Street Gang (22 page)

 

If one were to look upon this project as a true experiment, the participants argued, fair and effective measurements would need to be in place to prove or disprove the major hypothesis. The question that Morrisett posed at the dinner party in 1966 could be adequately answered only if the show had specific educational standards, goals, and rigorous pre- and posttesting. The project would establish its credibility, they predicted, based on its backbone of scientifically valid research.
Sesame Street
, then, would be the first children’s television series with a bona fide curriculum and evaluation mechanism.

In the 1950s matronly Miss Frances may have taught children effectively on
Ding Dong School
, but not by following a pedagogical master plan. The Captain and Mr. Green Jeans imparted plentiful information in the ’50s and ’60s on
Captain Kangaroo
, but never with a systematic program of instruction and appraisal. The same was true for
Romper Room
, a live-action show for preschoolers that mimicked a kindergarten class. Stations purchased rights to the program’s franchised name and format, launching their own versions with a female teacher-host.
Romper Room
no doubt educated and entertained children, but educational research played no role in its development or long-range planning.

Sesame Street
came along and rewrote the book. Never before had anyone assembled an A-list of advisers to develop a series with stated educational norms and objectives. Never before had anyone viewed a children’s show as a living laboratory, where results would be vigorously and continually tested. Never before in television had anyone thought to commingle writers and social science researchers, a forced marriage that, with surprising ease and good humor, endured and thrived.

After the meeting, Lesser privately admitted to Morrisett that he wasn’t sure he wanted to continue with the project. But Morrisett was certain the educator was the perfect choice to be
Sesame Street
’s founding educational director. “He took some convincing,” Morrisett admitted. “I remember going up to Cambridge and visiting with Gerry and his wife, Stella, one night, trying to convince him that he should take this on. He was the skeptic in the group. He wasn’t sure television could teach.”

Lesser also expressed concerns about Cooney, whose credentials he found lacking, even as he found her an engaging, intelligent contributor. He would not be the only one to raise doubts about Cooney’s lack of experience and academic training, as the time grew near to choose a formal project director. Qualifications aside, there also was the matter of gender. Lesser contributed to an undercurrent of doubt about whether any woman could command enough respect to steer the project, an attitude that nearly eliminated from consideration the very person who had developed the idea.

 

On Tuesday, November 7, 1967, President Johnson was in great good spirits as a marine band played triumphant marches in the marble foyer outside the East Room.
²
It was slightly before noon, two days after the debut of something called the Public Broadcasting Laboratory, the pet project of Fred Friendly.

The November 5 broadcast of
PBL
, the Sunday night television program the laboratory named after itself, was as notable for who didn’t watch as for who did. The opening-night topic was race relations in America, an inflammatory and polarizing issue, to be sure. Sight unseen, ten stations in Georgia, seven in Alabama, and five in South Carolina refused to air the premiere. In Tallahassee, Florida, station officials cited “financial reasons” for pulling PBL. In Cleveland, WVIZ delayed its broadcast of the program until after a mayoral election, fearful that its content might agitate voters. In Athens, Ohio, one broadcaster sent a one-sentence telegram to PBL’s executive director and PBL’s executive producer, Avram (Av) Westin: GOD HELP PBL AND ETV.
³
Altogether, some twenty-nine noncommercial stations refused to air the program. Friendly’s vow to “mobilize the hearts and minds of the nation” had backfired badly. Westin later gave the two-and-a-half-hour broadcast a middling grade of C+, as it fizzled rather than sizzled on the topic of racial divide.
⁴

Hyped as a dramatic departure from previous attempts at public service broadcasting,
PBL
offered 150 minutes of live television that missed the mark by miles and drove disappointed viewers away. What was billed as new seemed tired and stretched out.
New York Times
critic Jack Gould slammed the premiere as a “blight of awkward confusion and dullness . . . a sorry affair in all respects”:
⁵

 

Nevertheless, some three hundred dignitaries had already been invited to the White House to witness the signing of the Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, and there was optimism that the bill institutionalizing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), a nonprofit body charged with invigorating and strengthening noncommercial television, was a milestone in television history. After all, it marked the first time the federal government had authorized funds—$9 million for fiscal 1968—for, among other things, the creation of culturally enriching content for public stations. Though the funds had not yet been appropriated by Congress, Mr. Johnson confidently stated his hope that the money would be made available soon. Then, in praising the quick passage of the bill, the president singled out Douglass Cater, an administration aide who almost single-handedly steered the legislation through Congress.

After LBJ’s remarks, Carnegie Corporation president Alan Pifer rose to pledge $1 million from his organization to the CPB. Its public-private charter allowed for foundation money to supplement the government’s subsidy.

Hands were pumped, backs were slapped, and LBJ enjoyed a brief moment of release before returning to the Oval Office and the weight of a war in Southeast Asia that seemed without end.

 

Over at HEW, Doc Howe persistently battled with school districts in noncompliance with federal desegregation mandates. It was an ongoing struggle, his own little civil war. But amid that confusion, he still managed to make good on his pledge to Morrisett and Cooney, rounding up money from other government agencies to support the preschool TV project. In a memo, Howe appealed to representatives of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Children’s Bureau, the National Institutes of Health, and the National Institute of Children’s Health and Human Development. “It strikes me that this project represents a fine opportunity for government-foundation cooperation to solve a major human problem,” he wrote. “My current thinking is that . . . federal agencies should be prepared to fund at least half . . . with Carnegie and other interested foundations funding the balance.”
⁶

“Howe took upon himself the job of spokesman and convener and negotiator,” said Carnegie’s Barbara Finberg.
⁷

The pieces were starting to fall in place. At a meeting of Carnegie Corporation’s board of trustees held during the second week of January in 1968, approximately two years after the Cooney dinner party, a resolution passed to allocate a million dollars toward a project that was now budgeted at seven million dollars. Lloyd Morrisett had persuaded Carnegie to ante up; it only remained to be seen whether other funders would follow, as he dearly hoped.

