“Sergeant Bales”

Throughout the entire decade of the eighties Ann was in charge of the Children’s Bible Hour on Sunday nights.  The program was offered for children between age 4 and grade 5.  She put together a curriculum that would take the children through the Bible in three years.  She recruited couples to teach on a rotating basis.  The centerpiece of CBH was the puppet program.  Ann provided direction, creativity, training, and discipline to the group.  She demanded a certain level of excellence from all the puppeteers. 

“Flipping your lid” is a cardinal sin for a puppeteer.  A person, who operates a puppet, naturally wants to hold the puppet in such a way that causes the face of the puppet to look toward the ceiling.  The objective is to have the puppet face the children, but you have to retrain your hand movements to do it.  It’s easy for a puppeteer to fall back into the bad habit of flipping the puppets lid.  During rehearsal session, puppeteers got used to hearing Ann yell, “You’re flipping your lid.”

Once we had a group of college students come to Cedar Rapids for a spring break campaign.  They wanted to help with Children’s Bible Hour.  Sure enough Ann had to stop rehearsal to inform one of the collegians that he was flipping his lid.  She said, “Do you know what “flipping your lid” means?”   He said, “No, but I think I’m about to find out.”  At the end of the session, he said, “I didn’t know I was attending puppet boot camp.”   From that moment on, Ann became known as “Sergeant Bales.”