Street Gang (21 page)

In 1966 President Johnson used the bully pulpit of the State of the Union address to ask for increased support for noncommercial television. With Johnson’s blessing, a Carnegie-sponsored commission took up the task of investigating what it would take to vitalize the system. Ford awarded a ten-million-dollar stimulus grant at the end of the year to develop programming that would be shared by educational stations connected by long-line telephone cable, “a two-year demonstration of the power of interconnection.”

Out of that grant came the Public Broadcasting Laboratory (PBL), a costly experiment to test what would happen if a rich pool of television talent was set free to create bold, ambitious, and unconventional programs, the likes of which would never appear on commercial television.

PBL’s champion was Fred W. Friendly, a broadcast innovator-agitator who got his start on radio producing
Hear It Now
with Edward R. Murrow, a news magazine of the air. Its television successor,
See It Now,
set the standard for aggressive, probing—and often puncturing—documentary television. It was on
See It Now
, on the evening of March 9, 1954, that Murrow and his unseen editor Friendly stood up to a politician as no television news-men had dared to do before. The footage aired that night, accompanied by Murrow’s commentary, exposed Wisconsin senator Joseph R. McCarthy for what he was: a scheming, power-mad demagogue who trampled and twisted the constitutionally guaranteed rights of innocent citizens. That night,
See It Now
threw up a blockade to the mad march of McCarthyism.

Friendly, born Ferdinand Friendly Wachenheimer in New York, was once described as “a big, imposing man who hurled ideas and opinions around like Olympian thunderbolts.”
⁶
From the ranks of producers he rose to the presidency of CBS News in 1964, unleashing reporters like barking hounds to attach their jaws to the pant legs of the powerful. In doing so, he established the network’s reputation for unfettered, unblinking news gathering. But Friendly, who had fractious moments with his overlords at the network, resigned from his post in 1966 after CBS refused to preempt its daytime lineup of sitcom reruns, game shows, and soaps to make way for the long-awaited Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on the Vietnam War, which came to be known as the Fulbright hearings. Friendly no longer wished to be associated with a network that would choose a time-worn
I Love Lucy
episode over coverage of historic testimony. Friendly found a soft place to land at the Ford Foundation, where he played a critical advisory role in the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, which led to the formation of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and PBS. “TV is bigger than any story it reports,” he said in 1966. “It’s the greatest teaching tool since the printing press. It will determine nothing less than what kind of people we are. So if TV exists now only for the sake of a buck, somebody’s going to have to change that.”

In joining Ford, Friendly had a formidable new boss in McGeorge “Mac” Bundy, a thinking man’s thinking man who had been a foreign policy adviser to presidents Kennedy and Johnson. Once described by Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. as “a man of notable brilliance, integrity, and patriotic purpose,”
⁷
Bundy would also be damned by David Halberstam in
The Best and the Brightest
for his role in plunging the nation into the quagmire of Vietnam and the resultant loss of fifty-five thousand American lives.

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Yale with a mathematics degree, Bundy was appointed to Harvard’s Society of Fellows, a program reserved for only the most promising of scholars. In 1953, at the age of thirty-four, he became Harvard’s dean of the faculty of arts and sciences.

Lloyd Morrisett understood that any hope of assistance from Ford ultimately would require validation and support from Bundy and his television adviser, Friendly. Complicating matters was the news that Ford was contemplating support for a children’s television project of its own, a program to teach reading to the underprivileged.

Like the always-civil rivals from Harvard and Yale, so, too, did the gentlemen from the Ford Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation compete for dominance and regard in the 1960s. On paper, there was no comparison. Ford had been established as a family foundation in 1936 with assets of $164,000. By 1942, its coffers had risen astonishingly to $30.7 million. Within a year, the assets had shot up by nearly a factor of seven when Edsel Bryant Ford, the only son of Detroit industrialist Henry Ford, died at age forty-nine and named the foundation as chief beneficiary of his estate. When Henry Ford died in 1947, the foundation expanded to the point that its assets exceeded the combined balances of all other foundations within the then forty-eight states.

