Hazelle Hedges Rollins

Hazelle Hedges Rollins was a Kansas City artist, puppeteer and puppet maker who was active in the twentieth century. She owned her own puppet company, Hazelle’s Marionettes (later known as Hazelle, Inc.) that was based in Kansas City, Missouri. At one time the company was the largest manufacturer specializing in puppets in the United States.

Rollins began making handmade marionettes in 1932, when her eleven-year-old neighbor, Donald Newlin, asked her to make him a marionette. He had received one from his aunt and wanted a companion for it. Rollins created a marionette for Newlin, named the King’s Jester, and helped Newlin stage puppet shows with family members. Rollins and Newlin performed shows at schools and toy departments at local department stores. 

Rollins was employed at the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art and the Mary Atkins Museum of Fine Arts as a switchboard operator in 1933 when the museum opened to the public. In 1934, the museum began offering classes to children in which they would make marionettes based on works of art in the museum’s collection and produce a puppet show. Rollins' experience making marionettes meant that she was recruited to teach a Sunday marionette-making class. The classes were very popular and resulted in the students staging a production with the help of Rollins, museum engineer George Herrick, who built the stage, and museum staff Lindsay Hughes, who wrote the plays. The first play in 1934 was based on the painting The Illness of Pierrot by Thomas Couture.

From 1934 to 1935, Rollins taught arts and crafts classes to women at the Kansas City YWCA. She also gave lectures and puppet performances to various local organizations, and she had a booth at the Country Club Plaza Art Fair in 1935 and 1937.

Rollins started her puppet business in 1935. She brought her puppets to the New York Toy Fair in 1935, and later that year she studied with well-known New York puppeteer Tony Sarg. Returning to Kansas City, she decided to focus on the manufacture and design of puppets. While the business started in her parents' home, she eventually opened her first factory in Kansas City at 822 Broadway. By 1940, Rollins employed thirty-five people and moved to the Garment District in the Thayer building at 107 W. 8th Street. She sold her puppets at department stores such as Emery, Bird, Thayer in Kansas City and Marshall Field in Chicago. In 1936, her business entered the international market, selling the puppets in Europe. 

In 1941, Hazelle married John Woodson Rollins, an industrial engineer, who became a co-owner of the company. He took over management of the engineering and production at the factory, and was also in charge of advertising and sales. He introduced the idea of making the puppet heads from plastic. Hazelle focused on design of the puppets, the development of new characters, and their names and costumes. Rollins held four U.S. patents for marionette design, including the “airplane” control, body construction, moving mouth and moving ankle motion (“Puppets Find Happy Home", Iola Register (Iola, Kansas), March 8, 1980). Each year Hazelle introduced new characters and retired older characters. She had a total of seventy-five characters, including animals, people, and a puppet family. Hazelle also supervised production. 

In 1946, the company moved to 10th and Campbell.  In 1956, the company introduced a line of hand puppets that by 1964 grew to a total of thirty-nine characters. In 1957, they moved to their last location, 1224 Admiral Blvd. At that point, annual sales totaled 250,000 hand puppets and marionettes per year,  and they employed fifty workers. In 1975, Rollins sold the company and retired. During their run, the company made more than a million puppets.

Rollins also collected antique puppets. She gave part of her collection to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and to the Kansas City Museum. The remaining inventory of the company was acquired by the Puppetry Guild of Greater Kansas City, and examples of Rollins' work can be seen at the Puppetry Arts Institute in Independence, Missouri.

Rollins was active in civic organizations, both locally and nationally. She was the “first female chairman of the Kansas City Advisory Council of the Small Business Administration” (“Puppet Manufacturer …,” Kansas City Times, March 26, 1984). She was also a member of the Small Business Advisory Committee on Economic Policy, U.S. Treasury Department, the Women’s Commission for International Relations and Trade, and the Kansas City Women’s Chamber of Commerce, of which she was a director. She also was president of the Nelson Gallery Art Study Club and a member of  the Kansas City Athenaeum. She was a founder of the Puppeteers of America.