Street Gang (3 page)

In those early years there was an Arthurian round table of other remarkable souls—logicians and artists, dreamers and pragmatists, folksingers, storybook illustrators, and bow-tied PhDs—all gathered with a singular purpose. They came together at a star-crossed moment in American life when people of means who lived in comfort chose to dedicate their energies to the less fortunate and the forgotten, the rural poor and the underprivileged of the urban ghettos.
Sesame
succeeded beyond their wildest imaginings and, in doing so, changed the world, one child at a time.

 

These memories, and memories of Henson in particular, washed over Cooney as the service got under way. She was consoled by the knowledge that Henson respected her as he respected no other woman in his professional life. Their affectionate, trusting bond was mixed into the mortar that held together every brick of
Sesame Street
. She smiled as she recalled what Henson had said once about their relationship: “What we had was like a marriage. Lots of valuable time together and no sex.”

Now, for the second time in less than a year, she was burying one of her “originals.” The previous February had seen the death of Raposo, the gregarious, name-dropping, often bewildering talent whose final, tortured years were cursed by cancer. In a twist that seemed almost too much to bear, a television tribute to Raposo was scheduled to air on PBS hours after Henson died. Cooney watched it in bed and cried throughout.

She had also been in tears listening to Jon Stone earlier in the day, speaking about Henson from the pulpit. “I don’t remember exactly how Jim and I met,” said Stone. “It was in nineteen sixty-three or sixty-four. But from the moment we met, we were never very far apart. For me, the early hours of May sixteenth were a living nightmare. One by one, all of us heard the unhearable. And we all must have had the same reaction: This is an epic mistake.”

Stone, overwhelmed, barely made it through his brief remarks. As he walked off, all eyes were on Big Bird, who walked toward a grand piano. Through the years, Stone, a stickler for preparation and prompt rehearsal, had grown impatient with Caroll Spinney, a puppeteer who could easily access his inner child. Spinney, who since Day One of
Sesame Street
had provided voice and movement for sweetly quizzical Big Bird and hypercritical Oscar, was marvelous on his feet. But he had an antipathy for studying his lines, preferring to read them fresh, often after he had already stepped into Bird’s awkward and confining costume.

But on this day, there would be détente between director and performer, and Spinney left no dry eyes with Bird’s aching rendition of “Bein’ Green,” the anthem to self-acceptance written by Raposo.

Just before Big Bird trudged off, he looked skyward and said, “Thank you, Kermit.”

Chapter One

O
n a Sunday morning in December 1965, three-year-old Sarah Morrisett awoke to streams of soft light on her pillow. She pulled herself upright on the bed and blinked. Zipped into pink footie pajamas, Sarah hopped down to the edge of the mattress and stretched across the bedspread to grab her “nockey,” a faded, frayed security blanket she had been dragging around since taking her earliest steps.

Her parents, Lloyd and Mary, slept soundly, only steps away in the master bedroom of the family’s ranch-style home in Irvington, New York. Built along the Hudson, Irvington was a quiet refuge of workaday villagers, shopkeepers, and a smattering of commuters who worked downriver in Manhattan. The Morrisetts had hoped to sleep in that morning, or, with the Almighty’s good graces, stay under the covers until at least 8:00 a.m. An early walker and a chatterbox, Sarah had light brown, slightly wavy hair and a propensity for whirling about in a tutu, repeating jingles she had memorized from television. Like Sarah, it was, her parents thought, adorable.

To be three is to be absorbent, kinetic, inquisitive, exuberant, determined, malleable, and uninhibited. Sarah was a boundlessly energetic entertainer and, at bedtime, an attentive listener who enjoyed storybooks, her blanket close at hand. Because her parents believed in the social benefits of nursery school, Sara attended a private nondenominational one situated in a church hall. Though Sarah was smaller than most of the other children, she thrived in the play-school atmosphere.

Her nimble little hands had no problem popping open the doors to the cabinet-style TV set in the living room, transforming an idle and inert piece of furniture into an electronic theater that came to life at her command.

