In 1938, a 15-year-old Hume-Fogg student named Tom Tichenor walked from school to the library and staged Puss in Boots with puppets he made himself. Admission was free.
This October, Nashville Public Library and the Nashville Public Library Foundation unveiled a historical marker honoring Tichenor outside the Main Library.
Tichenor joined the library staff in 1947. He went on to work on the Broadway hit Carnival! and host NBC’s Birthday House in New York. In 1967 he came home to the library. When he retired in 1988, he donated more than 450 of his puppets.
Those puppets still perform with Wishing Chair Productions, the library’s resident troupe, in a collection that now tops 1,000. Gifts to the NPL Foundation keep those shows running, both in the Main Library’s Children’s Theatre and on the road. Foundation support put the first Puppet Truck into service in 2005 and helps fund the program. Today the trucks deliver more than 600 programs a year to over 45,000 children, teachers, and families across Davidson County. Every show is free, just as his first one was.
The reaction to the marker shows how far that reaches. One fan saw his shows in the 1950s and later took their own kids. A former Eakin Elementary student remembers him visiting fourth grade to teach puppet-making. Another still pictures Thumbelina on the library stage in the early ’70s.
“Puppetry lives here at the Nashville Public Library,” program manager Bret Wilson told the crowd, “and will continue to do so.”
