George Newall Dies: ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ Co-Creator Was 88
deadline.comGeorge Newall, who was an advertising agency creative director in the early 1970s when he helped create what would become one of TV’s most beloved and educational children’s titles with Schoolhouse Rock!, died Nov.
30 at a hospital near his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 88. His death was announced to The New York Times by his wife Lisa Maxwell, who said the cause was cardiopulmonary arrest.
The series of interstitial animated shorts that ran on Saturday mornings from 1973 to 1984 (later revived in the ’90s) got their start in the early 1970s when ad exec David McCall of the McCaffrey & McCall asked Newall, the agency’s creative director, to set multiplication tables to music to assist McCall’s young son.
Newall soon assembled a songwriting team that included Ben Tucker and Bob Dorough, and their output quickly inspired the agency’s art director Tom Yohe to add illustrations.
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