This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we continue with our American stories.

Everyone's a New Yorker on Thanksgiving Day when young and old rise early to see what

giant new balloons will fill the skies for Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Our next story is about

the man who first invented these upside down puppets. His name, Tony Sarg.

Here to tell the story is Deborah Sorensen,

curator of exhibitions at the Nantucket Historical Association, where their exhibition,

Tony Sarg, genius at play,

is the first comprehensive exhibition

exploring his life.

Let's take a listen to the story.

Tony Sarg is a really remarkable early 20th century commercial artist and entrepreneur who was

born in Guatemala to a family that was a German father, an English mother in 1880.

And whenever he was around seven years old, they moved back to Germany

and where he could attend a military school.

He inherited a number of toys from his grandmother, who was also an artist,

quite well known, Mary Ellen Best. She is a remarkable

watercolorist. And so as a child, he loved playing with her marionettes and mechanical toys

and always just had a fascination with how things worked and were put together, had a very

mechanical mind, but was also very artistic.

So he kind of blended these two halves of kind of the right and left brain of being very technical,

but also very creative.

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