland years, however, was on Jim’s way of speaking. While Southern-born, Jim learned to talk in the D.C. region, where he was more likely to hear the slightly fronted vowels of the mid-Atlantic accent than the Southern drawl of the Delta. Although Jim may have continued to hear Betty’s gentle Southern lilt at home, it was Paul’s flat, slightly nasal, Midwestern twang, as well as his almost whisper-quiet way of speaking, that Jim ultimately adopted. As he grew older, too, Jim developed a particular quirk in his speaking that, to many, would be as identifiable with him as his bib of a beard: when deep in thought, Jim would hmmm quietly as he considered a question or comment—and colleagues would learn to gauge Jim’s mood from the length or tenor of a particular hmmm.
At the end of Jim’s first-grade year, the Hensons returned to Leland, moving back into government housing on the Stoneville campus. The Henson home edged up against an orchard of pecan trees, planted for research and hybridization studies, but raided regularly by Jim and Paul Jr., who would bring in sackfuls of nuts for Betty to bake into pecan pies. Chickens ran in a small fenced-in area in the side yard, while the back of the house faced a fountain and circular drive leading up to the three-story, red-brick administration building. Just beyond the road that ran in front of the Henson house, the lawn sloped sharply down to Deer Creek.
Deer Creek, for all its beauty, wasn’t a creek for swimming. Already shallow and swampy, cypress trees crashed regularly down into the murky water, creating makeshift dams that backed up with a mess of mud and debris. “None of us were allowed to swim in that creek,” recalled Gordon Jones, Jim’s best friend at the time. It was still their primary spot for playing, though instead of swimming or fishing, Jim and his friends generally preferred romping along the sloping banks. But “there were snakes all along the creek bank,” recalled Tommy Baggette, another Leland friend, “and everybody had to be careful where they walked.” To Jim, the snakes were all part of what he later recalled fondly as “an idyllic time.” “I was a Mississippi Tom Sawyer,” he said later. “I had a BB gun, and I’d shoot at the water moccasins in the swamp just to wake them up.”
When he wasn’t romping on the banks of Deer Creek or startling snakes with his gun, Jim was an avid bird-watcher, squinting into the high grass near the fields on the Stoneville compound, or peering up into the tops of the cypress trees with a 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 Christian Scientists—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 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 r
est 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 of his 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.”
Jim Henson: The Biography Page 2