This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories, the show where America is the star and the American people.

And Kermit the Frog and Cookie Monster to Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch.

So many of our most beloved TV personalities came from the imagination and the hands of Jim Henson.

Joining us now is Brian J. Jones, author of Jim Henson, The Biography, with the full story of the man

behind the Muppets. Take it away, Brian. Jim was born in Leland, Mississippi, in 1936, September 23rd.

His father was an agronomist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And if that was the case, especially during that point in American history, coming out of the Depression, you were going to either be in Mississippi or Maryland. And as it turned out, Jim Henson's father was both places. Jim was sort of born and of the South, but actually did most of his growing up in Maryland, which is why he doesn't really have that southern accent.

Jim was always sort of a southern gentleman. You can never entirely take the south out of Jim, but for the most part, he was raised right outside of Washington, D.C. in Maryland.

His parents were Paul and Betty Henson. Jim had one older brother named Paul as well,

who was killed at a young age, killed at age 19,

while he was serving in the Navy. He was killed in an automobile accident down in Florida.

Sort of a defining moment in Jim's life, actually, because that was a moment, I think, that he realized that life was short.

And as a lot of his colleagues and his family and his children told me, Jim seemed to

realize there may never be enough time to do everything he wanted to do. But as his daughter Lisa put it,

once that happened with the death of his brother, he had rocket fuel in his blood. And it just was

constantly in motion for the rest of his life, constantly had ideas he was developing. He would have

ideas written on yellow notepads and black pen, which is the way he did everything, in his notebooks.

And then at the same time, he might have something actually that he was performing, and he might

be also building puppets for another performance, and developing animatronics, and writing lyrics for

songs for Broadway shows that didn't exist yet, and pitching

TV series, some of which made it, some of which didn't. So Jim is a man constantly in motion.

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