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Monday, April 27, 2009
Son Seeks Tapes of Puppeteer Parents' Shows
By Joline Gutierrez Krueger
Journal Staff Writer
The bodies are buried in big boxes stacked nearly to the ceiling in a spare room at the Stan and Carol Day home in the Northeast Heights, storage for the felt and furry and foam faces and arms and the occasional paw and vampire tooth.
Stan Day calls these boxes "puppet coffins," but if there is any mourning here, it is because these whimsical creations are not brought out much anymore, the people who gave them life and voice and sass long gone.
In search of tapes
Tapes of performances by the Ron and Mary Kay Puppets have disappeared. Stan Day says his mother gave many to Goodwill in 1994. They were 7-inch reel-to-reel tapes and 5-inch reels. If you have any of the tapes or know of their whereabouts, please contact Day at 842-7119 or e-mail him.
Stan remembers as a child watching his parents, Ron and Mary Kay Day, loading up armloads of these puppets into a beastly, white '65 Chevy Bel-Air station wagon and heading off to another show in another school or another TV shoot or another one of the education shows for KNME-Channel 5.
Other kids' parents went to work each day as teachers and salesmen and such, but Stan's parents played with puppets.
And those of us from the Baby Boom generation who grew up watching them in our classrooms and on our black-and-white TV sets were the better for it.
In that sweet, simple era before video games and cable cartoon networks, entertainment (with a lesson or two tossed in for good measure) came in the guise of the Ron and Mary Kay Puppets.
Few local children in the late 1960s and early 1970s weren't familiar with the goofy mirth of Albert and the saltiness of Zelda (his parents alter egos, Stan says). Or Daniel, Suzette and Sebastian, dogs with attitude and heart and a playful grasp of the English language.
Stan estimates that his parents amassed a good 50 handmade puppets, maybe many more, some of them replacement versions of those worn out by too many shows and too many hugs from their overeager fans.
Stan should know.
He made most of those puppets, creating his first one — Albert — when he was 12.
"There was a show about the Muppets and how they were made, and I told my parents, 'I can do that,' and they jumped at the idea," he says.
Albert was crude by today's standards, his wide mouth crafted of hard cardboard semicircles rather than the smooth, agile felt of the modern puppet.
A patch of fake fur became Albert's hair. Half a plastic Easter egg painted black became a nose for Sebastian. Ping pong balls became eyes.
"I had to use whatever I could find at Cloth World or Allwoods," he says.
Ron and Mary Kay had always encouraged Stan and his two younger sisters to be creative like that, but Ron and Mary Kay were creative, too.
By day, Ron was a well-paid, buttoned-down employee at Sandia National Laboratories, while Mary Kay was a stay-at-home mom.
But in their spare time, they performed with a folk band called the Hilarys and cast about for further creative expression.
They seized upon the notion of performing with marionettes after a family friend constructed a large wooden stage, ostensibly for the kids.
"We played with it, and then we soon lost interest," Stan says. "But my parents loved it."
The couple began performing at church, perfecting a host of funny voices to go along with the marionettes.
The newly minted Albert began making occasional appearances, and that's when the couple began to realize how much more agile they could be and how many more people they could reach with that kind of puppet.
They cornered Stan.
"Make more," they said.
After the shows took off, Ron quit his job at Sandia to become a full-time puppeteer, a job that paid substantially less — and sometimes in bags of quarters from the kids who paid to see the shows — but it was enough to keep the family afloat.
"My dad did puppets because he could not not do puppets," he says. "This was his and my mom's life's work."
It was a magical time. The Day home became a veritable playground of puppets and gleeful adults bursting into wacky voices at the least provocation.
"To me, they were just Mom and Dad," he says. "It was so normal to me."
Stan eventually grew up, of course, got married, moved on from the puppet-making business. His parents continued to perform until it became too physically taxing.
Times were changing, too. Computers in the classrooms edged out KNME shows. Animation and Game Boys were more exciting that bits of fake fur and ping pong balls and the happy banter of two human beings who wanted to entertain.
When Ron died, Mary Kay put Zelda and that part of her remarkable life away. She died shortly afterward — from a broken heart, Stan says.
"They were not only about the puppets," he says. "They were about each other."
Stan's biggest regret is that his parents did not hold onto the dozens of tapes from their performances. He hopes one day to find them. And maybe to find a better idea of what to do with all the puppets than keep them mothballed in boxes.
There are things from our childhood whose simple joys and innocence make them too fragile, too precious to transport to the harsher world of today. Ron and Mary Kay's puppets were like that.
But they are never forgotten, never missed, never more than a memory away in a bunch of boxes, in our minds.
UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. You can reach Joline at 823-3603 or jkrueger@abqjournal.com.
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