Setting Lessons to Music--How an Idea Evolved

Usually when kids have trouble remembering their multiplication tables, the result is a bad report card. When little Davey McCall couldn’t remember his, the result was “Schoolhouse Rock.”

While on vacation in the early ‘70s with his son at a dude ranch in Wyoming, David McCall noticed that his son could spout lyrics to one rock song after another, yet he couldn’t remember how much six times nine was.

McCall, then president of McCaffrey & McCall advertising agency, reasoned that if information were set to a tune that was catchy enough, kids could remember anything, even multiplication tables. After vacation, he approached two of his company’s advertising executives, Tom Yohe and George Newall, with the idea for an album and workbook for use in schools. They were enthusiastic.

“I had noticed the same thing in my kids,” Yohe said.

McCall commissioned a jingle writer at the agency; the syrupy song he got was less than he had hoped for.

Newall suggested giving jazz musician and songwriter Bob Dorough, known for his innovative lyrics, a shot. They instructed him not to write down to listeners.

Dorough came back with “Three Is a Magic Number.”

“It was just the kind of approach I like, and I knew it was [an] important assignment, so I took a couple of weeks to think it through,” Dorough said in a phone interview from his home in Pennsylvania.

“I just kept searching for an idea that would be far beyond the multiplication table and got the idea that three is the magical number,” he said, citing his admiration for architect Buckminster Fuller, who maintained that a triangle is stronger than a square. “I just got to thinking: Every triangle has three sides, the Trinity, man and woman had a little baby and it all fell together . . . kind of a transcendental solution to the problem.”

Yohe found the lyrics so visual that he suggested they do an educational film as well as a record album.

He designed a storyboard featuring a magician; McCaffrey & McCall account executive Radford Stone suggested they take it to ABC, where current Walt Disney Co. Chairman Michael Eisner was working as a vice president of children’s programming.

“[Animator] Chuck Jones happened to be with Eisner” when he came in for the meeting, Stone said by phone from his home in Connecticut. “Eisner turned to Jones and said, ‘What do you think?,’ and Jones said ‘This would be a good thing to have.’ ”

Musician Dorough, now 73, says he’s still bowled over by the response he gets when he plays his “Schoolhouse Rock” tunes.

“I’ve had people come up to me and say ‘You got me through school,’ ” he said.

“It’s been a very gratifying thing.”