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Orlando Sentinel
June 1, 2001
by Nancy Imperiale Wellons
Excerpts:
The kids TV network auctions off a ton of items as bidders mourn the end of an era at the Orlando studio.
It was the usual crowd for a funeral. Some serious mourners. Some curious onlookers. And more than a few opportunists with eyes full of dollar signs.
But the sweaty crowd gathered in a dusty warehouse Tuesday afternoon wasn’t marking the passing of a person.
“It’s sad. It definitely means the end of an era,” said Mark Simon, 37, a former Nick art director who now runs his own Orlando animation company, & Storyboards.
Simon was one of several former Nick employees high-fiving each other and sharing old stories at the auction. They talked of fellow former coworkers who already had moved to New York or California, looking for production work.
Mingled with the Nick refugees were men in baseball caps and T-shirts, with tape measures hanging form their belt loops.
The whir of industrial fans struggling to make a dent in the musty air joined the echoing drone of auctioneers from Karlin Daniel & Associates calling “Heyhamana hamana who’ll give me fifty hamana hebbada sixty, do I have seventy hamana…”
Four hours later, Nickelodeon coffers were richer. How rich? Nick couldn’t say as of Thursday, but tens of thousand of dollars richer, undoubtedly. Maybe more.
Meanwhile, people such as Mark Simon had preserved a memory.
“My wife’ll kill me, but I had to have it,” the former Nick employee said of a lopsided, yellow crushed-velvet chair he once designed for Welcome, Freshmen. He paid $120, plus tax and 10 percent auctioneer’s fee, for the chair.
“I had to get it back,” Simon said as he struggled to roll the chair out the door.
