Street Gang (4 page)

“But one of the problems was that despite the money, [Carnegie was] only reaching a few hundred children. The problem was far greater than we were able to deal with on an experimental basis. There was really no mechanism for spreading this kind of activity. There was a dissonance, if you will, between the goals we were trying to achieve and the [distribution] mechanisms available.”

In short, there were some powerful new strategies emerging to help disadvantaged children arrive at the school door better prepared for kindergarten and first grade, but too few means available to distribute and apply them. Listening to Freedman, Morrisett realized that perhaps television might provide an ideal electronic delivery system for some of these ideas.

If Morrisett had been inspired by Freedman, so, too, did Cooney get knocked back a bit listening to Morrisett go on about Carnegie’s commitment to help children learn more. What he did not know is that Cooney had produced
A Chance at the Beginning,
a documentary for Channel Thirteen about an intervention experiment in Harlem for at-risk preschoolers. Cooney was already well versed in the ideas that had led to Head Start, the federal program initiated in 1965 that helped communities meet the needs of disadvantaged children. Its supporters believed the tyranny of America’s poverty cycle could be broken if the emotional, social, health, nutritional, and psychological needs of poor children could be met.
⁶

Before good nights were exchanged, the fates of Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett had become entwined like strands of DNA. A professional relationship that spanned five decades started with Morrisett’s ostensibly simple question, “Do you think television could be used to teach young children?”

“I don’t know,” Cooney replied, “but I’d like to talk about it.”

Within a week, Morrisett had invited Freedman and Cooney to Carnegie to do just that.

Chapter Two

A
s autumn turned to winter in 1929, a direful shadow crossed the continent, like biblical darkness falling upon Egypt. Indeed, it was as if God Almighty had unleashed an eleventh plague, one of pessimism and despair.

In early December, President Herbert Hoover announced on radio that the worst of the financial crisis was over, but Sylvan Ganz knew too much about economics—and human nature—to believe it. As executive vice president of the First National Bank of Arizona, Ganz was obliged to assume an air of calm and confidence, and his upbeat veneer never faltered at work. But at night, his thoughts turned to what measures he might need to take to protect the bank should the nation’s economy reach a danger point.

In the final weeks of 1929, the Ganz household was going through diapers at an astonishing rate. Three children had been born in a thirty-nine-month span to Ganz’s wife, Pauline. Baby Joan arrived on November 30, a month and a day after Black Tuesday, the third and most disastrous day of record losses on Wall Street. Across the nation, billions in assets had been wiped out in less than a week.

The new sibling joined older brother Emil Paul, named for his grandfather and mother, and older sister Sylvia Rose, named for her father and maternal grandmother. “By the time I came along, Mother had run out of steam—and names,” Joan Ganz Cooney explained years later. “The joke in our family was they barely had time to name me at all, and it was after no one, except, possibly, Joan Crawford.”

While Cooney’s father had not amassed the wealth of some of his neighbors, he was well off, and well thought of, a civic-minded, progressive commercial banker following in the path of his father, Emil Ganz, one of the first mayors of Phoenix. Sylvan attended college, but shortly before graduation, his mother died and he failed to complete his finals and earn a degree. But as the son of a city father, Ganz was still considered one of the town’s more prominent bachelors when he met dark-haired, dark-eyed Pauline. He was thirty-five; she twenty-two. Pauline had moved as a teen from Jackson, Michigan, to Arizona along with her sister and mother. Her father had been killed in a train wreck when she was two, and her mother had to take in sewing to make ends meet. After graduating from secretarial school, Pauline headed west with her family, “for the warmer weather and, I suspect, the adventure,” Cooney said.

After a five-year courtship, Pauline and Sylvan finally made it to the altar, but not easily. She wanted to be married in the church, but to do so, Sylvan had to promise their children would be raised Roman Catholic. Though Ganz was agnostic, he feared taking vows from a priest would be seen as a denial of his Jewish roots. Despite his indifference to the religious tenets and obligations of Judaism, Ganz remained culturally identified with his heritage. But ultimately he relented, “because [marriage to Pauline] just wasn’t going to happen without it,” Cooney said. “He was by then forty, or close to it, and he desperately wanted to get married and have children, and he’d been in love with this woman for five years.”