As she sat cross-legged on the floor there was nothing much to watch on local TV so early on a Sunday, beyond a test pattern. Sarah cupped her hands over her ears to block out the test’s constant shrill tone, transfixed by a picture of an ascetic Indian chief in full headdress on a field of geometric shapes.
¹

Sarah understood that if she waited patiently, the Indian would soon vanish. An unseen announcer would then begin the broadcast day with a recitation of FCC-mandated station-identification drone, followed by the National Anthem, played over a film that panned Mount Rushmore, the Statue of Liberty, and, depending on whether you owned a color or a black-and-white set, either amber waves of grain or amorphous waves of gray.

Rousted from a sound sleep that December morning, Lloyd Morrisett followed the trail of TV noise to find Sarah spellbound in front of the Indian. The clock had not struck seven.

For a moment, Morrisett stood in wonder as Sarah stared blankly at the TV. “It struck me there was something fascinating to Sarah about television,” said her father, an experimental psychologist with a PhD from Yale, much later. “What is a child doing watching the station identification signal? What does this mean?”

Morrisett’s search for meaning in a preschool child’s enthrallment with television would have far-reaching implications for preschool children in America and beyond. In a real sense, one could say there may not have been a
Sesame Street
had Morrisett not been intrigued that morning, watching his preschooler watch television.

A few months later, Morrisett offered the test-pattern story as a conversational gambit during a dinner party held at the Manhattan apartment of Tim and Joan Cooney. The Morrisetts and the Cooneys had been indirectly introduced by Joan’s cousin and Morrisett’s boyhood friend, Julian Ganz, who operated successful furniture stores in Southern California. When the Morrisetts moved East from Berkeley in 1958, Julian had suggested to Morrisett that he look up Joan, but it took him until 1961 to do so. Lloyd and Joan shared the occasional lunch thereafter, and the couples met socially from time to time.

Though the Cooneys were childless urban professionals and the Morrisetts were mortgage-holding suburban parents, the couples had been swept up in the tide of the times and shared the core beliefs of left-leaning Democrats. Disciples of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, they were ardent supporters of the Great Society initiatives of his successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson. They saw the expansion of federally funded social programs as a remedy to the nation’s ills, and they believed that a more racially tolerant and compassionate nation would unite to offer not a handout but a hand up to the dispossessed.

While the Cooneys were vocal reformists and civil-rights activists, the Morrisetts were more quietly committed to issues of social justice. “We would term ourselves
progressive
,” Morrisett said. “Our support was more intellectual than action oriented.”

Manhattan in those days was a bastion of sixties liberalism, so naturally true believers had their own television station, WNDT, Channel Thirteen. Before there was a PBS, and before Thirteen’s call letters were changed to WNET, there was a loose confederation of local channels that offered
educational television
(ETV). In many homes, that term brought to mind programming that was as unimaginative as it was unwatchable, especially the torturous classroom-of-the-air lectures that filled weekday-morning schedules.

At the time Morrisett was telling his test-pattern story, Cooney had become one of the brighter lights at Thirteen, a producer of high-minded, low-rated public service programs and thirty-minute documentaries.

 

Neither Lewis Freedman, the station’s program manager and Joan’s brilliant mentor
²
, nor Anne Bower, Cooney’s producer colleague at Thirteen, had met the Morrisetts before arriving at the Cooneys’ high-rise apartment building at Twenty-first Street and Third Avenue. It was only a half block shy of being considered within the boundaries of sedate, stately Gramercy Park.
³

Joan said that she and her husband—medium-income earners, at best—were literally on the outside looking in. “People always looked at me blankly when I said where we lived, but everyone got it when I would say, ‘It’s a
block
from Gramercy Park,’ which had, and still has, a bit of cachet. Rents were low enough in those days, and apartments plentiful, so even those with low incomes could get a pretty good deal, if it was out of Midtown. We had what seemed like a palace after my having lived in a small one-bedroom on Sixty-sixth Street for eight years. We had two good-size bedrooms and a kitchen in which two people could actually eat at a small table. In the L-shaped dining area was a small table, but there weren’t six chairs to go around it.”

