Art Clokey spent his summers at his grandparents’ farm outside of Detroit. There he would play with toy soldiers. When he ran out of soldiers, Clokey made more of them out of clay. Little did he know that this would be the beginning of his lifelong dream of creating clay characters and molding them into creative animation.
In the early 1950s, he finished film school at the University of Southern California and started working on commercials. In one commercial, he formed clay to look like Swiss cheese. He did stop-action to show bites being taken out of the cheese. That gave him an idea.
He set up a 4-by-8-foot sheet of plywood in his garage and started making a short film in which he used geometric shapes moving to the rhythm of jazz music. A movie producer saw his film in 1956 and asked him to use his “Claymation” process to make characters with stories for children.
Clokey came up with the character Gumby, named from the muddy clay from his grandparents’ farm that they called “gumbo.”
Interestingly, the shape of Gumby’s head was based on an old photo of Clokey’s father, who had a giant hair wave on his left side.
“The Gumby Show” debuted on television in 1955 and was produced into the 1960s. The orange horse, Pokey, voiced by Clokey himself, was introduced into the show.
Gumby and Pokey and their friends still can be seen in syndication. All the episodes are available on YouTube. Enjoy!
• Professor James Pinkerton is a retired educator who loves to share the mystery in our history. He can be reached at pinkertonjames1914@gmail.com.