Street Gang (12 page)

Cooney had awakened prepared to undertake a mission, refreshed, energized, and determined. Years later, she said that almost overnight, she felt as though she had been summoned to a “television destiny” that would “test the power and the influence of the medium. I would have been interested if it had been a project to teach literacy to adults, or something for teenagers,” she said. “Preschoolers were not necessarily my thing. It was using television in a constructive way that turned me on.”

Lean, fit Morrisett, who rarely missed his rigorous daily workout, took a moment to watch Sarah scooting about in her pajamas. Thinking about the night before, he was fascinated by the notion of exploiting the technology of television to reach greater numbers of needy kids. “At that time, there were roughly four to four and a half million children entering school in a year, and our programs at the Carnegie Corporation were reaching perhaps a few hundred, maybe a couple thousand,” he later said. “Of the four million, a conservative estimate of five hundred thousand needed help. There was a huge gap between what we were doing and what we were trying to achieve. And if you believe that the programs you’re funding have potential value, and you find that you’re only doing a very small part of the job, it creates a problem in your mind: how are you going to overcome it?”

They got to work on the problem—Cooney and Lewis Freedman at Channel Thirteen, Morrisett and two associates at Carnegie—and by mid-April, after an initial session at the foundation’s offices, there already were a good number of dots to connect. Astonishingly, a primitive outline of a project that more than faintly resembles
Sesame Street
began to emerge as early as their second meeting.
¹

Cooney and Freedman proposed a daily program, “probably an hour long,” telecast twice a day for a target audience of three- to five-year-olds. It would be shot in a studio on videotape, to give it a “live quality.” There would be music, puppets, and stories. Filmed segments might venture beyond the set, visiting “firehouses, policemen, hospitals, zoos, and libraries.”

What Cooney and Freedman had in mind is today referred to as “edutainment,” a pleasurable—and often commercial—brand of pedagogy. Whatever the final format, they determined, the show would rise or fall on a single precept: it would need to be as engaging as it was informative. That would be no easy feat, considering that educational TV to that point had been well intentioned but stodgy, stiff, and colorless. If cartoons and Westerns were ice cream, educational TV was school lunch. What Cooney and Freedman hoped for would be more like raspberry yogurt, TV that was both tangy and nutritious.

Morrisett understood that any serious effort to explore such a program’s viability would first necessitate researching whether anyone beyond the five people in the room thought it could work.
²
Certainly, there were educators, psychologists, child development specialists, and pediatricians whom they could tap for expert opinion. Not only could these advisers comment on the feasibility of the study, they might also offer guidance on age-appropriate content for the show.

There was buzz and a hum around the table. Morrisett had in mind a barnstorming tour of campuses and laboratories across the nation to test what only months before had been a simple question prompted by the story of a preschooler peering at an Indian chief.

Someone would have to be designated as researcher-scout, returning to the group after a few months with a report. He or she would need to be careful and inquisitive, resourceful and prepared, efficient and dependable. Cooney shifted in her seat.

The proposition of reaching out to a hit list of sages and scholars almost made Morrisett’s ears wiggle. After all, they were his kind of people, especially those with a scientific bent toward cognitive matters. He was endlessly searching to find new ways to harness advances in science, technology, and media for the greater good.

Cooney recalled Morrisett saying, “
Maybe
we could do a little study for two or three months.
Maybe
we could let someone go around and talk to the various people about how they would view a television show to help with cognitive development.”

That’s when Freedman, the programming pro, piped up. “It’s a good idea!” he blurted, as ever, ebullient. “Channel Thirteen could certainly run that study!” Within seconds, all eyes fell on Cooney, the obvious choice for the assignment, given her degree in education, her reporting background, and her tenure at Thirteen. It was as if she were born to the assignment, and in her mind, she started packing her valise.

Freedman cleared his throat. “Of course, Joan wouldn’t be interested,” he blurted. “She’s a public affairs producer.”

