Noah Tafolla: Camera ready in his home-

town of Ocean Beach.

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Wonderland San Diego Creator and Producer Noah Tafolla loves San Diego. A native to the core, he explores his treasured neighborhoods with endless fascination.

"I love San Diego, and I know the town like the back of my hand - I've been here forever," says Tafolla. Wonderland San Diego is a show about San Diego communities, which airs on KPBS-TV and online at SanDiego.com. "My grandparents came here in the '40s. My parents grew up in Ocean Beach [OB], and so did I, and I've never left - I still live in OB."

Tafolla began his Wonderland San Diego film project three years ago when he simply decided the community needed a show about, "all of the crazy, cool things to do in San Diego," he says. "I did a pilot episode where I just went on my own and took a camera and filmed a bunch of stuff - a little documentary on OB, and talked to some hippies, had a burger, just did different things and hung out."

After pitching the show around town, local NPR affiliate KPBS picked it up. The show received a high Nielson rating and enthusiastic approval from the station. "They said, 'Wow, that was really good. Can you do another one?'" says Tafolla. "I told them sure, and I did another one on Ocean Beach - that's what I knew."

Without any formal film training, Tafolla relied on his instincts to cover what he thought would be interesting to viewers. KPBS ran the second episode, and the ratings were high once again. "So we signed a one-year deal," says Tafolla. "I would then go out every month and give them one new episode - Point Loma, Coronado, La Jolla, Little Italy, you name it."

Noah's approach was to combine history and community into a 30-minute show - a program with historical appeal minus the history-lesson humdrum. "I love history, but when you're watching a history show, after about 10 to 15 minutes, you're like, OK, enough with the history," says Tafolla. "I thought I would go into a neighborhood, like Coronado, into the historical society, get pictures of Coronado when it was just starting, find out why it started, when it started. That would take up about 10 minutes of an episode. For the next 20 minutes, I would go into the community."

Conquering the next neighborhood, Noah would visit local restaurants, museums and small businesses, and talk to locals whose unique personal-interest stories added to the show's charm. "It was just me kickin' around town," says Tafolla. "I thought, if it's La Jolla, I'll do a little something more upscale. If it's OB, I'm talking to hippies. Lakeside, I'm trying to go Western. Ride a horse. So, it just worked."

With the success of the show, KPBS eventually offered Tafolla his own crew although he continued to edit and produce. "It was cool when I was doing neighborhoods," says Tafolla. "But then I decided to do something different like "Great Italian Food," and then I would go back and do a couple neighborhoods, and back to "Great Mexican Food" in San Diego - that was my highest rating."

In one of his latest episodes, Tafolla sank his teeth into something meatier - "Cheeseburger History" in San Diego. Besides sampling burgers, Tafolla went well beyond the counter and behind the scenes - cooking and flipping burgers - and getting all the juicy details about the local burger business.

Tafolla on an adventure, paragliding at Torrey

Pines Glider Port in La Jolla.

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"It's not just about me eating cheeseburgers around town," says Tafolla. "I went and talked about the history of Jack in the Box. This local guy [Robert O. Peterson], who was born and raised in San Diego, started Jack in the Box. And he was also the first to use waitresses on roller skates. He's the first one to do a drive-thru. And he actually developed the intercom system, so you could order before you got to the window. He's a genius."

As far as his favorite neighborhood, he confesses, is not surprisingly, his stomping ground of Ocean Beach, where he's filmed four episodes. However, his favorite discovery was learning about the sudden boom of neighborhoods in 1887.

"All of these different neighborhoods were basically started at the same time, and that's because the railroad came to San Diego in 1887," says Tafolla. "I'm thinking La Jolla was being developed at the same time Lakeside was being developed. Coronado - they were just starting to build the Hotel Del - and it was all happening at one time. And it's amazing to me."

Along with each discovery came the memorable cast of San Diego characters who shared their extraordinary lives. "I met this one woman during an episode I was doing about World War II. She was 95 years old, and born and raised right here in San Diego. I asked, 'What hospital were you born in?' She said, 'You must be young - we were born at home back then.' That just blew my mind!"

"I also met Ralph Rubio and talked about how he started Rubio's Mexican Grill. There would be a ringer [bell] at the front, somebody would ring a bell, and he would come up to the counter, someone would order one fish taco, and he would make it for them, and then he would go in the back and sleep for two hours. And now it's a 135-chain store."

Turning viewers on to a whole new San Diego is one of the rewards of producing Wonderland. "I get a lot of people who call me and say, 'I never knew that ... I've been here my whole life, but I never knew that bakery right around the corner has been there for 40 years ... that's what I like," says Tafolla.

Don't count on Tafolla leaving his hometown of San Diego, except for the occasional getaway. "Sure, we've been to Arizona, L.A., back East (with his family)," says Tafolla. "I've been to Hawaii. It's great. But I couldn't live there. I'd also love to go to Italy some day, but I'm in no rush."

Tafolla makes a pretty convincing argument for staying put: "San Diego is so mellow; there are so many different things to do in town. You can be at the beach surfing, and then, literally, in one hour, you can be sledding in the snow. Where else can you do that? You can go to the bay and go fish. Or ride horses."

"I know that people are like that about their hometown," says Tafolla. "Like they love New York - it's their passion. For me, San Diego is it."

Tafolla's next Wonderland episode, "Holiday Fun," premiers on KPBS Channel 11 on Monday, Dec. 21 at 9 p.m. For a full schedule, go to www.wonderlandsd.com.