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The creator of the whimsical clay figure Gumby, Art Clokey died in his sleep (at age 88). Friday at his home in Los Osos, Calif., after battling repeated bladder infections, his son Joseph said.

Clokey and his wife, Ruth, invented Gumby in the early 1950s at their Covina home shortly after Art had finished film school at USC. After a successful debut on " "The Howdy Doody Show," Gumby soon became the star of its own hit television show, "The Adventures of Gumby," the first to use clay animation on television.
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Clokey was born Arthur Farrington in Detroit in October 1921 and grew up making mud figures on his grandparents' Michigan farm. "He always had this in him," his son, Joseph, recalled Friday.

At age 8, Clokey's life took a tragic turn when his father was killed in a car accident soon after his parents divorced. The unusual shape of Gumby's head would eventually be modeled after one of the few surviving photos of Clokey's father, which shows him with a large wave of hair protruding from the right side of his head.

After moving to California, Clokey was abandoned by his mother and her new husband and lived in a halfway house near Hollywood until age 11, when he was adopted by Joseph W. Clokey. The renowned music teacher and composer at Pomona College taught him to draw, paint and shoot film and took him on journeys to Mexico and Canada. Art Clokey attended the Webb School in Claremont, whose annual fossil hunting expeditions also inspired a taste for adventure that stayed with him. "That's why 'The Adventures of Gumby' were so adventurous," his son said.