Street Gang (19 page)

“I studied all the way from figure drawing to calligraphy, lettering, advertising layout, and product illustration,” Spinney said. “I remember drawing a Milky Way [candy bar] whose wrapper was ripped a little bit. I was really good at drawing oozing caramel.”

Commercial art was enjoyable, but whatever praise might follow was always delayed, Spinney said. With puppetry, the gratification of applause was immediate. He pursued both until the middle of his second year in the School of Practical Art’s three-year program. “The Korean War was raging and I began to worry about being drafted,” he said.

A tiff with Chester over use of the family car pushed Spinney out the door. “I never seemed to put enough gasoline in it for him,” Spinney said, “even though I brought it back with more gas than when I left. He always said it was full and that I had not left it full.” So one morning, totally fed up, Spinney impulsively turned to an art school buddy. “Wanna join the air force?” he asked. They enlisted that day.

“Somebody gave me great advice,” Spinney said. “He said that when you go to basic training, if you’re good at something, take some samples of what you can do. So I brought all of my best samples of [what I’d done] in art school.” Spinney had admired the air force recruitment posters he had seen in Massachusetts and was overjoyed to discover that the art studio where they had been created was right where he was stationed: Sampson Air Force Base, near Waterloo, New York. “I took my art to the department but they said all of the positions were filled. I said, ‘Curses! I’ve got to get in there.’ ” Spinney petitioned to take a specialist’s test to qualify as a draftsman. “You had to get an eighty-five on the exam and I got an eighty-six. It was multiple choice, and just by using logic I passed. But an officer said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m afraid you didn’t make it. They’d like you to have at least a ninety.’ ”

Crestfallen, Spinney walked back to the barracks, test results in hand. On his way, he encountered a major he knew. “Well, did you pass?” he asked.

“No, sir,” Spinney said.

“Let me see,” the major said, looking over the results. “Yes, you did pass. You’ve got an eighty-six. You’re a draftsman.”

With that, “Everybody had to go off for five months of training but me,” Spinney said.“I went off to a real job, stationed in Las Vegas. The first day I got there was 117 degrees, then it was 119, the third day 122. The base was just broiling. When I was being assigned, I learned there were a lot of draftsmen. So I said to the captain, ‘I’m not really a draftsman. I’m an artist.’ He said, ‘What?’ Seconds of silence felt like minutes.

“I showed him my work from art school and he said, ‘Oh, there is a God. I’ve been asking headquarters for an artist, not just draftsmen, and they keep saying there aren’t any.’” After a pause, the captain looked directly at Spinney. “All right,” he said. “You’re an artist.”

Among the projects that came his way, Spinney helped design a poster entitled “How to Bomb and Strafe.” He said he worked for days to make the bombs appear shiny.

 

Spinney’s run of good fortune took an unexpected turn when the wife of a marine captain convinced local television station KLAS to audition the puppeteer. “I had given a show for her PTA group,” Spinney said. The day of the audition he arrived at the station with the title card for what he called the
Rascal Rabbit Show
. So I came in with all my puppets. The [director I saw] was quite unimpressed.”

“We already have a kid show,” he said. “But who did this artwork?”

“I did,” Spinney replied.

The director brightened. “Okay,” he said. “We’ll hire you as an artist.”

Because of the desert heat, Spinney’s workday on the base began in the cooler hours before dawn. By 2:00 p.m., “our life was our own.” That favorable schedule allowed him to work afternoons at Channel 8, for two dollars an illustration. He never lost hope that he might one day be on camera, and when he returned from Christmas leave, the station offered him a chance at a weekly show.

“What will I get paid?” Spinney asked.

“Five dollars per sponsor,” they replied.

“I got two sponsors, but I would have done it for free,” Spinney said. Using a white rabbit puppet his mother had long ago built for a staging of
Alice in Wonderland
, Spinney used up twelve years of material after only three episodes of
Rascal Rabbit
. “I didn’t have any material to go on the air with, and I didn’t know what to do.”

Once again, fate marched in. “Morton Langstaff was in the air force with me. One day, he said, ‘How are you doing with your television show?’

“It’s fine, except I’ve run out of material,” Spinney said.

