Stanley Hess

Stanley William Hess, who followed up an impressive career as an art librarian for
Seattle, Cleveland and Kansas City museums with curatorship of a puppet museum
in his native Bremerton, died on May 5 after a three-year illness. He was 84.
Bremerton artist Amy Burnett said she was heartbroken to hear of Stan’s death.
They met when she opened a downtown Bremerton art gallery in 1991
and he was the director.
“We have been partners of sorts ever since, an artist and historian with simple
passions shared with the community,” she said.
“Stanley was perfect, not really but almost,” she said. “He was smart, aware,
opinionated, hardworking, trustworthy, always smartly dressed and appreciated humor.
“In the arts we were soul-partners, always involved,” she said.
“He was a wonderful friend,” said Deborah Housen, owner of Silverdale Antiques,
who served with Stan on the board of the nonprofit Aurora Valentinetti Puppet
Museum, located downtown from 1999 to 2023.
“Stanley was a unique individual,” Housen said. “He was a great curator with
hoarding tendencies. Puppetry gave him a purpose in life; documenting and
cataloging each treasure.”
Stan was born on July 9, 1939, in Bremerton, to Ray and Kathryn Hess. His
mother lived to be 103 and was a devoted library volunteer and member of the
League of Women Voters in Kitsap County and the Episcopal Church.
He was born four days after the family moved from Bremerton to Silverdale, which
was mostly farms and a few small shops. They lived on 9 acres that included a barn,
garden, chickens and cows. Stan and his older brother, David, would milk cows
before heading off to high school.
Mrs. Hess would later tease Stan: “Did you ever tell your arty friends you know
how to milk a cow?”
Stan loved art and history from an early age and in his early teens was known
around the county for his elaborate collection of bells from all over, which he showed
at fairs and club meetings. He had collected about 60 bells by 1954,
when he was 14.
In December 1952, for instance, he showed members of the Silverdale Garden
Club a four-century-old bell from the island of Martinique in the West Indies, given to
him by his great-great aunt C.B. Welles of Chicago. Her husband had been given the
bell by the nuns of a Martinique convent. (In 2022, Stan donated the bell to his and
his mother’s longtime church, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church of Bremerton, where it
now hangs and is rung before services.)
Welles (1869-1965) was a famous Chicago silversmith and suffragist whose work
was included in an exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
“Stan was a lover of all things from his family,” Housen said. “He loved learning
about his aunt Clara Wells, the silversmith from Chicago, and about the
early days in Silverdale.”
Stan attended Olympic College and earned a bachelor’s degree in art from the
University of Washington in 1964.
With his new degree, he started working at the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) in
Volunteer Park in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, where it was located at the time.
“I was ‘in charge’ of photographs and slides — in essence a visual resource
librarian without the title,” he said.
Toward the end of his nine years at SAM, Stan also started graduate work in
librarianship at the University of Washington.
In 1973, he was hired to become associate librarian for photographs and slides at
the Cleveland Museum of Art. He worked under Sherman E. Lee, a Seattle native
and art historian who was director of the Cleveland museum from 1958 to 1983. Lee
is credited with turning CMA from a regional to a major global museum.
While in Cleveland, Stan completed his master’s at Case Western Reserve
University and became involved with art library associations at the national level and
in the reference-publishing field.
In 1980, Stan became head librarian at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in
Kansas City, Mo. His 11 years there coincided with “an exciting period of growth in
the museum’s library, bringing it to being one of the important research collections
west of the Mississippi,” he said.
Stan returned to Bremerton in 1992 to be nearer his mother, who by then was in
her 80s, and moved into the home his parents built on Hood Canal, where they had
moved in 1963.
“Returning to the West in the ‘90s was not a good time to get back into the library
field,” he said. “So as with many late life career changes came many lifestyle
changes, as well.”
His jobs included the art gallery and art sales work, office work in a gutter
company and marketing and sales work in the early years of Canterbury Manor.
But in 1998 a new opportunity in the arts field presented itself. He was asked by
board members of the Evergreen Children’s Theatre to help the organization
establish a puppet museum in downtown Bremerton.
The Evergreen theater already had a significant puppet collection through its
relationship with Aurora Valentinetti, professor emeritus of children’s theater at the
University of Washington. And Stan’s 45-year friendship with Valentinetti and his
museum background and connections made him a good choice for this role.
