How It All Began - Part 2

Yesterday I told you how I bought Cookie Monster all by myself back in the Fall of 1971. Today, I'll finish the story of how I got the rest of the gang. In short, the answer was Christmas - and that was one of my absolutely favorite Christmases ever!

I had put the rest of the new SESAME STREET puppets at the top of my Santa list. But one thing that made the Christmas of 1971 so great was that it was a sort of transitional Christmas -  I was young enough to still have some belief in Santa, but also old enough to pick up on the clues that my parents were doing a lot of it. The biggest clue was that one night we were out doing Christmas shopping and my mom told me I had to stay in the car while she ran into the big "American Furniture" store and made me wait in the car. This was very unusual!  She came back out after a while and put something in the trunk. and somehow, either while she was loading it or unloading it, I got a tiny peek and was fairly suspicious that it was Oscar the Grouch! I don't recall the specifics. I also knew my father was working on some secret project.

I had a very hard time falling asleep that Christmas Eve and woke early Christmas AM. I remember waking and padding in to my parents bedroom and urging them to get up. Mom said it was too early, indeed it was still dark, but I jumped into my parents bed thinking that would make Christmas arrive faster.  From my parents bedroom I could see a little bit into the living room, nothing at all specific, it was very murky and shadowed. But my mind turned shadows into objects and characters. There was some structure I could barely see and creeping over the top was what looked like a large hairy head. My imagination immediately decided I was getting a Herry Monster for Christmas - even though I'd seen no evidence a Herry puppet had been made. [Actually no Herry Monster puppet was produced until 1978].

This is my current Oscar in his original box.

Eventually I was restless enough (or bothersome enough) and my parents relented. It was time for Christmas! There in the middle of the living room floor were Oscar and Ernie and Big Bird! Oscar was great! His box looked like a trash can. The backs of all these boxes looked like TV sets, and one could cut out the screen and use the box as a small puppet theatre. The lid to Oscar's trash can was printed in the cut-out "screen" section of the "TV set."

Ernie seemed incredible, too! He looked so perfect! Just like Ernie. I don't recall if I asked where Bert was - I was very pleased with all I'd gotten . But at some point that morning my Mom mentioned that Santa hadn't been able to get Bert to me yet, but that he was having Bert sent to Sears and we could pick him up in a few days. Who knew that Santa used Sears!

 

These are my current Ernie and Bert puppets in their original boxes.

This is not my Big Bird. I still need this box!

Big Bird was pretty awesome! He was about 20" tall and had wonderful (if very uncuddly) legs. He wasn't much of an actual puppet though. He had a hole in the back of his head where you could insert a finger. And via a tab, you could make him open and shut his beak. His wings had two little slits in the back so you could insert fingers and make him gesture as you held him.

The downside to Big Bird was that he came in very unfriendly packaging. You can't see it in the photo, but to keep Big Bird standing tall, his feet were bolted to a piece of thin plywood hidden in the bottom of the cardboard base.  Even after you ripped him out of his box he still had bolts sticking out of the bottom of his feet and my dad needed to go find a wrench to remove them. My dad grumbled quite loudly about that packaging! My dad may have been tired of tools as my other big present that Christmas was a tri-fold puppet theatre my dad had built. It was made of early 1970s paneling over theatre-style flats. My mom had made the orange felt curtains which opened on a traverse rod by pulling the cords at the side.

The "thing" I had mistaken for Herry Monster in the dim morning light was a large wolf puppet that was perched on the upper corner of the puppet theatre. Both he and a goat puppet were not SESAME related.

My sister and me playing in the puppet theatre.

It was a great Christmas!  A week or so later we went to Sears to pick up Bert.  I was somewhat disappointed when Bert was handed to me in a plain brown box and not the incredible display packaging of the other puppets.

The puppets arrived like this if ordered thru the Sears catalog.

The Bert puppet also quickly suffered from shirt-loss. The shape of Bert's head and neck, combined with the weight of his hands, seemed to put too much stress on the few stitches that held Bert's shirt on.

Both Bert and my sister have somehow lost their shirts!

And that's how I got my first SESAME STREET toys! I mentioned in the last post that I lost all of my original toys in a fire when I was fourteen. In recent years I've been able to replace them. However,  I still very much need both Cookie Monster and Big Bird in their original open-front boxes. If you've got one for me I'd be delighted to hear from you.