Periodically my wife, Ellen, and I go to visit Ellen’s parents in Hilton Head, South Carolina. Every time we visit I am reminded how lucky I was to not just to marry Ellen but also to marry into such a wonderful family. I have learned much about my professional life and how to behave like an adult, something I recognize is always a bit out of reach for me, from both David and Barbara Elow. And to top it off their relationship with my two daughters which has only deepened over the years is such a pleasure to experience.
In addition, there are always great things to do and see and learn about when we visit Hilton Head and the area around it, as we did this last weekend, January 9th and 10th.
Among David’s many volunteer activities he does in his very active retirement has been over the last year to arrange the children’s programs for the Hilton Head Branch of the Beaufort County Library; a program called Super Saturdays, held every second Saturday of the month at 11:00am, http://www.beaufortcountylibrary.org/bcl_calendar
The Saturday we were in Hilton Head, the program entertainer was a local ventriloquist and puppet maker called Conrad Hartz. Naturally, since I offered to join David, along with soon-to-be ticket taker Ellen, I looked up this guy on the Internet. It turned out that not only was he one of the leading professionals in the business, http://personal.lig.bellsouth.net/g/k/gkoepke/hartz/ and http://www.puppetcircus.com/conrad.htm, but had a long history of making all of his puppets by hand out of wood.
To top it off, it turned out that perhaps the last performance, albeit informal, that Buffalo Bob and Howdy Doody ever did, was in Beaufort with Hartz operating Howdy for the routine. Coincidentally, Buffalo Bob lived in New Rochelle, when not visiting Doodyville, and his son Chris was a fellow student of my wife’s. It was years before she learned that not every school had Howdy Doody come visit on a regular basis.
The show was really terrific. Over 100 kids and their parents attended. They got to see puppet birds who laid an egg, puppet clowns who blew balloons and floated up above the ground, puppet jugglers who actually juggled wooden balls in the air, and even a puppet replica of Conrad Hartz when he ran away and became a clown in Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey’s Circus. At the end they were entertained by magic tricks as the multi-talented Hartz finished with a flourish.