“I’ve always wanted to write a kid’s show,” Langstaff said. “Could I write it for you?”

Fifteen minutes before airtime, Langstaff ’s script arrived, well written but wordy. Spinney, working without a monitor, struggled, but the show went on.

Rascal Rabbit
might have lasted longer than its three-month run had Spinney not received orders to be transferred to Germany. He learned to speak the language during his tour there and appeared on German television. “I almost got my own TV show there, and probably would have, had I reenlisted. But four years was enough.”

Spinney returned to Massachusetts in late March of 1957. That summer, he and a friend made a thirty-state, eighty-day tour of the United States in a 1954 Chevy station wagon. Another friend had provided the phone number of Clarence Nash, the cartoon voice of Donald Duck, and Nash arranged an interview for Spinney at The Walt Disney Company during his tour stop in California. Spinney had brought a portfolio of drawings along.

“They said, ‘We like your stuff. We’ll hire you.’ Then, and all of a sudden, Walt appeared in the doorway. He didn’t speak to me, but I thought,
Wow. That’s getting close.
I remember at six years old I decided that I was going to be a cartoonist for Walt Disney.”

Spinney was told the job would not begin for a year, after the studio had completed
Sleeping Beauty
. He was fine with that. Then they said he’d be paid fifty-six dollars a week.

“Fifty-six dollars?” he said. “I knew I could do better than that. So I returned to Boston, went back to art school. A year later I was making a hundred five dollars a week for Trans Radio, a little film company in Boston.” One of his first projects for television was an animated commercial for Narragansett Beer (“Hi, neighbor! Have a ’Gansett”). It was hand drawn on cells, just like
Sleeping Beauty.
¹

In 1958, Boston’s WHDH, Channel 5, held auditions for children’s performers. It was a sunny April day and Spinney arrived with his puppets. He left disappointed. “It was one of those things where they said, ‘Don’t call us. We’ll call you.’” Spinney didn’t have his own phone, so he left the number of a lakeside pay phone in Connecticut he often used, and he put the audition out of his mind.

Two years later, while he was visiting that lake, the pay phone rang. He picked it up.

“Person-to-person call for Ed Spinney,” the operator said. Spinney was more amused than stunned at the one-in-a-million occurrence.

“This is Ed,” Spinney said. (During his time in the air force, he had begun using his middle name. “I decided not to go through [the service] being known as Caroll,” he explained. “I’ve got enough troubles.”)

The voice that then came on the line belonged to the very man who had auditioned Spinney in ’58. WHDH was looking for a summer replacement for its popular children’s show
Captain Bob,
on which its star, bewhiskered actor and artist Bob Cottle, portrayed a sea captain. He’d asked for a month off. Would Spinney be interested in filling in for him?

Spinney jumped at the offer and, along with singer Judy Valentine, worked six days a week that summer. The station provided a set meant to suggest a rocket ship headed for the moon. One of the puppet stars was Goggle, a large yellow-beaked bird “with goggle eyes,” Spinney recalled. The show performed nicely in the local Nielsen ratings, doubling Captain Bob’s ratings, but when Cottle returned to work, Spinney was, once again, out of television—but this time not for long.

A month later, he joined the cast of Boston’s
Bozo’s Circus
on WHDH, whose producers had admired Spinney’s versatility during his replacement stint. On
Bozo’s,
he played costumed character Mr. Lion. In one episode, without benefit of rehearsal, Mr. Lion created in less than thirty seconds a drawing from the name of a child in the audience. The gimmick became a fixture of the show, but Spinney remained a puppeteer at heart.

In 1962, performing at a puppet festival in Sturbridge, Massachusetts, one act in particular fascinated him, a performing duo who managed to do eight riotous routines in fifty-five minutes. One involved a platoon of wooden soldiers and their drill sergeant. “Sarge would march them in and they’d get tired, then he’d get them up for target practice,” Spinney said. “They were all carrying little guns. Sarge then puts up this little target and steps back. And they’re all aiming at the target, but then they do a 180—all the guns are facing [the sergeant], and,
boom,
they blow him away. It was really incredible.” It was Jim Henson, Jerry Juhl, and the Muppets.

