How We Got to Sesame Street

How We Got to Sesame Street

Posted on May 11, 2020 at 8:00 am

Copyright Simon and Schuster 2020

There’s a terrific history of Sesame Street by Jill Lepore in The New Yorker, based in part on a terrific new book called Sunny Days: the Children’s Television Revolution that Changed America by David Kamp. I appreciated the mention of my dad, who, as Kamp’s book reveals, played a critical role in obtaining the first funding for the show. I remember his telling us about it at family dinners, and I was lucky enough to watch the very first episode, which I loved instantly.

Half a century ago, before “Sesame Street,” and long before the age of quarantine, kids under the age of six spent a crazy amount of time indoors, watching television, a bleary-eyed average of fifty-four hours a week. In 1965, the year the Johnson Administration founded Head Start, Lloyd Morrisett, a vice-president of the Carnegie Corporation with a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Yale, got up one Sunday morning, at about six-thirty, a half hour before the networks began their day’s programming, to find his three-year-old daughter, Sarah, lying on the living-room floor in her pink footie pajamas, watching the test pattern. She’d have watched anything, even “The Itty-Bitty, Farm and City, Witty-Ditty, Nitty-Gritty, Dog and Kitty, Pretty Little Kiddie Show.”

Not much later, Morrisett fell into a dinner-party conversation with Joan Ganz Cooney, a public-affairs producer at New York’s Channel 13. The first time Cooney had seen a television set was in 1952, when she watched Adlai Stevenson accept the Democratic nomination. She’d gone on to champion Democratic causes and had moved from Phoenix to New York to work at Channel 13, where her documentary projects included “A Chance at a Beginning,” about a preschool program in Harlem. As David Kamp reports in “Sunny Days: The Children’s Television Revolution That Changed America” (Simon & Schuster), both Cooney and Morrisett were caught up in Lyndon Johnson’s vision of a Great Society, his War on Poverty, and the promise of the civil-rights movement, and they’d both been stirred by a speech delivered in 1961 by Newton Minow, President Kennedy’s F.C.C. chairman, which called television a “vast wasteland.” Minow, a former law partner of Stevenson’s, had gone on to rescue Channel 13’s public-broadcast mandate during a takeover bid. At that dinner party, Cooney and Morrisett got to talking about whether public-minded television might be able to educate young kids.

Educational television for preschoolers seemed to solve two problems at once: the scarcity of preschools and the abundance of televisions. At the time, half of the nation’s school districts didn’t have kindergartens. To address an achievement gap that had persisted long after Brown v. Board of Education, it would have been better to have universal kindergarten, and universal preschool, but, in the meantime, there was universal television. “More households have televisions than bathtubs, telephones, vacuum cleaners, toasters, or a regular daily newspaper,” Cooney noted in a Carnegie-funded feasibility study, “The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education.” With that report in hand, Morrisett arranged for a million-dollar grant that allowed Cooney to begin development of a show with no other title than “Early Childhood Television Program.” In a fifty-five-page 1968 proposal, “Television for Preschool Children,” Cooney reported the results of a national study of the increasingly sophisticated scholarship on child development: she’d travelled the country, interviewing scholars and visiting preschools to find out about what was called, at the time, the “sandbox-to-classroom revolution”—the pressing case for intellectual stimulation for three-, four-, and five-year-olds.

That proposal brought in the eight million dollars in foundation and government funding that made possible the founding of the nonprofit Children’s Television Workshop and the production of the first season of the still unnamed “Early Childhood Television Program.” “Nothing comparable to such a program now exists on television,” Cooney observed. “Captain Kangaroo,” broadcast on CBS beginning in 1955, had educational bits, but it was mainly goofy. (Bob Keeshan, who played the captain, had started out as a Sideshow Bob clown named Clarabell on “Howdy Doody” and then starred as Corny the Clown on ABC’s “Time for Fun.”) “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” a half-hour show produced by WQED, in black-and-white, had gone national in 1968, but reached mainly a middle-class audience. The new show would be broadcast nationally, every weekday, for an hour, in color; it would be aimed at all children, from all socioeconomic backgrounds; it would be explicitly educational, with eight specific learning objectives drawn from a list devised by experts; and its format would be that of a “magazine” made up of “one- to fifteen-minute segments in different styles”—animation, puppetry, games, stories. The “Early Childhood Television Program” would also be an experiment: its outcome would be measured.

