📍Leland, MS 38756, USA
1936 – 1948“I was born in Greenville in 1936 and spent my early childhood a few miles away in Leland, a small town in the Mississippi Delta. My father was an agronomist working at the federal agricultural research station at nearby Stoneville, so I grew up surrounded by fields, scientists and growing things. Deer Creek winds through the middle of Leland, and as a boy I spent long hours outdoors along it, among the turtles, birds and frogs of the Delta. It was a gentle, close-knit childhood. My grandmother, known as Dear, was a painter and quiltmaker who encouraged every creative impulse, and our family's warmth and steady Christian faith gave me a sense that the world was fundamentally kind. Before television arrived, I listened to the radio and loved Edgar Bergen, the ventriloquist who could make a wooden dummy feel like a real person on the air. I had a boyhood friend called Kermit Scott, and people in Leland still like to say the frog was named after him; I always said I simply liked the sound of the name. When I was about twelve, my father's work took us to Hyattsville, Maryland, near Washington. There I fell in love with television, built my first puppets, and in 1955 made Kermit from one of my mother's old coats. The playful, kind-hearted spirit of the Muppets and of Sesame Street owed a great deal to those Delta years. Leland returned the affection: beside Deer Creek, a small museum celebrates the town as the birthplace of Kermit the Frog.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
🛰️ Satellite view · © Google