Fixin Jerry McGee

Jerry McGee is a sixty-five years old Turner figure owned and still operated by his partner Bill Fetzer. Bill and Jerry have been together Jerry's whole “life.” Bill and Jerry still entertain guests at the South Carolina Aquarium in Charleston.

This is a picture of Bill and Jerry in their early days.

This is Bill and Jerry at the Aquarium last year.

This is Bill and Jerry with Doctor Cookie Jensen at the Vent Haven ConVENTion 2009.

Bill approached me a Vent Haven about giving Jerry some TLC. It seems a previous repair resulted in a few problems. Jerry controls were dragging when Bill operated them and the reason was obvious to me the last person to fix Jerry used picture wire instead of string on his controls, so they were slowly sawing their way into Jerry’s control stick.
Another issue Bill had with the repair was that Jerry’s eyeholes had been made smaller and he wanted them opened up somewhat and his eyelashes had been reduced to singular looking ‘hairs’ instead of the thick eyelashes Jerry had back in the day. I agree with both their aesthetic views of the eyeholes and tried for a happy medium I hope Bill likes it.

Also Jerry started out as a redhead and somehow he had morphed into a dirty blond. After I went searching for a new red hairpiece I found out why Jerry was sporting a different color; attractive red wigs are hard to find!

This is Jerry when I started with him.

Here are the picture wire control ‘strings.’

And the inside of Jerry head showed up with some age problems as well. There were cracks in the top of his head and under his control stick, so he was starting to split in half on the inside.

The ‘spitter’ tube in Jerry’s head was jammed into the hole and held in place by electrical tape and so I added a brass tube and used Apoxy Sculpt to hold that in place as well as clean up the hole in his lip.

The former repairman had added some plastic foam to the TOP of Jerry’s head to make his wig fit better but Bill felt it made him look to different from his original Turner flat headed design.

After removing his wig I found Jerry head was covered in many different layers of glue some of which were still tacky and his head looked like he was a burn survivor. I scraped and sanded all the glue from his head. I also added a little Apoxy Sculpt to one side of the end of his nose since it was cockeyed most likely from years of paint but I wasn’t going to start scraping off years of paint to find his old nose. All this sanding and the eyehole enlargement meant that there was no getting away from a repaint of Jerry’s whole head.

I removed that foam but added wood to the BACK of Jerry’s head to round it off a little to try to help the wig fit better.

The new wig was cut in a woman’s style so Jerry needed a haircut and my friend Shawn stepped up to give him a professional look.

Jerry McGee
2009