Stan quickly compiled a thick notebook that detailed each puppet by size,
material, maker, character, date, condition and cultural context.
The museum was in the basement of the Admiral Theatre with very limited hours
before it opened at 249 Fourth St. downtown on Dec. 7, 2001, the only public
puppet museum on the West Coast. (The Amy Burnett Gallery helped by providing a
large storage area.)
The opening exhibit featured examples from the collection’s main strengths —
exotic puppets from Asia and homegrown puppets from UW’s collection
built by Valentinetti.
The Kitsap Sun at the time noted that three of Stan’s favorites greeted visitors at
the front of the museum:
“As the labels will explain,” the article said, “the Burmese rod puppets are a
barefooted monk wearing a benign expression on his wooden face and
a brasstrimmed maroon costume on his carefully crafted body.
The princess is decked out in an elaborate sequined vest and headdress while a celestial being sizzles in a
brilliant gleaming gown.”
That opening exhibit also featured a Miss Piggy puppet in a lavender dress and an
Alice in Wonderland puppet tableau in a display case, with a yellow-haired Alice, two
wide-eyed gardeners garbed in playing cards and a big brown Gryphon, all based on
John Tenniel’s classic illustrations for Lewis Carroll’s 1865 children’s novel.
In 2005, the museum opened a temporary exhibit in the Olympia office of Lt. Gov.
Brad Owen, showcasing the history of puppetry in the U.S. and particularly the
Northwest and Pacific Rim.
The next month, Owen accepted on behalf of the museum a donation of 132
hand-painted traditional puppets from a leading entertainment company in China.
Then in 2010 the museum received three Bunraku puppets from Bremerton’s
Sister-City, Kure, Japan.
On April 3, 2017, the museum crossed Fourth Street to move in with the Kitsap
Historical Society & Museum. The Kitsap Sun’s front page that day showed Stan,
talking on a cell phone while carrying a huge Pinocchio head and torso down the
street with the help of a museum volunteer.
By then, the museum had assembled an international collection of more than
1,700 pieces.
“For a nonprofit institution relying totally on gifts from the public and businesses
we have received remarkable recognition,” he said at the time.
From its Fourth Street home it featured a series of rotating exhibits highlighting
significant parts of the collection and telling the story of puppet history around the
world. Stan loved the museum and saw it as a wonderful way to use his skills and
connections to benefit the community and spread some understanding of cultural
and religious differences through this unique art form.
The museum ran on all-volunteer help, and Stan didn’t hide his frustration that the
community, especially in the early 21st century, didn’t support museums, including
the Valentinetti operation, as much as he thought it should have.
In 2019, in a Kitsap Sun “Your Turn” column, he begged the community to help
save the museum by helping find a new home and storage space.
“It is depressing that after 20 years of building a significant cultural, educational
and historic public treasure,” he wrote, “Bremerton has no room in their corporate or
civic facilities to house (the museum’s) international puppet artifacts and history.”
The museum closed in 2023, hit hard by several factors, especially the pandemic.
Stan built a wonderful personal collection of art books and examples of all kinds
of art work. In 2022, he donated 150 pop-up books to Collins Memorial Library at
the University of Puget Sound — “The Wonderful World of Pop-up Books: The
Stanley W. Hess Collection.” https://tinyurl.com/ynep3aha
Stan also was involved in the LGBTQ+ community and participated in OUTKitsap,
Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays (PFLAG), and other
organizations in the Kitsap area. He served on the board of Gay Kitsap.
When living in Bremerton, Stan was a longtime member of St. Paul’s Episcopal
Church where he served as an acolyte and sang in the choir as a child and served
on the vestry in later years. During his career in the Midwest, Stan belonged to St.
Paul’s Church in Cleveland Heights, Ohio; and Grace & Holy Trinity Cathedral in
Kansas City among other area churches.
While living in Kansas City, Stan established an 8-year partnership with Roger D.
Brooks, a former Kansas Supreme Court law librarian. Roger died in 1997 and Stan
continued to keep in touch with his former wife and children and some other
relatives.
Stan also was preceded in death by his parents, Ray and Kathryn Hess. Survivors
include his brother David and his wife Evelyn; his niece Erika and her husband Bob
Neustadt; and his nephew Jeff and his wife Anna Grace.
Services will be at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, May 27, at St. Paul’s Episcopal Church,
700 Callahan Dr., in Bremerton, with interment following in the St. Paul’s
Columbarium.