“Oh yes I would!” Cooney exclaimed, unwilling to let the comment stand for even a half second, even if it meant refuting her boss publicly. “I didn’t know it until I said it,” she later admitted.

Freedman shot Cooney a stern look, as he was understandably opposed to allowing one of his most reliable and levelheaded producers to go gallivanting to who-knows-where for three months. “Lewis was absolutely determined not to lose me on this,” Cooney said, but she was equally adamant to be chosen. The meeting ended with the matter unresolved. Days passed.

By dint of good fortune, Tim Cooney had a scheduled lunch with Morrisett to discuss matters unrelated to the TV project. Before they met, Joan urged Tim to promote her cause. “Go ahead,” she said. “It’s never going to happen if we don’t work around Lewis.” Tim had no reservations about speaking up for his wife, and not only out of matrimonial allegiance. He might have done so for any capable woman attempting to lead in what was then a man’s world. “Tim was a radical feminist, maybe the first feminist I ever knew,” Cooney said. “He always felt that men and women should do what they want. I came late to the idea.”
³

 

When he was sober, thirty-four-year-old Tim Cooney was a prince of a guy. Though born in 1929 in Milwaukee, Cooney was raised in New York. He earned an undergraduate history degree in 1952 from Columbia College, the highly selective undergraduate program at Columbia University. It also was the year in which he made thirty-five dollars per week as a functionary in Adlai Stevenson’s presidential campaign.

He proved to be something less than the model soldier during his army days at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Perturbed by America’s foreign policy under the stewardship of John Foster Dulles, Corporal Cooney penned a stingingly critical letter to the
Louisville Courier-Journal
about the secretary of state’s administration. The commentary reached the desk of Cooney’s commanding general, and he was busted back to the rank of private. “Cooney did the thing that most soldiers try to avoid—he made himself conspicuous,” the
New York Times
once reported, adding the soldier was “rebuked for registering implicit dissent with his commander in chief, the president of the United States.”
⁴

The highlight of Cooney’s career as an army paratrooper came during a doomed flight onboard a “Flying Boxcar” transport. When the plane crashed en route to Alaska, Cooney and a planeload of others parachuted to safety. The army pinned a commendation medal on his chest, “for saving my own life.” Self-deprecating humor was only part of his rogue charm.

After serving in the Korean War, civilian Cooney left America to discover Spain. Assuming the life of a scholar on the Iberian Peninsula, he researched and wrote a scholarly tome,
Ultimate Desires,
published by Philosophical Library in 1958. According to the
Times,
the book explored “man’s quest for answers to the fundamental problems of his existence.”
⁵

When Tim married Joan in the winter of 1964, he was director of public relations for the New York City Department of Labor. In July of the following year, when Cooney was thirty-five, he was appointed executive secretary of the New York Council Against Poverty.

In 1967 Cooney was named interim director of New York’s Office of Civil Defense, with the curious mandate to abolish the very department he was chosen to temporarily lead. “I don’t want to become a specialist in liquidating offices,” Cooney said. The assignment did appeal, however, to his quest to conserve and redistribute taxpayer-funded resources, in the hope that more dollars would be available to assist the poor. It made him feel like an Irish Robin Hood.

So fascinated by African American culture was Cooney that his friends teasingly called him “the blackest man in Harlem.” Tim and his bride of two years made for a “powerful one-two punch,” recalled Robert A. Hatch, a former Peace Corps executive who became
Sesame Street
’s first public relations director. Hatch viewed the couple as beguiling social activists who found each other at a time of great social foment. They were, for a time, a delightfully unmatched set, a Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn two-some who married despite differences in upbringing, station, and sobriety. They had exchanged vows in the Friars Chapel of the Roman Catholic Church of St. Vincent Ferrer on February 22, 1964.
⁶

In the early years of the marriage, Tim’s more commendable qualities made up for his less attractive ones. When Tim drank, he could be an ill-tempered lout who’d throw dishes around the apartment. Joan learned to duck.