Carnegie was a muscular institution in the 1960s, but Ford was the world’s wealthiest. Carrying on compatible missions, the foundations roamed in realms of their own choosing, crossing paths occasionally with respectful nods.

 

It was not always a certainty that
Sesame Street
would end up on public television, at least in the eyes of Lloyd Morrisett. He was open to the idea that it could air as a commercial venture, with advertisements bracketing—but not interrupting—the program. There were precedents for such an arrangement in corporate underwriting of network specials and event coverage.

Morrisett called on top television executives to measure their interest in committing funding or airtime or both to the show. But after a month of consideration, neither Julian Goodman, president at NBC, nor John A. “Jack” Schneider, Goodman’s counterpart at CBS, offered much beyond their best wishes for success. Two television ownership groups, Time-Life Broadcasting and Group W (Westinghouse), likewise politely passed on the proposal.

So let the record show that two years before
Sesame Street
would debut, NBC and CBS, the networks of Sarnoff and Paley, rejected a project that would ultimately reshape children’s television and make Big Bird as recognizable as Mickey Mouse. Given the revenue generated by
Sesame Street
licensing and merchandising through the decades, and the global reach of the franchise, turning down
Sesame Street
was a billion-dollar blunder.

What is more, the networks missed a chance to alter perceptions of commercial television itself, long regarded as a great thief of time. All the applause, all the gratitude from parents, all the awards and recognition, all the praise from critics, could have been theirs. It was an opportunity that Newton Minow himself might have described as vastly wasted.

The lode of goodwill generated by the arrival of
Sesame Street
in 1969 was accordingly lavished upon public television, which would be perceived thereafter by viewers at all income levels as a safe haven for children.

 

On September 21, 1967, Lloyd Morrisett met with another quintet of TV executives. This time he wasn’t trying to sell anything.

In what was essentially
Sesame Street
’s first focus group, five experienced men from the business and programming sides of television, commercial and noncommercial, were briefed on the preschool project. They were then asked to assess its viability and estimate its cost. In attendance were George Heinemann, executive producer of children’s programs for NBC; Oscar Katz, a former vice president of programming at CBS; Mark Goodson of the Goodson-Todman production company; Lewis Freedman and Stuart Sucherman of the nascent PBL; and George Dessart, director of community services at WCBS-TV. Gerald Lesser, the Harvard Ed School researcher who had advised
Exploring
, sat in alongside Morrisett, Cooney, Finberg, Hausman, and freelance writer Linda Gottlieb.

In a calculated move, Morrisett also invited Lou Hausman, who was still advocating his pick-a-pilot plan to steer production of the series to a Hollywood studio. Hausman agreed to attend the meeting and abide by whatever his former CBS colleague, Oscar Katz, deemed the smartest course. He anticipated that Katz would see things his way.

Their viability verdict from the TV pros was swift, clear, and unanimous: a show for preschoolers that taught as it entertained, or vice versa, was an idea whose time had come. Lewis Freedman, who attended the dinner party in 1966, took charge of the conversation. “You cannot possibly do this without setting up an organization,” he said. “There’s no production company in the United States that can do this, so you have to create that animal.” That sentiment echoed around the room, and a call arose for the creation of a new, autonomous, hybrid organization that in Morrisett’s words, would “be given the task of fusing education and entertainment.” “It was said right away that L.A. was not the right climate for this kind of project, that it was a New York project, where you can get the right kinds of people,” Cooney recalled. You could almost hear Hausman’s balloon burst.

“Lloyd was so shrewd,” Cooney said. “One of the reasons he had that meeting was to have Hausman in attendance. Lou respected the producers, and when everyone was in favor of creating a new entity, that was the end of the [showbiz pilot] discussion. It was a turning point. Lou left knowing it wasn’t going to go his way, but he came around. And to his credit, he never looked back.”

