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Also, check out The Henson Company's Biography of Jerry Nelson   Caption of the Month

Jerry's Biography   I was born in the Chinese Year of the Dog, July 10th, 1934, so I'm what you could call a crabby dog. I'm loyal, trustworthy and friendly, but leave me alone sort of thing, if you catch my drift. My Mother's side Grandparents gave me quarters to learn songs when I was coming up and I think that had a profound influence because I'm still learning songs to this day and will probably continue to do so until the day I die. When people ask me how I became a puppeteer I jokingly reply "I lied and wore cowboy boots" The basis of that comes from the time I first went to see Bil Baird about a job. A friend Jerry Contes told me about an article in the NY Post that said that Bil (Baird) needed a puppeteer to complete his company for a New England Tour. I was "between jobs" so I called and set up an appointment to audition. Now, the only experience I had with puppets was watching them on early television, and when I was around twelve I had a small marionette I got for Christmas. So when Bil asked me if I had experience I did what any actor worth his salt would do ... I exaggerated. The Muppets Darts team- Jerry, Richard Hunt, and Graham Binmore- raising money for charity. "Oh sure" I said, "I used to do shows for kids in the neighborhood"(this was not strictly a lie- I did show friends how I could make my little policeman marionette run and walk and climb and jump) but whether lie or mere exaggeration, I had the base knowledge of how a string puppet worked and the confidence that I could do it. I was wearing cowboy boots, (The second part of my equation) which Bil told me to remove before climbing up onto the Travel-stage Bridge. This was a rig of interlocking aluminum pipes with two parallel walkways, each two feet in width, with a thirty inch gap between, six feet above the stage in the middle and nine feet to the floor, behind. The over all length of this bridge was about twenty feet. The front walk on the audience side had curtains hung to hide everything but the stage. The back walk had, off the backside, an extension of wire cloth to keep the feet of the puppets, hung from a rail above, from dangling into the view of the audience. The bridge or walkways were suspended from two towers, one on either side, and these two towers each had small handpuppet stages at their bases. Bil explained how the puppet controls worked (much more sophisticated than my simple store bought puppet), told me to get familiar with it and call him when I was ready. The puppet was a goon (henchman) from his "Man in the Moon" show. The goon was wearing a trenchcoat and fedora and was holding a tommygun. He was about twenty-six inches tall, as opposed to my cops' nine-inch height but the theory and the premise was the same. I worked with it for I don't know how long. In fact I got wrapped up in it and all of a sudden Bil was there asking if I was ready. Without missing a beat I turned the goon and pointed the gun at Bil and said in my best goon voice..."Hey Baird, the mob thinks dis kid Nelson is okay. We want youse should give him a job... Think it over... verrry carefully!" Bil asked me to walk him across the stage, step across to the front bridge and walk him back, which I did and he then told me to hang up the puppet, come back down and put on my boots. He then took me down stairs to the office and said to his wife Cora, "Cora, we've found our other puppeteer." When I left I was walking about two feet off the pavement. I had a job with the famous Bil and Cora Baird. My elation was in part that I had a job but mostly because I knew their work from early television and somehow suspected I was off on what turned out to be the biggest adventure of my life.  I worked for Bil Baird from 1963 off and on until 1965 when I went to work for Jim Henson. I joined Bil again in 1966 but occasionally did Variety Show work with Jim, always asking Bil if it was okay with him. Bil liked Jim and his work and never minded. I enjoyed working marionettes until 1967, when I saw Bil fall off the back of the stage. He landed with a thud and bounced under the stage, another two-foot drop after the nine-foot fall from the bridge. I was never easy on the bridge after that and eventually followed two sirens out West but that's another story. Bil came out of that with a vertical fracture of a vertebrae and was in the hospital for a few weeks.  I used to play guitar in the basket houses in the Village. This was in the early 1960's when Richie Havens was playing at the Cafe Wha, Patrick Skye , Jesse Colin Young, Dave Bromberg, John Hammond all those cats were playing at the Gaslight, Gerty's Folk City, places like that. The basket houses were clubs that were essentially coffeehouses and they wouldn't pay you anything to play there, but they would let you do your thing and then pass a basket around. I never made much money doing it but it was like a test to myself, to prove that I had the brass to do it. When the New York World's Fair started in 1964, I worked in Bil's shop helping to build the show. There were some great people working with Bil and Cora at that time. Franz Fazakas (FAZ), Frank and Fania Sullivan, Carl and Maryann Harms and Bil used a sculptor named Ernst to make all his molds.   When the show was built we put it on its feet out at the World's Fair site in Flushing Meadows, Queens. The show was for Chrysler and the name of the show was "The Chrysler Show-Go-Round". The stage was a huge turntable in the center of the building and there were four theaters. Stage One would start the show to Audience One and at the end of the Stage One show, the announcer would say "Let the show go round" and the turntable would turn taking Stage One to Audience Two at the same time bringing Stage Two to Audience One, which had the entertainment part of the show and the show would continue around until Audience One had seen the three parts of the show. That Number One Theater would then empty out and reseat a new audience and so it would go for the two seasons of the New York World's Fair 1964 and 1965. FundRaising.jpg        Page: | 1 | 2 | Copyright 2004 Dogstar