By Megan Mansell Williams

 

He lives in a snowy land and sports a full head of white hair and a round, ruddy nose. He has even been known to keep reindeer. No, it’s not Mr. S. Claus, but Mr. J. Putnam Henck (B.S.’40 CE), 89, of Skyforest, California. And though he isn’t Kris Kringle, he did reign over a Christmas-inspired theme park built on his family’s forested homestead in the San Bernadino Mountains near Lake Arrowhead. 

“I’ve been all over the world, and I can’t think of a nicer place to be,” Henck says of the 5,700-foot-elevation plot he’s called home since 1923.

Henck’s pioneering parents started the community’s first school and fire department and ran water and electricity to the mountain. They thinned the forest to prevent fires. Young Putnam, the oldest of four and the only boy, helped with all the heavy lifting. He attended Cal when it came time for college, then landed a job building airbases in Central and South America. He rose from foreman to superintendent within a single year, a feat he credits to two things: his Berkeley degree and the skills he learned in Skyforest.

 “Everybody asked why I got ahead so fast,” Henck says. “It was because I had such a good work ethic from living up here in the mountains.”

Henck spent most of World War II in a hospital bed with a broken leg sustained in a shipboard fall. He was probably the only Navy lieutenant promoted while lying flat on his back, he says. By the time he healed, the war was over, so he headed home to Skyforest to get his contractor’s license and marry Pamela Wright, a Broadway actress and singer who had toured military bases with the USO.

When a group of investors leased a parcel of land from Henck’s parents for the first in a small chain of theme parks to be called Santa’s Village, they didn’t have to look as far as the North Pole for a hardworking contractor. Putnam built the life-size gingerbread house, sleigh ride and snow-capped toyshop, readying the park for its opening on Memorial Day 1955, six weeks before Disneyland.

In the following decades, Henck oversaw hundreds of building projects in Southern California, and he and Pamela raised three children. But in 1980, they returned to Skyforest to resuscitate Santa’s Village, which was failing under its current management. The family effort—which included 12-hour days with the Henck children taking tickets and running rides—brought years of success. In 1999, they threw in the jingle bells, opting for some well-deserved rest.

Looking back, Henck says, only one job ever got the better of him. In 1996, around Christmas, all his hired Santas got sick on the same day. Henck had to don the red suit himself and belt out his best Ho Ho Ho.

“Playing Santa is hard work,” he says. “The little kids have wet pants from sitting around in the snow. Three days of that was enough.”