Wisconsin Life

When people ask me how many puppets I've made in my life and I, for a long time, I've said 10,000 or so. My name is Ken Vogel. I'm a puppet maker. I've always thought there are two elements of the puppets that I sell that are appealing to people. That catch people's eye. One is the design of the face. The look of the face and then it's the costume basically. Mainly those are the two obvious things. It's been close to 50 years now that I've been working on puppets. What's changed is that my level of skill. You know, I think I can get more subtle effects than I used to. I've done so many heads that I, sort of, know what mistakes to avoid and where to steer myself. I get up in the morning and make coffee and sit down at my desk and try to do two to three hours of work. I make a mold out of modeling clay about that big. That big and cover that with papier mch. Let it dry each time. And then eventually, put the front half of the head back together with the back half. While the paper mch has been drying over the course of the last few days, I've been working on the costumes. Cutting out the fabric and sewing it on my machine.

whirrr

It's like six or seven little steps that I'm taking and sometimes more. You know, I get the greatest pleasure out of all of these because I get the fun of making them and see them evolve and I've sort of absorbed all of the pleasure I can get from making them and looking at them when they're finished. Think if I were just making art with no customer in mind that would be not quite as fulfilling. I was doing some puppet sales at the Wisconsin Historical Society. Somebody who worked at Ella's saw the puppets and brought the attention of Ken Balkin, the owner of Ella's. Some of the people at Ella's told me there's a man in here

who's been buying a lot of puppets

Jim Kirchstein. He was a customer there and a big fan of the puppets. One time I was there, for one reason or another, and they pointed over to him and said, "That's the guy who's buying all of them." So they suggested I do a puppet of him. When I stopped selling puppets directly to Ella's, he tracked me down and started coming here or calling me on the phone and asking for puppets to add to his collection. Marcel Marceau. He was the first puppet I had made and then from then on, we get ideas. We'd call Ken. We got into biblical characters. We got into mythology. We got into musicians. We got into a lot of political people including governors. And also a lot of artists and authors. So by the time we got around to present day, our puppet population was a little over 400. And once in a while he'll bring me pictures but I'll often have to do some research on the characters. Some of the puppets that he has are puppets of his family members, his children and grandchildren. The beauty of all this is the pleasure they bring. It's fun for me to surprise people. I love to bring them down here and they come. They're completely overwhelmed when they see all this. I think what Ken's done is miraculous and I love talent. Very nice person. He is very appreciative of people that like his work. You did a great job on the likeness. Yeah. Good, I'm glad you like it. - Yeah. Jim has this wonderful collection. And I've been conscious of that being the, kind of, premier collection of my work and the fact that that will be there even after he and I are both gone. That is real wonderful thought that it will... it will exist beyond me. All of those hours, if you put them together, that's why I did this because it was pleasurable to do it. And even if the puppets would all be destroyed, I would have had that pleasure in my life of being a creative person and being able to have done this all these years.