Joseph Stookins, a legendary Loomis faculty member, introduced puppets as teaching tools in the late 1930s. Intended to help students gain confidence in speaking a foreign language, the puppets brought innovation, surprisingly, not to his classroom, but to extracurricular opportunities open to all Loomis boys. While professional organizations recognized Stookins for this idea, members of the Loomis Puppeteers, including Allen Hawthorne ’53, remember his “wonderful good humor and constant encouragement” that allowed talents to blossom and made learning fun.

Stookins and club members fashioned the puppet heads from filler putty. Once air hardened, each head was painted and attached to a dowel with bendable wire pieces serving as arms. Faculty wives and students sewed costumes. While the cast of puppets was reused, every now and then a new character was created for a particular script.

Each puppet required two students: one as the manipulator and the other to read lines from a script. Stookins did not require boys to memorize their parts and yet he recollected in a 1977 oral history interview that many students did just that, perhaps as a sign of their dedication. Reginald Greene ‘52 recently noted “It was seventh heaven for me to be part of the productions” and “wholesale memorization of puppet plays, such as ‘The City and The Country Mouse’” have stayed with him to this day.

The Puppeteers gave shows in Palmer Lounge, at meetings of local community organizations and, notably, at a number of regional modern language teaching conferences. The group performed about four shows a year, each requiring around six weeks of rehearsal.  Students performed plays in Spanish, English and French, and translated from French into English, while live piano music accompanied the shows. Productions of scenes from plays by Moliere, including “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme… and Les Misanthrope” make up some of Earl Canfield’s ’52 “favorite memories of Loomis”.  Reg Greene remembers, “I…was recruited by Mr. Stookins to be the Spanish voice. He knew I loved the sound of language, and he gave me the opportunity to experiment with it.” Al Hawthorne fondly recalls one 1890s comedic “melodrama with a mustachioed villain and a heroic Little Nell, for whom I personally provided a falsetto voice which Mr. Stookins forever after thought to be hilarious”.

Stookins found inspiration for puppet theater in courses at Middlebury College’s Language School and the story of a ninteteenth-century French puppet, Guignol. But it was his decades of careful stewardship and “infectious enthusiasm” that transformed the Loomis Puppeteers into meaningful experience. Earl Canfield, a four-year club member and President noted, “I can’t exaggerate how kindly and thoughtfully Joe Stookins led the effort.” Others echo this sentiment, including William Fischer ‘52. He poignantly wrote in a recent email message, “ In the matter of the puppet performances, I have… no details to offer you... What remains is my abiding respect for Mr. Stookins.”