The proprietor and artist of How to Get a Head Without Hunting was born Merikay Goede in November of 1946 in West Allis, Wisconsin, the youngest of Gilbert and Alice Goede’s five children. She showed early interest in art and nature.

The Milwaukee Public Museum was a big influence on Merikay from when her parents first took her there at age 5. Its dramatic dioramas, of natural and human history, made her dream of helping to build such exhibits as her career. Had she been born 20 or 30 years later, these dreams might well have come true, but the options available to girls in Midwestern working families in the 1950’s were much more limited than they are today.

Merikay graduated from West Allis Central High in June 1964. She had met her future husband Craig at a scholarship banquet for art students a year or so earlier. They attended the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee in the following years, with Merikay majoring in Art Education, and both of them working at the UWM Computer Center. They were married in early 1966, and had two children, Deidre in 1967 and Gil in 1970.

Merikay finally graduated from UWM in 1973, and taught Art in the Brown Deer, Wisconsin public schools from 1973 through 1976.

In 1974 a neighbor taught her to crochet. As she tells the story, she was crocheting a mitten one day and the thumb “went wrong, and ended up looking like a nose!” From this, it was just a few creative days until her first animal head creation, a Tiger, was complete. We still have it, and you can see it near the end of the Tiger page.

The early ’70s were an avant-garde time and receptive to new forms, and Merikay’s creatures quickly grew into a small business at art and craft shows. Interest was aided by several articles in area newspapers, a tradition that has continued in Texas and California. Probably in part because of these articles, to this day occasionally someone will come up to Merikay at a show and say “You didn’t originate these! A lady in Wisconsin did, years ago!”

The MacKennas moved to the Dallas area in 1978 and then to the Silicon Valley in 1983. In 1982 and ’83, Merikay’s creatures took a back seat to working as a corporate trainer for the McGraw-Hill Book Company.

After arriving in California, Bay Area art and wine festivals were her main outlet, with animal head sales helping put both kids through college. In recent years, the Internet and World Wide Web have helped bring her animal head sculptures to a wide, new audience, and helped reduce her shows to a select few.

Merikay and Craig now live in the Santa Cruz Mountains above Los Gatos. She has planted their forested homestead with over a thousand daffodils, which enhance the new promise of each spring for them and their neighbors.



In recent years, Merikay has become a fairly avid skier. Here’s a shot from a ski trip, which we combined with delivering an Elk to a customer.



And of course her love for animals will continue throughout her life. Here’s one photo with a real one, and another with an unknown artist’s creations, which she got for Christmas.

If you have comments, suggestions, or questions, please send an E-mail to merikay@animalhead.com, use the contact page, sign the Guestbook, or call at 1-408-353-5037. Is this a good time?