Carole Hart

Carole Ruth Hart (April 30, 1943 – January 5, 2018) was an American writer and television producer who was involved in the inception of Sesame Street and other projects on broadcast television targeted at children.

Biography Born Carole Ruth Strickler in Paterson, New Jersey on April 30, 1943, she graduated from Barnard College in 1965, where she majored in philosophy. Bruce Hart had proposed Free To Be You and Me Jamboree as the title for the theme song he was developing and it was Carole Hart who convinced her husband to eliminate the word "Jamboree" from the title. The song was ultimately written together with Stephen Lawrence.

After meeting Debby Franke Ogg, a woman who had been diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma who had survived the cancer using alternative therapies, Hart turned the story into Leap of Faith a 1988 television drama that features Anne Archer and Sam Neill. The movie was broadcast on CBS after overcoming objections from the network that people would be discouraged from pursuing standard medical care for cancer based on the portrayal of the success of alternative therapies depicted in the program.

When Hart herself was diagnosed with cancer in 1994, she underwent a Native American healing ceremony and other conventional and alternative treatments that left her free of cancer for 20 years. She died on January 5, 2018, in Manhattan, of cancer that had reappeared two to three years earlier.