Heinemann, Katz, Goodson, Sucherman, and Dessart called for an aggressive rollout of the series, with a sufficient number of episodes spread across a long enough time period to build a substantial audience. Their ambitious suggestion was a daily one-hour program to be seen over either a twenty-six- or thirty-nine-week schedule, with perhaps as many as 130 episodes in its debut season. Each episode would air twice daily, presumably morning and afternoon, to reach as many children as possible.

No one was sure what it would cost, but Sucherman agreed to help Cooney craft a more realistic budget, one that would be much closer to Hausman’s $6 million projection than the first stab at $2 million.

As the meeting broke up, WCBS’s Dessart caught up with Cooney on her way out to share a thought that had occurred to him during the discussion. Excitedly he said, “You’re going to teach numbers and letters, right? And your hunch is that kids learn from catchy commercials, right? Then why not make commercials to teach letters and numbers?”

In one brilliant flash, the first streetlight on
Sesame Street
was illuminated. “I had noted the attraction of commercials for young children in my report, but I hadn’t put it together myself how commercials could be used, or if they could,” Cooney said. “We knew we were going to teach letters and numbers and we knew we wanted commercials in some form. I don’t know how I missed that connection, but [George] brought it together.”

Dessart, pleased by Cooney’s response, added a flourish. “I’ll bet you could get a string of advertising agencies to donate enough commercials to get you started.”

How right he was.

 

Cooney retreated to her apartment to work on rewriting and expanding the feasibility study into something that more resembled a plan for season one. In November, Morrisett was at the typewriter as well, drafting a well-considered memo to his boss, Alan Pifer, in which he said that a $1 million commitment from Carnegie “would be enough money to get the project organized and to finance the core staff over a period of approximately two years. It would not be nearly enough money to ensure production and distribution of the program, but this core support would allow the recruitment of key personnel and would tide the project over until the other agencies act.”
⁸
Pifer was inclined to agree; a grant of that magnitude would represent Carnegie’s largest of the decade.

In a moment of candor long after
Sesame Street
was a reality, Pifer said that as he deliberated, he took “wry amusement at the thought that all this enormous effort—and the substantial funds involved—[might] be frustrated by the determined little four- or five-year-old who, the minute his mother’s back is turned, slips up to the TV and switches it to the cartoons.”

Chapter Nine

I
n the fall of 1967, shortly after Lloyd Morrisett had convened the meeting of television experts, he arranged for a panel of educators to travel to New York to discuss how the television series might be researched and evaluated.
¹
While that marked the first gathering of academic advisers to
Sesame Street
, its significance was greater than that.

Once again Gerald Lesser, the Harvard professor who had advised NBC’s
Exploring
during its four-season run, was in attendance. At the time, Lesser was one of the few academics of note who was conducting serious research on children and television. Another was Dr. Edward Palmer of the Oregon state education system, who was developing tests to measure children’s attention to television.

Lesser’s manner was informal, unpretentious, and collaborative. “I remember when I first met him in his office at Larson Hall at the Harvard Graduate School of Education,” said Milton Chen, executive director of the George Lucas Educational Foundation and a former director of research at the Children’s Television Workshop. “I was maybe eighteen, a college sophomore. And here’s a Harvard professor with an endowed chair whose standard uniform was tennis sneakers, corduroy slacks, and an open shirt. He was as casual with students as he was with distinguished psychologists and educators from around the country.” Lesser’s hallmark was his ability to extract information in a nonthreatening manner. “Gerry’s style was to listen, observe, and make suggestions, but in a way that did not turn people off. Whether it was his personality, his clinical training, or his work in the School of Education, I can’t say. He just wanted to know where you were coming from, and then he would make suggestions that you’d clearly understand, and not impose something on you. He wanted to help you do your work.”

With Lesser’s gentle prodding, three guiding principles emerged at the Carnegie gathering that proved essential to
Sesame Street’
s success: