Street Gang (26 page)

“The timing of these protests . . . was unpredictable, but they often occurred when it appeared the academics were dissecting not only the creative product but the child himself, dividing and classifying his mind and heart into ‘symbolic representation,’ ‘cognitive processes,’ and ‘self concept.’ ”
¹⁸

Lesser recalled “temporary armistices” that lowered participants’ blood pressure: “Academics and educators—presumably the thinkers and analyzers—acknowledged the necessity of intuition in designing creative materials, but argued that adding some elements of analysis in deliberate planning need not smother that necessary intuition. The protesters were skeptical of this compromise, but they also were eager to avoid a stalemate. They agreed that since we were meeting to exchange thoughts about the goals of a children’s television series, we should proceed in the unlikely hope that thought and intuition were not inevitably incompatible.”
¹⁹

 

There was no seating plan for the seminars, so Jon Stone arrived early to each session to sit near Maurice Sendak, the daring author-illustrator of
Where the Wild Things Are
, a book that contained only 338 words but that had spawned a million opinions. Published in 1963, Sendak’s phantasmagorical tale of Max, a rambunctious boy whose mother sends him to bed without his supper, was hailed by some as a bold and fanciful exploration of how a parent can get angry at a child and vice versa. Others fumed that a child’s rage at his mother—upon being punished, Max threatened to eat her—was inappropriate subject matter for a storybook. Child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim, writing in
Ladies’ Home Journal
, criticized Sendak for illuminating the “destructive fantasies in the child.”

“Sendak’s patience with some of the long-winded debates was minimal,” Stone recalled, “and to vent his boredom he drew dozens of X-rated cartoons expressing his opinion of the proceedings. I could watch over his shoulder as he doodled. For the most part his cartoons dealt with basic sex and violence, much as his published writings often do. The drawings were incisive, the perfect scalpel to cut right at the heart of the sometimes unbearably stuffy discussions. My favorite, I guess, he titled ‘One Minute of Educational TV.’ It showed a normal-looking child watching television, then yawning, then sticking his tongue out at the screen. The child grew more and more ferocious, hitting the set with his fist, then attacking it with a hatchet, reducing it to a smoldering pile of wires and plastic, and finally taking out his tiny penis and peeing on the whole thing.”

Sendak’s portfolio of drawings from the seminars included a classic rivalry-inspired sketch of a child pointing a drawn pistol at his mother and baby sibling. A discussion of television’s effects on children yielded a sketch of an agitated child doing a war dance in front of a hideous, grinning woman on TV. The boy’s cat is hanging from the ceiling by its collar. “I have been doodling with ink and watercolor and paper all my life,” Sendak once said. “I recommend doodling as an excellent exercise in stirring up the subconscious, just as you would stir up some mysterious soup, all the while hoping it would taste good.”
²⁰

 

In Gerry Lesser’s book about the developmental years of
Sesame Street,
he wrote that the stresses of the seminars caused many of the participants to have little “nervous breakdowns,” moments when it all got to be too much. Sam Gibbon was among them.

“I remember we were meeting in Boston to talk about kids’ social and affective development, and Chester Pierce, who was a psychiatrist and professor at Harvard, and an absolutely wonderful man who was very important in the education of the staff, unloaded himself one day about what it was like to be a kid in the inner city, what kinds of horrors they lived with and the dangers of life and the dim prospects of ever emerging from it. He was saying the show would have to reflect this reality. It couldn’t be white bread. It had to reflect the reality of these children’s lives.

“I listened to this all morning and the image of the show that was building in my mind was absolutely horrible. I couldn’t imagine how this children’s show could reflect the reality that he was describing and do anything other than destroy the viewer. It just seemed so hopeless and awful, and I said as much. I exploded in this meeting.

“Gerry instantly said, ‘I think we should break for lunch.’ And as we left the meeting room and headed for the elevators I was surrounded by Chet, Gerry Lesser, and a couple of others who sort of were stroking me and saying, ‘There, there. Let’s go get a cup of coffee.’

“I recovered,” Gibbon said.

 

Seminar III, devoted to mathematical and numerical concepts and held at the Waldorf, was well under way when Joan Cooney panicked. “This bearded, prophetic figure in sandals walks in and sits way at the back, ramrod straight, staring straight ahead with no expression on his face,” Cooney recalled. A shiver ran up her spine because she feared that the intruder might be a member of the radical Weathermen, a splinter group of former members of SDS [Students for a Democratic Society]. “The Weathermen were blowing up buildings,” Cooney said, “and some radical kids were trying to make bombs and had recently blown themselves up in a Greenwich Village brownstone basement. Here we are sitting at the Waldorf in a conference room . . . and in comes someone with long hair and wearing an outfit dripping in leather. I remember whispering to Dave Connell, ‘How do we know that man back there isn’t going to throw a bomb up here or toss a hand grenade?’ ”

Connell, always one to keep a cool head, assessed the situation with care. He discreetly turned his head toward the back and realized he recognized the tall, angular man carrying a small purse under his arm. A slight smile curled as he assured Cooney the hippie back there posed no threat.

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

 

Chet Pierce got everyone’s attention at one seminar when he said, “What I want the show to do is prepare my three-year-old daughter to react properly the first time somebody calls her a nigger.”

“We were all shocked and didn’t know quite how to react,” Dave Connell said. “It was a real confrontation. Chet is such a brilliant man, he was doing it to get the issue on the table, to discuss it.”

From the ensuing discussion came the decision that the show would lead by example. There would be an integrated cast, but nothing would be done artificially to draw attention to their diversity and harmony. The actors would regard each other with kindness, respect, and tolerance.

When the seminars ended in August, Connell, Stone, and Gibbon had received a crash course in child development, psychology, and preschool education. “It was a horrendous strain, physically and mentally,” said Connell. “I can still remember, at the end of those things, feeling as though I had just played linebacker for the Chicago Bears. I ached after three days of those meetings. But it was terribly exciting.”
²¹

Of this he was certain: “Three days locked up in a hotel with fifty people, you come out knowing those you want to drink with and those you never want to see again.”
²²

Gibbon described the seminars as a “wonderful mixture of excitements. We worked our asses off getting ready for the meetings, going through the meetings, and digesting them afterward. For me, it was an enormous high.”

Stone recalled it this way: “Weekend after weekend . . . the ideas and convictions filled the room in dizzying confusion. Often I was left behind when the academicians began arguing in their own arcane language. Sometimes I was near falling asleep when the talk droned on in the afternoon July heat. But I tried to learn and absorb and take notes and make sense out of the overwhelming barrage of information that went down,” he said.

“It was a summer of opportunity few in my position are ever afforded. And, I was to find out, it was only the beginning.”

 

In attendance at two of the seminars was Edward L. Palmer, the man who took the longest trip of all to get to
Sesame Street.

“When the Children’s Television Workshop was announced, I was finishing my first year in Oregon working with the state system of higher education in a full-time research lab,” he said. “I was an associate professor there . . . and I thought I was going to do theoretically based research on children and their thinking and learning, and publish, and that was going to be my life.”
²³

By a quirk of fate, he had taken over a USOE grant to study what holds a child’s attention to the television screen. “[The original researcher] was an alcoholic, and he’d spent half the money and hadn’t started the research. The Oregon people [got] him some health care he needed, and they needed to have somebody take this study over. I was happy to take it, but I had to start from scratch because I didn’t like his proposal. At that time there were a lot of locally produced children’s programs, [like]
Jack the Engineer
or
Tilly the Teacher,
or whatever. He was going to do a comparison, pitting two programs against each other, running them at the same time.

“I said, ‘We need just
one
program and we need to find out if we can pull the kids away from it. That’ll be the test.’ ” Palmer devised a diabolical apparatus he called “the distractor.” No one has ever described the architecture of Palmer’s experiment—and the distractor—better than Jim Day, the founding father of San Francisco’s jewel of a public station, KQED:“The distractor was a portable movie screen, set at an angle off to the side of the television receiver, which showed a series of slides with random images appealing to children.

“Using this device, Palmer could determine from moment to moment the young viewers’ attention to the program on the tube. By changing the slide every seven and one-half seconds and observing whether the eye movements of the youngsters were on the screen or the tube, Palmer developed an attention profile of each episode that resembled nothing so much as the chart of stock-market prices in a highly unstable economy—instant evidence of what held the children’s attention and what didn’t.”
²⁴

Around the time Palmer delivered his findings to the USOE, a colleague who knew Joan Cooney arranged to have a copy of the series proposal sent to Oregon.

“I had all the credentials that would have been needed by someone who wanted to find out how much a television series could influence children,” Palmer said. “There was a real natural affinity. I had a background in research and a PhD in measurement and research design.”

A program officer at the USOE recommended Palmer to Cooney, Morrisett, and Lesser, who were in search of a research director for CTW. “They were going to come out and visit my lab in Oregon. Then the Workshop began the series of summer planning seminars, and instead of them coming out, I went to New York City. I met Sam Gibbon and Dave Connell at the first seminar I attended and was impressed that they had been with
Captain Kangaroo
. I had children who watched [it].”

On a second trip to New York, Cooney all but gave Palmer the job, but he still needed to pass muster with Lesser, the advisory board chairman.

“Ed Palmer was the only social scientist in the United States, other than Gerry, who had studied children and television, and he was the right age, in the right stage in his life,” Cooney said. Lesser emerged beaming from an informal interview with Palmer, a session Cooney said lasted five minutes. “You don’t have to look any further,” Lesser said to Cooney. “Trust me, this guy is it.”

Cooney worked out the details. “Joan Cooney was always utterly, utterly forthcoming,” Palmer said. “I took the job on the basis that we’d have to see if the research was going to work. . . . We would have a good faith agreement that if it wasn’t working on either side we would give ample notice and take care of things properly. That was the basis for an academic to jump up with a family, two children, and come from Oregon to New York. I took a two-year leave of absence from my job and it never occurred to me, not even a glimmer, that CTW would become an institution, forevermore and all that. I was sure that an eight-million-dollar grant for children’s television was an anomaly, and I thought,
This is a wonderful once-in-a-lifetime opportunity
.”

Chapter Eleven

In the amazing summer of ’68, two items with special relevance to the story of
Sesame Street
appeared in the
New York Times
.

Item No. 1:
Writing in the Sunday, July 14,
Times Magazine,
critic John Leonard cast a cynical eye toward the Children’s Television Workshop and its supporters. “Any project seducing the philanthropies of two private foundations and a government agency is suspect,” he warned. “Government agencies are permitted to exist . . . only so long as they use hair sprays to attack our various social Medusas.”

Item No. 2:
In the July 31
Times
, television beat reporter-critic Jack Gould covered a press conference at the
Captain Kangaroo
studio at 229 West Fifty-third Street. There, CBS senior vice president Mike Dann announced that the Bank Street College of Education, a graduate school for teachers and guidance counselors, had been enlisted to create a series of ten-minute educational segments for
Kangaroo
. The new “structured” elements, Gould wrote, would “encourage youngsters to learn more about themselves, the outside world, living, eating, and clothing habits, improvement of vocabulary and speech patterns, elementary use of numbers, and the job obligations of family members, policemen, firemen, and doctors.”

Gould continued, “Mr. Dann said that CBS hoped tests might be given to groups of preschool children who had and had not followed
Captain Kangaroo
to determine in what ways the TV hour had contributed to preparation for formal education.”

Bank Street president Dr. John H. Neimeyer and Bob Keeshan were asked if “the innovations for
Captain Kangaroo
did not bear a marked resemblance to the aspirations of the recently announced Children’s Television Workshop. Dr. Neimeyer indicated his discussions with CBS had preceded announcement of the Workshop plans. Mr. Keeshan noted that several members of his production group had joined the Workshop staff. He said if time conflicts could be avoided, he doubted if there could be too much TV programming expressly intended for preschoolers.”