A Happy Haunter

Jan Cronkhite's home is a favorite stop for Waitsburg trick-or-treaters who can always count on a performance by her skeleton marionette, Aloysius (pronounced al-u-wish-es). The 81-year-old former Waitsburg librarian has been entertaining with marionettes since she before she was a teen.

She began her role as puppet master when her mother gifted her with a pair of boy and girl marionettes when she was twelve. Cronkhite would perform, joined on stage by her cat, before the 500 members of the commune, where her family lived at the time.

In her early teens, Cronkhite lived in the San Francisco Bay Area and began volunteering, performing marionette shows, in hospital polio wards during the polio epidemic.

"I felt so bad for those poor kids in iron lungs that had to just lie there and could only turn their heads. So I asked if I could come and do puppet shows for them and they loved it!" Cronkhite said.

A high school classmate, Scotty Hickman, later made himself a skeleton marionette that Cronkhite fell in love with at first sight. She convinced him to make one for her as well, though she can't recall what she paid for it. Cronkhite and Aloysius have been performing and making smiles together ever since.