Cooney put together a board of academic advisers, chaired by the developmental psychologist Gerald Lesser, and in 1968 she began a series of seminars loosely affiliated with the Harvard School of Education, where Lesser was a professor. To one of those seminars, she later recalled, “this bearded, prophetic figure in sandals walks in and sits way at the back, ram-rod straight, staring ahead with no expression on his face.” She thought that he might be a member of the Weather Underground. She whispered to a colleague, “How do we know that man back there isn’t going to throw a bomb up here or toss a hand grenade?”

“Not likely,” he said. “That’s Jim Henson.”

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59 Years Ago Today: My Father Told TV Executives They Had Produced a Vast Wasteland

Posted on May 9, 2020 at 8:00 am

On May 9, 1961, my father, Newton Minow, delivered a speech that continues to inspire the conversation about media and was recently an answer on Jeopardy!

He was President Kennedy’s new Chairman of the FCC, just 35 years old, and in his first major address he told the National Association of Broadcasters that while there was much to admire on television, too much of it was a “vast wasteland.” His contributions to broadcasting include the launching of the first telecommunications satellite, the creation of PBS, the original funding for Sesame Street (noted in the current issue of the New Yorker) and helping to start the Presidential debates. He continues to serve as Vice Chair of the Commission on Presidential Debates, which he helped to form.

He told the audience about the day before the speech, when President Kennedy brought Commander Alan Shepherd, who had just become the first American in space, and his wife, to the National Association of Broadcasters event Dad would be speaking to the following day.  President Kennedy invited Dad to come upstairs while he changed his shirt, to give him some ideas about what to tell the broadcasters.  Dad suggested that he talk about the difference between the way Americans and the Soviet Union conducted their space program.  In the US, we had all the television cameras there to show the American people, good or bad, what was happening.  The authors of the forthcoming book and documentary Chasing the Moon tweeted about it today:

At the time Dad called on the broadcasters to do better, there were just three national television networks. There was no PBS, just a National Educational Television which was not even available in most of the country, including Washington DC itself. My father told the broadcasters that as long as the airwaves were a scarce resource, they would have to do better to live up to their statutory obligation to serve the public interest, convenience, and necessity, especially with regard to coverage of news and programming for children. He worked over the next half-century to make more choices available, including cable and satellite as well as the creation of a robust public television station. He served as chairman of PBS and of the Chicago affiliate WTTW, served on the board of CBS, is vice-chair of the Presidential Debates Commission (he was the one who proposed its current structure), pushed for closed captioning to make television programming available to hearing-impaired viewers, and argued one of the only cases in history to have a broadcast license rescinded — a station that spewed hatred across the airwaves. And in protest of his critique of television, the sinking ship on “Gilligan’s Island” was named after him, the S.S. Minnow! He is so proud he has a lifesaver from the SS Minnow on his office wall, a gift from his law partners for his 90th birthday.

PBS has a great documentary about him which is free to watch online.  He is also the world’s best dad and we are all so proud of him.

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Tonight on PBS: The Definition of Insanity — Mental Illness and the Criminal Justice System

Tonight on PBS: The Definition of Insanity — Mental Illness and the Criminal Justice System

Posted on April 14, 2020 at 7:00 am

Tonight on PBS: A powerful documentary about the failures of the criminal justice system when it comes to mental illness, will millions of dollars wasted on the very definition of cruel and inhuman punishment. It is also the story of a pioneering judge who establishes a very successful pilot program, reducing arrests, recidivism, and costs.

A personal note: When I was a young lawyer I worked on a case that would have benefitted from exactly this kind of option. A mentally ill homeless man was cold and so he broke into an office building. Because it happened to be a federal office building and he opened a file drawer it led to a number of charges that he was not really responsible for, or responsible enough to understand. I wish we had had an option like the one this judge has created.

More information:

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Pop Store Auction: Find the Perfect Gift for the “Friends” Fan

Pop Store Auction: Find the Perfect Gift for the “Friends” Fan

Posted on December 8, 2019 at 10:11 pm

“Friends” was a cultural phenomenon when it was on the air and continues to be one as new generations of fans find it through streaming. Now all kinds of treasures from the show are being auctioned off for charity.

Copyright Warner Brothers 1994, All rights reserved

Rachel’s employee evaluation of Tag, the invitation to Monica’s and Chandler’s wedding — and their handwritten vows, Rachel’s sonogram, scripts, costumes, Ross’s second grade report card, Joey’s Soapie award — and lots more!

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New on PBS: The Retro Report Illuminates Today’s Stories With Yesterday’s Headlines

Posted on October 23, 2019 at 11:01 am

Retro Report makes sense of the present by revealing the past. Join journalists Celeste Headlee and Masud Olufani as they connect the present to the past through four distinct and varied stories, and New Yorker humorist Andy Borowitz adds his signature wit.

 

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