Albert Heschong

Elmer Albert Heschong (February 22, 1919March 1, 2001) was an American art director and production designer, principally for television.

In a career that spanned more than 40 years, he worked on over 2,500 productions and was posthumously inducted into the Art Directors Guild Hall of Fame.

A native of Cincinnati, he served in the United States Army during World War II and worked in scenic design for the live theater after the war.

Heschong was born in Cincinnati in 1919.

His father, Albert Heschong, designed and made clothing.

As a boy, he enjoyed building model boats and airplanes, drawing, and building things with Erector Sets.

He attended Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, graduated cum laude, and was voted "most all-around boy in the class."

He was also in drama club, where he both acted and designed sets.

After graduating high school, his high school drama teacher contacted the drama department at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Institute of Technology and secured a scholarship for Heschong.

In the second half of his sophomore year, he transferred to the architecture department to develop his technical drawing skills.

He left Carnegie Tech after two years to work at a playhouse in Chautauqua, New York.

He next worked for a year at a theatrical company in Cincinnati and then for the Baltimore Museum of Art, where he designed and built sets and exhibits.

During World War II, he was drafted into the United States Army.

He was assigned to a camouflage design unit at Richmond Air Force Base, where he worked with Broadway designer Jo Mielziner.

He was later assigned to interpret aerial reconnaissance photographs.

He spent 18 months in India, supervising photographic reconnaissance in the China Burma India Theater.

After the war, Heschong returned to Carnegie Tech to finish his degree.

He was then hired to assist in teaching scenic design at Carnegie Tech.

He also did design work for stage productions, including scenic design for The Woodstock Playhouse.

He began working for the American Broadcasting Company in 1949 and worked on the network's early live drama series, Pulitzer Prize Playhouse and Celanese Theatre.

In 1949, he was hired by the American Broadcasting Company (ABC) as an art director.

His early works included futuristic settings for ABC's Buck Rogers television show, including the interior of Buck Rogers' spaceship and the use of sparkler for the blastoff of rockets.

He continued to work on live television drama in the 1950s, working on United States Steel Hour, Climax!, and Playhouse 90.

In 1950, he was assigned to create all the settings for ABC's live drama Pulitzer Prize Playhouse.

For the first episode, You Can't Take It with You, he built a large Victorian house set for $15,000.

While at ABC, he also worked with Alex Segal on the live drama series Celanese Theatre, including productions of Abe Lincoln in Illinois (1950) with Raymond Burr, Winterset (1951) with Burgess Meredith, Ah Wilderness (1951), Anna Christie (1952), and The Street Scene (1952).

In the early 1950s, the ABC art department in New York worked out of a building that had previously been horse stables.

They built sets using quarter-inch plywood on one-by-three framing.

His work at the Steel Hour included P.O.W. (1953), The Last Notch (1954), Hedda Gabler (1954), A Garden in the Sea (1954), No Time for Sergeants (1955), and Freighter (1955).

No Time for Sergeants featured highly stylized sets and was the first dramatic show that was aired with an audience.

For The Last Notch, the first Western done for television, he designed an entire Western street scene.

For A Garden in the Sea, he designed a villa in Venice, including a gondola approaching the villa.

In 1954, he began working on the United States Steel Hour, which aired on NBC.

In the fall of 1955, he moved to Los Angeles to work for CBS.

His first series for CBS was Climax! with Martin Manulis.

His work for Climax! included Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1955) and The Circular Staircase (1956).

Heschong also worked on the Meet Millie sitcom, the Red Skelton Hour, and an early-summer replacement show starring Johnny Carson.

He won an Emmy Award for his art direction on Playhouse 90's 1956 production of Requiem for a Heavyweight.

In the 1960s, he worked on multiple CBS series, including Gunsmoke (1961–1973), The Wild Wild West (1965–1967), and Hawaii Five-O (1968–1969).

During the 1970s and 1980s, he worked principally on television movies, winning Emmy nominations for his work on Rascals and Robbers: The Secret Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1982) and My Wicked, Wicked Ways: The Legend of Errol Flynn (1985).