Jim Henson's Deer Creek

Jim Henson was born at Greenville in 1936 and spent most of his boyhood at Leland on the banks of Deer Creek, the family moving to Maryland when he was about a year old and back again in time for his first year at school, then away for good when he was twelve. The creek and the woods along it are what the town builds its claim on, and it is a fair one: an exhibit on the bank called Birthplace of the Frog, opened in the early 1990s, was given to the people of Leland by the Jim Henson Company, and it holds a tableau of Kermit on the creek with a banjo along with material from the Jim Henson Legacy. The original Kermit went to the Smithsonian in 2010. Henson was recruited out of his high school puppet club in 1954, at seventeen, to make puppets for a Washington television station, and Sam and Friends began the year after that. The naming story is the part to be careful with, and it runs the opposite way to how the town tells it. Henson did have a Leland friend called Kermit Scott, who was real and whose family remembered the two of them running up and down the creek. But Karen Falk, the Henson archivist, records that Henson always said the frog was not named after the boy, and that he simply liked the sound of the name, the hard consonants and the slight nasal quality of it. Nor was the first Kermit a frog. The 1955 puppet made for Sam and Friends, from a discarded coat of his mother's and two halves of a ping pong ball, was a vague lizardish thing with rounded feet, and the collar and the frog came in 1969. Deer Creek is an old Mississippi distributary, severed from the river when the levees went up, and it runs through the middle of Leland rather than round it.