For parties, dinner was served buffet-style. Cooney would set out the heavy handmade sterling silver place settings that came as wedding gifts from friends and relatives. “We ended up eating on trays and tables in the living room,” she said.

In 1966, Cooney was caught up in the still-bubbling American craze for French food, a change in the American palate inspired, in part, by the haute cuisine of Rene Verdon, White House chef during the Kennedy years.
⁴

A second impetus for the sharp rise in interest for—and demystification of—French food could be traced to another New Englander, an oddly affecting, altitudinous matron from Cambridge named Julia Child, who lived a short walk away from JFK’s beloved Harvard campus. After studying at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, Child coauthored the first volume of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking
. The cookbook found its way into hundreds of thousands of home kitchens, including that of Madame Cooney. A second volume was published in 1970.

The French Chef
, Child’s spin-off television program, was made available to viewers nationwide by the good offices of Boston’s pioneering educational station, WGBH. When it debuted in February 1963,
The French Chef
helped to popularize an entire genre of television, the studio-based cooking show built around the talents—and recipes—of a stove-top auteur. The show’s producers strove for such authenticity that they virtually duplicated the kitchen design of Child’s work area, sink, and cabinetry in Cambridge.

According to Morrisett, on the evening of the dinner party, Cooney served up a delectable boeuf bourguignon, beef stew in red wine with bacon, onions, and mushrooms, a traditional French country recipe—which, as it happens, appears on page 315 of the first volume of
Mastering the Art of French Cooking.
Let history note, then, that Julia Child, public television’s grande dame, provided the savory sauce poured on the night
Sesame Street
was conceived.

After dinner, the Cooneys’ guests lingered over coffee and conversation. The topic was TV.

“Lewis Freedman was holding forth on the educational potential of television,” Cooney recalls. “He would dramatize and mesmerize, and I was always in his thrall. He could have been a revival minister, an Elmer Gantry.” Freedman bemoaned the awesome, unfulfilled potential of television, wondering aloud what it might take for the network program lords to strive higher for America’s children. That void was part of the “vast wasteland” famously described by the then FCC chairman Newton N. Minow in a 1961 speech. On the receiving end of that stinging critique was the duly chastised membership of the National Association of Broadcasters. Minow told the assembly, “It used to be said that there were three great influences on a child: home, school, and church. Today there is a fourth great influence, and you, ladies and gentlemen, control it. If parents, teachers, and ministers conducted their responsibilities by following the ratings, children would have a steady diet of ice cream, school holidays, and no Sunday school. What about your responsibilities? There are some fine children’s shows, but they are drowned out in the massive doses of cartoons, violence, and more violence. Must these be your trademarks?”
⁵

The Morrisetts acknowledged the failings of children’s television, but they did allow Sarah to watch certain shows. In their view, the best of the lot was
Captain Kangaroo
, the gently comedic, sweetly soothing, good-hearted early-morning program on CBS.
Captain Kangaroo
was network television’s first sustained attempt to provide preschoolers with consistent quality entertainment and stimulation for growing intellects. It clicked with children who enjoyed picture books, puppets, music, and animation—kids like Sarah.

At one point in the discussion, Morrisett, the psychologist, turned to Joan, the television professional, and asked aloud, “Do you think television could be used to teach young children?” The question hung in the air for several long seconds.

Unbeknownst to everyone in the room but Mary Morrisett, Lloyd had more than a parent’s concern in asking the question. Her husband was on the forefront of a quiet revolution being led by researchers in education and child development and funded by private foundations and the federal government. Morrisett was then a vice president for the Carnegie Corporation, the foundation instituted by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to advance knowledge and spread it globally. In that role Morrisett had helped award between $500,000 and $1 million in grants for programs meant to stimulate the intellect of preschoolers. “Carnegie had begun to take an interest in what you could do to enrich the preschool curriculum, in particular to overcome the disadvantages that poor children and children from minority groups were suffering when they entered school,” Morrisett said. “The results indicated you could teach children a great deal before they entered school in first grade. And the children who had that advantageous education early did better in the early school years. I thought that the evidence was pretty clear.