HICKORY HIDEOUT, WKYC-TV AND NBC Productions, Robert Thomas Noll, Producer

One night a few months before my son Jamin was born at about 9:30 or 10:00, I was scouring a pot in the kitchen when the phone rang. A very pleasant voice on the other end introduced himself as someone I didn't know, but he knew my work from the Play House and told me that the television station where he worked was planning to replace its children's show, and he wondered if I had ever thought of doing children's television. I asked him, "Who is this?" He told me he was Bob Noll and asked again if I had any interest in doing a children's television show. A very wise man had told me once "never to close an open door," so I told him I was certainly open to the possibility. And so began a truly lovely run.

Cassie Wolfe (who was an apprentice at CPH and had played the Parrot in the first production of A Christmas Carol) and I were asked to come down and audition for Barry Loper who was to be the director. I remember we did a little improvisation which bore a resemblance to Story Theater. We got the job. There followed a discussion (largely off the top of our heads) about what we'd do with a show if we had it and we agreed right away that we didn't want to have anything to do with a show that talked down to children or lectured to them or condescended to them by being overly silly. We kept those precepts throughout the wonderful eight-plus year run.

Management wanted us to appeal to (and draw audiences) made up of K through 8. Since we weren't educationists, we didn't know that couldn't be done and we set about trying to design a format that would appeal to that hugely diverse group. We decided to use the lowest age group's attention span and build stories built around subject matter that would appeal to as many of the higher groups as possible. The idea was that if you didn't care for what was happening at any given moment, stick around and there would be something else for you to look at.

We brainstormed our way into a treehouse, which led to the alliterative Hickory Hideout, a place we thought of as a special place where kids could go and be safe... Cassie and I were really just overgrown kids. And the characters we were to develop were characters in the sense of "play" idealized into something believable. Kids believe in the characters they're playing, so ours had to be "real" but we didn't try to disguise the fact that we were playing them.

Puppets were decided on early on. I think that, nostalgia for Kookla, Fran & Ollie and Howdy Doody aside, puppets would augment characters without breaking the bank. We auditioned a few of the better known local puppeteers and brought Nancy Sander on board to create Nutso and Shirley Squirrely and Know-It-Owl (I'm pretty sure those names came from Bob Noll's fertile brain.)

We started out doing an hour a week using cartoons to supplement the little storylines and magazine segments that we dropped in. After a while we refined our techniques and withing about a year and a half we were able to get rid of the cartoons and do our own drop in magazine segments. Cassie did "Cassie's Kids"; I did "Wayne Talks to the Animals"; we did segments on every conceivable topic and in virtually every place of interest that would let us set up a camera from the art museum to Sea World.

I vividly remember going out on a location to a school one afternoon to shoot a group of unicyclists. If memory serves they were middle school aged. This was really the first time Cassie and I had had an opportunity to meet our target audience face to face. We'd been on the air only a couple of months. We came right out and asked some of the kids if they watched the show. They all said they didn't themselves, but they thought maybe some of the other kids had seen the show. But we noticed that when we were out of sight around a corner of the building that that same group of kids was singing our theme song word for word. We didn't even know it by heart yet! I think it was that moment that I realized what I'd gotten myself into. And it was good.

We had been on the air about four years when NBC productions announced that they were looking for a children's show to air on all the O&O's (stations owned and operated by NBC). WMAQ in Chicago put in an entry and I'm not sure who all. We had to change the format to a 1/2 sitcom, but the rest of the process was nearly business as usual. Stu Calcote came on as director, and as good fortune would have it, we got the nod, along with a new set and an expanded budget so we could hire Nancy's long time partner, so we no longer had to "vamp" when Nancy had to change characters or move to the hole in the tree so Know-It-Owl could make his entrance. We brought David Frazier on as a regular to play Buzz Buzzsaw and a host of his relatives including the mustachioed Cecelia C. Seesaw. We added a couple of real kids to the mix each week. Two of them, Matt Murphy and Catherine Hahn have gone on to very successful careers on Broadway and Prime Time telly respectively.

And we were off and running. We won a zillion emmies, the Silver Medal at the New York International Film Festival, an NEA Award for "Advancement of Learning Through Broadcasting." And tons of loyal fans. At one point we were sending out up to 1500 autographed postcards a week to kids who had sent in jokes for our joke-plant segment that aired only in Cleveland! We were getting more mail than Dorothy Fuldheim, who owned the airwaves in Cleveland.