To be sure, there were Jews among the earliest settlers of Phoenix, not the least of whom was papa Emil, an immigrant tailor from Walldorf, Germany. Emil Ganz, a nonpracticing Jew and avowed atheist, came to the United States in 1858 or 1859. After stops in New York and Philadelphia, he established his trade in the unlikely locale of Cedartown, Georgia. Family speculation has it that Georgia reminded him—and a smattering of other German-Jewish settlers—of the “bucolic scenes from which they had come in Germany,” Cooney said.

Convinced the South would prevail in the Civil War, Emil joined the Confederate army, served with distinction, and was wounded twice. His company participated in the battles of Antietam, Gettysburg, Fredericksburg, and the defense of Richmond. He was held for seven months at a notorious federal prison in Elmira, New York, but when the war ended, he signed a loyalty oath to the United States and was released. Emil headed west, with stops in Quincy, Illinois; Kansas City, Missouri; and Las Animas, Colorado, before settling in Arizona in the mid-1870s. After operating hotels in Prescott and Phoenix, he became bank president at the National Bank of Arizona (which later became First National) and served three mayoral terms.

Emil was a charter member of the Phoenix Country Club and enjoyed privileges there that were denied succeeding generations of Jews. It was almost as if the gates of the club briefly swung open for certain old-line families with German-Jewish bloodlines, only to close rapidly thereafter. Also making it through the country-club portal were the wealthy owners of a family-owned Phoenix department store, M. Goldwater & Sons—one of those sons being Barry Goldwater, the grandchild of Jewish immigrants from Poland. Raised in the Episcopalian tradition of his mother, Goldwater inherited the family business, attained wealth and stature, and went on to serve five terms in the United States Senate.

“The pioneering Jews of Phoenix were English and German, and they were treated as a separate class by the non-Jews,” Cooney said. “My father
hated
that country club. It made him uncomfortable on almost every level. It let the Goldwaters and Ganzes in, but Eastern European Jews who had accents from the old country? I don’t know if they even applied to get in, but if they had, they would not have been admitted. And these were my father’s friends.” Sylvan kept up his membership in the club, despite his objections to its tacit discriminatory policies. “My father didn’t want to deprive his children of using the club, so he would occasionally go to dinner there, but he would be uncomfortable.”

Sylvan and Pauline owned a pale pink one-story home on East Verde Lane, just a ten-minute walk from the country club. It had three bedrooms, a large high-ceilinged living room, a dining room, a family room, and a bedroom and bath for Eunice Turner, a black housekeeper the children called Turner.

In 1932, when Joan was three, a family crisis erupted. Sylvan was seeking buyers for First National, a difficult assignment during a national epidemic of bank failures. “He became extremely worried that the stock-holders would be harmed if he couldn’t get a sale,” Cooney said, “and he began drinking heavily, using alcohol as self-medication the way people use Xanax or Valium today.”

Sylvan and Pauline booked passage on an ocean liner, in the hope that time at sea would provide rest and relief from the pressure. But it was to no avail, as Sylvan began to unravel further onboard. “He had started to say some things that were off-kilter,” Cooney said, “and while on the cruise, he became a little paranoid, convinced that one of the passengers was a detective. That’s when my mother knew she’d better get him to a doctor.”

Sylvan was having a nervous breakdown, a crushing case of depression. He needed uninterrupted rest, therapy, and a clean break from alcohol. “My mother moved all of us [temporarily] to California, where there was good psychiatric help,” Cooney said. For Joan, leaving Phoenix meant leaving Turner, whom she adored. “With three children, each a year and a half apart, my mother really didn’t have time to give to everybody . . . and a very demanding husband,” Cooney said. “So it was Turner who taught me how to tie my shoes and the ABCs. She gave me the love that I really wanted. Family lore has it that I always said ‘bye-bye’ to my mother when she would go out, but I would just sob when it was Turner’s day off. I’d go wandering back to her room, find her gone, and just throw a total tantrum.”

