A plethora of puppets

KAYSVILLE — It started with what Kaysville resident Carolyn Frank calls a "really ugly sister missionary puppet" but has grown into a puppeteer's paradise, based out of a gray business building at 1343 W. Flint Meadow Drive, Suite No. 3.

Today Puppetorium.com is an online puppet superstore that sells puppets, marionettes, stages, scripts and more.

But the seeds for the puppet-supplying company were sown more than two decades ago while Frank was serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Alberta, Canada.

"I had a companion who had taken a puppetry class at BYU, but she was not much of a seamstress," Frank said. "But we needed a puppet one day for a zone meeting."

So Frank tried her hand at making her first puppet — a sister missionary puppet — that she said was really ugly but "sufficed."

Later in her service, other missionaries expressed their frustration with trying to teach young children who had drug, alcohol and tobacco problems.

"They couldn't even begin to teach them spiritual things until they kind of helped fixed up that health issue there, and so I got the idea, 'Well, let's use puppets to help teach them,' " Frank said.

Frank crafted a puppet that resembled a bottle of beer and one that looked like a package of cigarettes that the missionaries used with songs to teach the children the dangers of smoking and drinking.

"It was very effective, and I found that the puppets could be used in more and more things with my missionary work," she said.

After her mission, Frank attended Brigham Young University where one summer she took a puppetry class.

"I was married at that point, and my husband said, 'Well, these puppets are cute, why don't you put them into boutiques,?' " Frank said.

The puppets premiered at Payson Golden Onion Days. Shortly after, with the help of a music company that wanted various puppets to go along with its songs, Frank started selling puppets outside of Utah.

For many years she created the puppets in her basement, both in Orem and then in Kaysville after she moved there in 1989. At one point she had several other seamstresses helping her with productivity.

But demand was steadily increasing.

"Finally it got to the point where I needed to either get out of the hobby or into the business, one or the other, because I had all the work I could handle with just word of mouth," Frank said.