 

Howe, meanwhile, had heard that the Ford Foundation had been considering support for an unrelated children’s television project, a show to teach reading skills expressly to inner-city viewers. Word of it had also reached Morrisett and Cooney, who were both baffled by the notion of limiting the audience for such a show to the underprivileged. “What are they going to call it,
The Poor Children’s Hour
?” Cooney asked, only half facetiously.

Howe, the Yankee pragmatist, phoned McGeorge Bundy, the Boston Brahmin, urging him to drop the reading show and back the Carnegie project instead. Howe argued for one concerted effort to assist all economic classes of children, with the indigent as a target audience but with concentric circles of more privileged viewers gaining from it, as well. “Why should we be going in two directions when we should be going in one?” he asked.

Unbeknownst to Howe, Bundy had made quite a study of the Carnegie idea, but only after Champ Ward, the officer charged with bringing forward education initiatives at Ford, had rejected it. A copy of the discarded feasibility study had found its way to Howard Dressner, a quiet and unassuming administrator at Ford. But after reading the document that had been set adrift, he sailed it over to Bundy’s office. “Mac,” he said, “you’ve just got to read this!”

Bundy told Howe he might consider support for the Carnegie study if it was more explicit about using television to address the needy. The foundation was less interested in the experimental aspects of the project, he said, than in its remedial possibilities. If Cooney’s proposal rewrite could demonstrate how the project might benefit the underprivileged, and could clarify how word of it would reach its intended target audience, Ford would likely join the consortium. “Ford wanted it made clear that the disadvantaged child was the bull’s-eye,” Cooney said. “We all agreed totally.”

It sounded good to Howe, who for the third time had exerted his influence on behalf of the preschool television project. His person-to-person plea to Bundy ultimately fused a three-way partnership among the U.S. Office of Education, Carnegie, and Ford.

On January 31, two weeks after Carnegie appropriated the first $1 million, Morrisett received a letter from Ed Meade, informing him that a check for $250,000 would be arriving from Ford within two weeks. The letter also indicated that Ford would consider awarding an additional $1 million if a series of planned curriculum seminars the following summer proved “satisfactory.”

In a marriage of convenience, Morrisett arranged for NET to provide financial management and legal and administrative assistance to the fledgling Children’s Television Workshop. “They needed a home for this project,” said John F. White, then president of NET. “We devised a letter of agreement . . . that said we would provide the legal tent and the fiscal tent under which this could operate. The government and the Ford Foundation had to have a place to which they could give the money. We had it. For our part, the board of NET and I would be helpful in any and every way we could by providing whatever advice and assistance we deemed wise or Joan requested. We would handle and assume responsibility for the expenditure of dollars, but we would not interfere with the development of the program. The CTW was to be a self-enclosed entity under the direction of Joan Cooney and it was so established. One of the reasons it worked so well is because [we learned] from some of the mistakes at PBL.”
⁸

Fresh in everyone’s mind was the fractious mess that Fred Friendly’s PBL had become. Despite an all-star team of production and on-air talent, suffocating interference from two boards of advisers—and a strangulating management structure—doomed the project from the start. In his smart, concise history of public television, author James Day described the dilemma faced by Westin, the respected CBS News producer who was PBL’s executive director and executive producer: “Responsible to not one but two committees—and with an actively kibitzing Ford Foundation bankroller on the sidelines—Westin found himself atop a hydra-headed structure that produced confusion, frustration, and anger and promoted organizational malaise from which PBL never fully recovered.”
⁹

“We learned so much from PBL,” Cooney said. “Everything they did we did differently. Jack White wanted the project at NET, and it could not have been easier. We were independent but we always called [ourselves] semiautonomous. We didn’t want to have NET unhappy.”

Tom Kennedy and Stuart Sucherman finalized details of the arrangement. Kennedy, a finance whiz who had toiled for CBS during the tumultuous reign of Fred Friendly, had been the chief number cruncher for PBL. “I used to control the budgets for the space program and for the elections, among other things,” he said. “I was into very heavy-duty pressure. I remember Fred Friendly calling me into his office one day. He had all of the vice presidents there . . . and was complaining about the pressure I was putting on them on the budgets. He said, ‘You don’t understand, my people are out there in the snow and the rain and they’re trying to get a story, and you and your accountants are home with your loved ones, snuggled up in a warm bed.’ I thought, ‘I have to say something,’ because Fred was a very overbearing kind of guy. I reached into my pocket and took out a piece of paper and pencil. I don’t know where I got the idea, why it jumped into my head, but I wrote my telephone number down, leaned over, and handed it to him. ‘Fred, tell them if they get confused about spending any time of the day or night, give me a call.’ He was speechless.”

Both Sucherman and Kennedy had “fought hard and long to get a concept, at least, of independence within NET, sort of a wholly owned subsidiary concept,” Kennedy recalled. “The NET way of doing things . . . wasn’t necessarily the shrewdest or sharpest. . . . They didn’t manage well and they were a little too political in some areas. [But] Jack White was so anxious to get CTW as part of NET, and so anxious to prove that he was
not
going to interfere, that he gave more independence to the Workshop than he had to PBL. He didn’t want to look like he was being political after PBL.”