 

At their lunch, Tim Cooney spoke ardently to Lloyd Morrisett about Joan, though Morrisett had in fact already concluded that she was the logical person to conduct the study. Morrisett phoned Joan’s boss, Lewis Freedman, a few days afterward. “You know who I’d really like on this is Joan,” he said, and he meant it. Faced with the Cooney couple’s end run and Morrisett’s intervention, Freedman had little choice but to acquiesce. To say no would be to risk upsetting a Carnegie vice president and jeopardize possible future funding.

Characteristically certain of what she wanted, Joan Cooney had bested her boss. “I never told Lewis about this because I always felt it was a little tricky,” Cooney said, with a smidgen of guilt. “But I’m awfully glad I did it.”

It was as if the work of the previous months had provided a brief glimpse into a future beyond documentaries and public affairs programming, a life of greater purpose and a realization that she “could do a thousand documentaries on poverty and poor people that would be watched by a handful of the convinced, but I was never really going to have an influence on my times. I wanted to make a difference.”
⁷

The plan set, Morrisett instructed Cooney to write a proposal for a feasibility study. By mid-May it landed on the desk of Carnegie president Alan Jay Pifer. Clipped to it was a supporting memo from Barbara Finberg, an executive associate at Carnegie, which read as follows:

 

The proposal won quick approval, and Carnegie came up with fifteen thousand dollars to cover Cooney’s salary and travel expenses, By June she was off harvesting heaping bales of opinion, working her way down a list of experts provided by Carnegie, with a smattering of additional sources chosen by her.

Over fourteen weeks she swooped down on campuses—not only the nation’s elite state and private universities, but a day school in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and a Montessori preschool in Phoenix. She dropped in at pediatric research hospitals and consulted with the National Film Board of Canada. She sat with top broadcasting executives at CBS and NBC in New York, and toured a local station in Philadelphia that had success with original programming for children. She conferred with an educational specialist at Head Start and interviewed an animation team and a filmmaker. And she also met with game-show creator Mark Goodson, half of the Goodson-Todman production team responsible for giving away truck-loads of washer-dryers and fistfuls of cash on
The Price Is Right
,
I’ve Got a Secret
,
The Match Game
, and
Tattletales
.

There were twenty-six sessions in all, packed into a summer of sprints to the airport and hikes around college quadrangles. Cooney compiled her careful, detailed notes as a veteran reporter might—on the fly and without benefit of a tape recorder. Given the ever-widening gap in school readiness, the educators and psychologists were surprisingly open to the concept of teaching through TV. “All of them, to a man and woman, were supportive of [the] idea . . . even though no one knew
if
you could do it. But I knew because as I said in the study, they’re singing commercials all over the country. Why can’t you teach them something else?”

Harvard cognitive psychologist Jerome Bruner spoke for the majority of those interviewed when he said, “We cannot wait for the right answers before acting. Rather, we should look upon the first year of broadcasting for preschoolers in the nature of an inquiry. There is no substitute for trying it and evaluating its effects.”

By the time her sojourn was completed in September, she was ready to synthesize her notes, extract the major points, and begin typing like hell. “I remember just laying stuff out on a sofa, each chapter with its backup,” Cooney said. “I would call Lloyd every now and then and say, ‘Here’s where I am,’ or read him a paragraph, And he kept saying, ‘Fine, that’s what we want.’ At one point I said, ‘Who is the voice?’ and he said, ‘You! We want
your
opinion. This is an informal report. It’s not going to be published. We just want to know what Joan Ganz Cooney thinks, after talking to these people.’ I had no credentials for this, except for a BA in education, and having done one half-hour program on the subject. It was an immense leap of faith for Lloyd to say, ‘She’s got the brainpower to do it, I’m interested in her opinion.’ He just decided that he was going to bet on me, which in a funny way is probably the most significant single personnel decision for
Sesame Street
that was ever made. . . . Everybody else who came on the project from then on was utterly qualified. I was the question mark.”