Archibald Ransom

Archie Ransom (full name Archibald Enoch Ransom) was born in Provo, Utah in 1929. His father was a patriarch in the LDS Church and managed the Provo branch of the Zion’s Cooperative Mercantile Institution (you know, the chain of LDS Church-owned department stores founded by Brigham Young). The family once had ties to the United Order of Enoch, a Mormon splinter sect with a communalist-egalitarian bent, though by the time Archie was growing up, they’d apparently made their peace with the acquisition of material objects.

Archie finished high school in 1947, did two years of missionary work abroad, then enlisted and served with the U.S. Army in Korea.¹ Archie’s unit was cut off and taken captive during the Chinese offensive in November 1950. He spent five months in a POW camp near the Yalu River, where he was tortured, held in solitary confinement, and compelled to make false confessions of waging biological warfare.²

Archie was always interested in puppets. As a kid, he’d been a devotee of radio ventriloquists like Edgar Bergen; in high school, he carved his own wooden puppets and spent his paper route savings on dodgy mail-order ventriloquism courses. In Korea, he encountered traditional Korean puppetry and was astonished by the sophistication of Chinese shadow puppets. During his captivity, Archie fashioned crude puppet companions out of sticks and mud and talked to them in order to stay (more or less) sane.

When the Army declared him un-brainwashed, Archie returned to Provo and did his best to put Korea behind him. He married the girl he’d gone on mission with, got a degree from a two-year business college, and started a family at the ripe old age of 24. A natural salesman, he could have lived out his days selling kitchen appliances at the ZCMI, but the puppets kept calling to him. In 1955, he packed up his young family and moved to Hollywood.

His timing was good: television production was shifting from New York to Los Angeles and the new medium was booming. Archie bluffed his way into a gig as a puppeteer on Bob Clampett’s Time For Beany, and eventually got the chance to create his own kiddie show for KTLA Los Angeles. Ransom Roundup lasted less than a year; though kids seemed to love it, many adults found Archie’s puppets “troubling.” But the star of the show, the Ransom Kid (Archie’s signature puppet, a little boy who was also a cowboy sharpshooter), got signed as the spokespuppet for Sharp Cereal (maker of Sugar Sharps, 56% sugar by weight, whee!), and Archie’s career in advertising began.

Archie spent the next ten years or so transforming from a modestly-successful puppeteer into a highly-successful ad man. His weirdly-compelling puppets sold cereal, soft drinks, frozen foods, coffee, cigarettes, you name it. And Archie was good at it: Like all the best salesmen, he doesn’t seem like a salesman. He has a gentle, avuncular manner, like a Sunday School teacher, and a particular gift for connecting with, and selling to, children.

The ad industry in Los Angeles was always just a bit flakier than the white-shoe firms on Madison Avenue, and Archie became well-versed in motivational research, engineering consent, esmology, subliminals, all that Century of the Self hocus pocus. As he moved on up to the executive suite, he couldn’t really remain an active puppeteer, but he kept most of the Ransom Gang in their plush-lined hard-shell cases, and could sometimes be heard talking to them behind the door of his corner office; he always said they were his best “consultants.”

When Project SANDMAN first tried to recruit Archie in 1963, he laughed them out of his office. What he didn’t know is that, through cut-out clients, he had been indirectly crafting memes and enthrallments for SANDMAN for years. Then in 1965, Archie’s ten-year-old son Charlie died in some kind of tragic crime or accident.³ This loss, combined with the Kennedy assassination, the Watts Riots, the worsening quagmire in Vietnam, you name it, shook Archie’s faith in the rationality of the democratic mind and the inevitable triumph of the American way. When SANDMAN came round again a few years later, their cockamamie stories about an “idea war” for the hearts and minds of the next generation sounded a lot less cockamamie. Archie moved up the coast and joined the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory as an “applied anthropologist” in 1968, just in time for the many memetic catastrophes of that year.

By 1973, Archie is right in the thick of the meme war, with a high security clearance and a pretty solid faith that SANDMAN and the US of A are on the side of the angels. He takes a particular interest in the Indigo Children; he probably speaks Aulang (as does Hobo Stan, see below). 

He wears a bow tie, smokes a pipe, looks like Richard Hofstadter and talks like Fred Rogers. He’s no longer active in the LDS Church but he hasn't formally left it. He’s still married to his mission sweetheart, Melanie Ransom (née Gardner). Their daughter, Jane, is 17, their second son, Eddie, is 14. They appear happy enough, but the family never really recovered from Charlie’s death. Mostly, Archie pours himself into the work.

Archie is the fourth of five siblings (who lived to adulthood). His three older siblings all live in Utah. (Archie's mother does too, still in Provo; his father died some years ago.) The eldest brother is a wealthy doctor, recently called to full-time service in church leadership. Older sister is wife of a business exec, raising six kids. Middle brother was an Air Force pilot (between wars), now owns a regional commuter airline. All married, all have big families; Melanie is also from a big family, so Charley has, uh, a lot of cousins. Archie's younger sister is estranged from her family, a little less so from Archie, lives in Arizona or New Mexico somewhere.