Under proper care, Sylvan recovered within three months and was sent home with a stern recommendation: “The doctor said, ‘I think you’d better drink less,’ and Pop said, ‘Well, I’ll just stop’—and he did,” Cooney said. “Alcohol was never a problem again.”

Poverty was pandemic in the early 1930s, and a steady stream of homeless, jobless, hungry men arrived in Phoenix seeking work, their possessions balled in burlap and slung over a shoulder. “Arizona was right in the middle of the national malaise,” said David Tatum, a curator with the Arizona Historical Society.
¹
“Nobody was insulated from it. Farm workers from the Old South, Texas and Oklahoma looking for work in the cotton fields, along with immigrants from Mexico.” And Pauline Ganz always tried to help those left unemployed by the Depression when they came to her door, often with a sandwich and a dollar bill.

Pauline’s compassion was an expression of her living faith. Though later in life that faith would be tested severely, Christian teaching guided her through the Depression, and she assisted the less fortunate with an open heart. Her little girl, whom she favored and gave the nickname Ganzy-Bug, never forgot the small kindnesses dispensed by her devout Irish-Catholic mother.

The baby of the family, the most independent and adventurous of the three Ganz siblings, would venture far from Arizona during her long, fruitful, and celebrated public life. The specter of a household dogged by depression—and, later, cancer—informed Joan Ganz Cooney’s own painful private life and prepared her for a string of setbacks that might have felled a lesser person.

 

In the summers of Joan Ganz’s early elementary school years, after her father’s recovery from his breakdown, the family retreated to the Hassayampa Mountain Club near Prescott, elevation 5,347 feet. That “cabin,” as it was called, was set within a landscape of boulder outcroppings and ponderosa pines. It had a two-story living room with a balcony, Indian rugs, handmade rustic furniture, and a deck overlooking the Prescott National Forest. With the outbreak of World War II and the imposition of gasoline rationing, however, the Ganzes sold the summer home. That came as an especially great disappointment to Joan, for the cabin was, as she recalled, “sheer heaven” for an inquisitive, serious beanpole who was frequently sick with minor ailments.

“I was not a happy child,” she said. “I was always trying to keep up with my brother and sister, and I never could be quite as good as they were. So I became a student, which they weren’t. And I read a lot, which they didn’t.” She devoured
Anne of Green Gables
,
Gone With the Wind
(three times), and the Nancy Drew mystery series. “I would come home from school and go into a corner with a book. My mother was forever trying to get me to go outside.” Cooney once told
Life
magazine
²
that her mother “was always trying to fatten me up. In those days, people thought being thin meant being unwell, though I was perfectly healthy. Her idea was to give me a good lunch and drive me back to school.”

Joan was, in large measure, bookish and opinionated, “high-strung, but not nerdy. I was always reading and arguing about ideas,” she said, “trying to find answers and forever being slapped down.” She even took on the priests at school, questioning the catechism. “The priests were Jesuits, and they understood that I was just intellectually curious,” she told a
People
magazine interviewer in 1977. “If there was an adult conversation, I moved right into the center of it.” But at home, her father was unaccustomed to being challenged by a child and he was not amused.
³

Sylvan reacted predictably: “It drove my father crazy because he didn’t like intellectual women. Here was this peanut telling him he was wrong and showing less respect than his two older children. I didn’t realize I sounded insubordinate. I saw myself as his peer, his friend.”
⁴
There were times when Joan was put in her place. “If I argued with or contradicted my father, he often became enraged, leaving me hurt and puzzled.”

Cooney recalled afternoons in 1938 and 1939 when her family was joined for Sunday dinner by pilot trainees from the British Royal Air Force, young men who were being readied for combat at Army Air Corps bases in Arizona. After the United States entered the war, American pilots would come for dinner, as well. “Our town was filled with armed services people,” Cooney said. “War was everywhere. We listened to every Churchill speech on the radio, then every speech of Roosevelt’s. My father was the neighborhood air-raid warden, and he had to go out every night and make sure all the blinds were down because Phoenix was thought to be a target with so many air force training fields around us. When I think about that period, World War II was the overriding event that turned me, and I suspect others, outward.”