Spinney’s turn on stage came soon after, and Henson watched as he performed with Goggle, a bird who could be obnoxious. When Goggle refused to get off the stage—“It’s time to leave!” Spinney pleaded from out of sight—a human hand appeared and began to strangle the bird. “Jim loved that,” Spinney recalled.

Later, when the two met backstage, Henson said to Spinney, “I kinda liked your show. Why don’t you come down to New York and talk about the Muppets?”

Spinney said, “Gee, that would be good,” thinking Henson’s casual remark was an invitation to talk shop someday, like one hobbyist to another.

But Henson meant otherwise. He had been impressed enough with Spinney’s skills to invite him to Manhattan to discuss possible employment—he just hadn’t made that invitation clear to Spinney. So the two men shook hands and parted. That exchange fell into the category of “understandable understanding,” given the indirect and sometimes obtuse manner in which Henson spoke, even while conducting business.

It would be seven long years before the chance to join the Muppets again presented itself to Spinney, just months before the debut of
Sesame Street
.

Chapter Eight

T
here are risk takers and risky risk takers. Some are calculated, others impulsive. Some are reasoned, others reckless. Lloyd Morrisett is an example of the former.

In the late spring of ’67, after doing considerable research, Morrisett was ready to bet that television could teach children something more substantive than “Mr. Clean gets rid of dirt and grime and grease in just a minute / Mr. Clean will clean your whole house and everything that’s in it.”

The question was Would anyone else lay money on that bet?

The odds were only fifty-fifty that Carnegie, the foundation that paid his salary, would participate, even though the philanthropy had bankrolled the feasibility study and in May had taken on Joan Ganz Cooney as a consultant to develop the project.

“Television was not thought well of at Carnegie,” Morrisett recalled. “It had the perception of being a black hole in terms of using up money, and there were doubts that what you produced would have any value, [that] it was ephemeral. So my job became how to convince my colleagues to take a chance and do something like this, when we hadn’t done anything in television. Zero.”

Morrisett had to follow the same procedures in procuring a grant for the preschool series as he did for any other project at Carnegie. That he was vice president provided certain clout, but not a golden ticket. The preschool series was just another idea up for consideration, and Morrisett would have to defend it, promote it, and, ultimately, sell it to his boss, Alan Pifer. Morrisett believed that if Carnegie could show good faith and guarantee the first million dollars for the effort, it would “likely be the key to releasing funds from other interested agencies.”

Fund-raising at this stage became Morrisett’s highest priority and foremost responsibility. “We didn’t know whether we would have the money to produce the series, and we didn’t know if we did produce it how we would get it broadcast,” Morrisett said. But the self-described “true believer” made a plan. Rather than cast a wide net, he would cherry-pick, targeting only major corporate and philanthropic entities and the federal government.

Cooney encouraged Morrisett to aim high. “We had decided from the first that we wouldn’t go around begging for pennies,” she said. “Either we could get full funding to do the show right or we would drop it.” If it was to be a bold endeavor, she reasoned, they should assume an air of confidence. After all, they were intending to enter the arena of big-time, big-budget television, where the size and scope of an audience determines success or failure. Cooney said, “We’d have to compete with the loud noise, mad music, and strong wine the kids were getting on commercial shows.”
¹

And so, with no funding commitments, hard or soft, the hunt was on, with Washington the first stop.

 

You can’t discuss what transpired at the United States Office of Education (USOE) on the final day of June 1967 without using that vivid, if slightly impolite, noun,
balls.

The USOE’s commisioner, Harold Howe II, had them.

A civil servant known from childhood as Doc, Howe slew a roomful of bureaucratic dragons that day. He had called the meeting only weeks after receiving a bulky parcel from his old friend Lloyd Morrisett that contained Cooney’s feasibility study, which Howe devoured. He was so intrigued by its argument and aims that he phoned Morrisett right away to ask that he come to Washington—with “that Cooney dame.” Cooney recalled that Howe said to Morrisett, “We don’t have the money to do this, I don’t think, but come on down and we’ll sit around the table with the department people, the research people, the preschool education people.”