Maury was born in Mississippi right before World War 2, but he grew up near Washington D.C. in the post-war period. That was when television was becoming a staple in many American homes, and Maury took to the new medium with great enthusiasm. Every afternoon, the youngster would plop himself in front of the screen, like many of his generation and the ones since, and soak up whatever the “vast wasteland” had to offer.

He was fascinated by the performers he saw on the variety shows that crossed his eyes during the 1950s. While many of the performers on early TV were crossovers from radio, Maury was particularly taken with Edgar Bergen, the famous radio ventriloquist. He eventually attended the University of Maryland where he studied commercial arts and home economics, but his true passion was creating a comedy/variety show that featured marionettes for a local TV station, WRC. Along with a fellow student (who eventually became his wife) named Jane, Maury created a show called Sam and Friends. The comedy show ran for five years on the channel, and the characters on the show became popular locally. That led Maury to be hired by different companies and businesses in the D.C. area to create commercials that featured the marionettes he’d written for on the Sam and Friends show.

The most popular commercials Maury created were for a local business, the Wilkins Coffee Company. The marionette characters that were featured in the ad series were called Wilkins and Wontkins (Get it?). Maury not only created the ads, but he also wrote the ad copy and voiced both characters. The commercials were a hoot (You can even find them on YouTube today.). Now, this was early 1960s, and most ads were of the type you would see produced on the show Mad Men, that is, they were what ad men called the “hard sell.” The Wilkins ads were the opposite. The ads were silly and fun, and they ran for only about 7 seconds each.

The usual script called for the Wilkins character to tell the audience how wonderful the company’s coffee was, and then Wontkins would come in and disagree. That would make Wilkins retaliate against Wontkins by doing things like shooting him out of a cannon, hitting him with a pie, or dousing him with water. And the spots were refreshingly hilarious. People loved them. The Wilkins company was thrilled with the public outpouring of approval of both the commercials and for their product. Maury made good money on the spots. He produced over 300 of them. Those successful coffee commercials led to more and more work and even some appearances on national TV with his marionettes. Maury later said that he wasn’t selling coffee; he was selling laughs. 

That idea of selling silliness stuck with Maury. He took the Wilkins character and decided to create a slightly new character out of him. That character would make Maury internationally famous. The Wilkins puppet’s head reminded Maury of a toad. So, he went with that. Of course, you know the character today really well.

That’s because his creator, James Maury “Jim” Henson, turned him into Kermit the Frog.