Cincinnati's Bill Kelleher won't be having dinner with Barbara Walters anytime soon, according to the letter she sent recently to the Gradison McDonald Investments vice president.

        On Oct. 19, Ms. Walters told ABC's The View national audience about a dinner invitation “from a nice-looking man” whom she had met during a speaking engagement here on Oct. 17.

        Ms. Walters, 69, told viewers she questioned her immediate decision that the 40-year-old Cincinnati man was too young for a dinner date with her.

        Her View cohosts urged her to reconsider and invited the Cincinnati man to contact the show. So Mr. Kelleher e-mailed the veteran news anchor.

        He finally received this response from Ms. Walters:

        “You sound like the most charming man, and I remember you as being very attractive. However, would you forgive me if I don't meet with you. I appreciate everything you said, but it just doesn't feel "right.' ”

        Burbank news: Gary Burbank's crazy world continues to expand. Twenty stations are carrying daily Gilbert Gnarley or Senseless Surveys through national syndication. His Earl Pitts bits are syndicated to 130 stations.

        Rick Consolo, who syndicated Mr. Burbank's entire WLW-AM show for Jacor in 1995-97, is marketing the WLW-AM comedy, plus Kevin “Doc” Wolfe's Everybody's Cooking show which airs 10 a.m.-noon Sunday on WVXU-FM (91.7).

        WARM results: WRRM-FM (98.5) raised $24,660 for the Children's Hospital Cancer Program last week by auctioning a dozen PlayStation2 machines to listeners — an average of $2,055 per unit. The machine retails for $229.

        Kids' stuff: Writing children's books isn't kids' stuff, says Rosemary Wells, author of Timothy Goes to School, adapted for one of the PBS Kids Bookworm Bunch cartoons (6:45 a.m. Saturday, Channel 48; 8:45 a.m. Saturday, Channel 54).

        “To have a voice to write for children is as rare in literature as the voice of a counter-tenor in music, the rarest voice of all,” Ms. Wells says.

        A good children's book is “written to be read 500 times,” she explains. “No adult novel, no poem, nothing perhaps but the lyrics of songs are meant to be repeated as often, and the lyrics of songs have music to accompany them.

        “This is the most difficult voice in the world to write well for children, (but) if you do, your words will be remembered for an entire lifetime,” she says.

        Hooray for Harry: Children's authors praise J.K. Rowling for her Harry Potter novels, which have become a phenomenon with kids, particularly young boys.

        “Starting about the third, fourth and fifth grade, (boys) wouldn't be caught dead holding a book. It was so uncool,” says Ms. Wells.

        “Overnight, Harry Potter . . . changed that,” she says. “She has accomplished what every (publisher's) marketing department has tried to do for 15 years, and failed to do.”

        Wrestling hold: Nick von Esmarch, the Rick Schroder look-alike who plays a professional wrestler on WB's Nikki (10 p.m., Channel 64), wasn't allowed to wrestle in high school.

        “I tried to wrestle,” says Mr. von Esmarch, who co-stars as Nikki Cox's husband, “but I was too big to wrestle in high school. That's the truth. There was a weight limit, and I didn't make it.”

        Bruce Helford, who produces Drew Carey, Norm and Nikki, says finding Mr. von Esmarch was critical to the success of the WB comedy.

        “If it wasn't for Nick, we wouldn't be doing the show because we could not find someone with Nick's physical characteristics . . . and a good, funny actor to do the job,” says Mr. Helford, who met Ms. Cox when she played Gaby Hoffman's older sister on NBC's Someone Like Me in 1994. “We literally went everywhere to find the actor.”

        They found him in a Los Angeles mall, selling PlayStation games, while trying to break into acting. (He wanted to work at Blockbuster video, but “they turned me down. I tried three summers in a row.”)

        A college friend, whose father is an agent, suggested he audition for Nikki. He got the part in a week.

        The San Francisco native earned a degree in theater at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore. He says his old high school buddies are getting a kick out of him playing Ms. Cox's husband on TV. “We were all just big, dateless geeks in high school,” he says.

        Revising history: Channel 9 News Director Scott Diener says that November's third-place finish for the 11 p.m. news was not the first since Al Schottelkotte ruled the Tristate airwaves.

        “We actually finished third in May 1995,” by a small fraction, he says. And “though we haven't tracked it down officially, I am told we finished third during the 1980s on several occasions,” he says.

        E-mail: jkiesewetter@enquirer.com.

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