Jerry asked for two things he had written to be read at his memorial.  The first was called, "Puppets ben berry berry good to me."  Here's the statement:

When I was eleven years old I saw a marionette in one of the display windows of Vandever’s Department Store, in Tulsa, Oklahoma, while visiting my grandparents for the Christmas Holidays. My mother noted my interest and it was one of my presents that year. It was a twelve to fourteen inch high policeman. I learned to manipulate this and the following year was given a clown marionette made by the same company. He had a barbell he could do several tricks with, provided the correct strings were pulled, in the right sequence. I played with these two puppets off and on for another year or so and  forgot about them.

My next real experience with puppets came from watching our first television set in 1950. There were lots of puppet shows on early TV. Bil Baird’s “The Whistling Wizard” and “Sparky and Heathcliff”, Burr Tillstrom’s “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” and The Bunin Brother’s “Pinhead and Foudini” are the ones I recall. Little did I realize at the time that fourteen years later, while in-between acting jobs I would audition for that same Bil Baird I watched as a fifteen year old and begin a career as a puppeteer that would span forty-six years and have me working with Jim Henson, one of the most creative innovators of modern puppetry.

Bil believed that puppets touch something in our primitive ancestral memory dating back to times when we huddled around fires in caves and hunters related how they put on animal skins and fooled the herd enough to make meat for the evening meal. He could well be correct in that but whatever else puppets do, they awake and delight the child that lives still within our heart of hearts.

As we say in my country, “Puppets ben berry, berry good to me”.

Jerry Nelson

Copyright 9/17/09, Dogstar

(thanks to Jan Nelson)