Sunny Days

The Children's Television Revolution That Changed America

David Kamp

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781501137822
• Topic: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Subtopic: Fernsehgeschichte & -kritik

One of the "Best Books" of the year from The Smithsonian, The Washington Independent Review, and more! From bestselling writer David Kamp, the "fun, fascinating, and surprisingly touching, " ( People ) behind-the-scenes story of the cultural heroes who created the beloved children's TV programs Sesame Street, The Electric Company, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Free to Be…You and Me, and Schoolhouse Rock! —which transformed American childhood for the better, teaching kids about diversity, the ABCs, and feminism through a fun, funky 1970s lens. With a foreword by Questlove. In 1970, on a soundstage on Manhattan's Upper West Side, a group of men, women, and Muppets of various ages and colors worked doggedly to finish the first season of a children's TV program that was not yet assured a second season: Sesame Street. They were conducting an experiment to see if television could be used to better prepare disadvantaged preschoolers for kindergarten. What they didn't know then was that they were starting a cultural revolution that would affect all American kids.In Sunny Days, bestselling author David Kamp captures the unique political and social moment that gave us not only Sesame Street, but also Fred Rogers's gentle yet brave Mister Rogers' Neighborhood; Marlo Thomas's unabashed gender politics primer Free to Be…You and Me; Schoolhouse Rock!, an infectious series of educational shorts dreamed up by Madison Ave admen; and more, including The Electric Company and ZOOM. It was a unique time when an uncommon number of media professionals and thought leaders leveraged their influence to help children learn—and, just as notably, a time of unprecedented buy-in from American parents." Sunny Days is full of such nostalgic jolts…it makes the era a pleasure to revisit" ( The Wall Street Journal ) and captures a wondrous period in the US when a determined few proved that, with persistence and effort, they could change the lives of millions. It is "a lively and bewitching recounting of a particularly ripe period in television and cultural history" ( The New York Times Book Review ) and, as the Los Angeles Times notes, "a sublime book about a variety of creative people coming together not in the pursuit of fame or money, but to enrich the lives of children."

PART

How to Get, How to Get to…

CHAPTER

Putting Down Roots in the Vast Wasteland

In the spring of 1961, Newton Minow, the newly appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, was gearing up to deliver the keynote speech at the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters—addressing the very people he was charged with regulating. He had a lot to say about the state of television, both in a professional capacity and as the father of three young girls growing up in a TV-saturated age.

“My big interest was, from the beginning, children,” he later said. “Because I realized that children were spending more time with television than in school. I felt that television was not living up to its potential for kids.”

The thirty-five-year-old Minow, a lawyer from Chicago, had come to the attention of the country’s forty-three-year-old president, John F. Kennedy, through his friendship with the president’s kid brother and attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy—all of them the parents of young children. RFK and Minow, born two months apart, had become close while working on Adlai Stevenson’s 1956 campaign for president against Dwight Eisenhower. Even back then, television had been a frequent topic of conversation between the two men. “When I was a child,” the younger Kennedy told Minow, “there were three great influences on children: the home, the school, and the Church. Now I see in my home a fourth great influence: television.”

Indeed, the speed with which TV was transforming America was troubling to the country’s intelligentsia. In 1946, only about eight thousand homes had television sets. By 1961, that number had surged to 47 million, accounting for 90 percent of all U.S. homes. The average American was watching six hours of TV a day.

Minow was no TV prude. To the contrary, he was a dedicated consumer of it, and, in his capacity as an attorney, represented one of the medium’s earliest national stars, Burr Tillstrom, the creative mastermind behind the Chicago-based breakout hit Kukla, Fran and Ollie. (Though it aired at 6 p.m. and featured puppets, Tillstrom’s wry, mostly improvised show was not expressly aimed at young children. Among its devoted fans was a gangly teenager in Maryland named Jim Henson.) But the FCC job was an opportunity for Minow to address TV’s growing incursion into American life, and to make sure it didn’t reach a crisis point.

While writing the speech he was to deliver before the NAB, Minow leaned on another of his friends, a journalist named John Bartlow Martin, for help. Martin happened to be at work on a series of articles for the Saturday Evening Post about the state of commercial television. As part of his series, Martin had pulled an immersion stunt, watching NBC’s Chicago affiliate, WNBQ, for twenty straight hours. The onslaught of soap operas, game shows, and ads proved stultifying to Martin, leaving him cranky, disillusioned, and resistant to the bandleader Mitch Miller’s importunings to sing “By the Light of the Silvery Moon” on the program Sing Along with Mitch. (“The author did not join him,” Martin dryly noted.)

To Minow, Martin suggested that the FCC chairman refer to television, in his speech, as a “vast wasteland of junk.”

The speech that Minow actually delivered to the broadcasters was gentler and more complimentary. He began with some disarming self-deprecation, telling his audience, “I was not picked for this job because I regard myself as the fastest draw on the New Frontier.” He proclaimed that he was a fan of The Twilight Zone and CBS Reports and promised, “I am in Washington to help broadcasting, not to harm it; to strengthen it, not weaken it; to reward it, not to punish it; to encourage it, not threaten it; and to stimulate it, not censor it. Above all, I am here to uphold and protect the public interest.”

But Minow, echoing Martin, noted that, at its worst, TV was “a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, Western bad men, Western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons.” This version of television, he said, was indeed a “vast wasteland.”

Nevertheless, Minow believed in TV’s potential to be better, and, in his speech, he specifically cited children’s television as an area ripe for reinvention. “Is there no room on television to teach, to inform, to uplift, to stretch, to enlarge the capacities of our children?” he asked. “Is there no room for programs deepening their understanding of children in other lands? Is there no room for a children’s news show explaining something to them about the world at their level of understanding?”

Minow thought his speech went well. If there was any phrase in it that he expected to resonate with his audience, it was “the public interest.” But, to his surprise, the phrase that the broadcasters fixated upon was “vast wasteland”—a term that would enter the lexicon even though he never intended for it to describe the whole of the television landscape. For this coinage, adapted from Martin’s words, Minow received not only blowback from the industry—Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of the sitcom Gilligan’s Island, named the show’s shipwrecked charter boat the SS Minnow as payback—but also the unwelcome embrace of Luddites and snobs, who, for years thereafter, would proudly announce to him, upon discovering who he was, that they didn’t even own TV sets.

“To which I would say, ‘Well, you’re missing something very important in your life,’ ” Minow said.

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One person who clearly did get the gist of what Minow was trying to say was Joan Ganz. She had moved to New York from her native Phoenix, Arizona, in 1953, when she was twenty-three years old, to pursue a career in television: a still-novel path, especially for a woman. The daughter of a Jewish banker and a Catholic homemaker, Ganz was raised Catholic in a well-to-do household. She harbored dreams of becoming an actress but, facing her father’s disapproval, instead took a degree in education at the University of Arizona. Fresh out of college, Ganz became inspired by the teachings of the Christophers, a Catholic group whose progressive leader, Father James Keller, encouraged not only civic engagement but also the embrace of mass media as a means of furthering humanitarian goals. For a time, Keller himself was a TV personality, hosting a syndicated show called The Christophers (later renamed Christopher Closeup), a benignly low-key, brimstone-free interview program.

In New York, Ganz found a niche as a TV publicist, one of the few options then available to women in the industry. Television in the fifties abounded with highbrow anthology drama series, among them Playhouse 90, Cavalcade of America, and the one that Ganz worked for, CBS’s The United States Steel Hour. It was a good job, though it did little to fulfill her interests in social activism, and it wasn’t particularly challenging: Ganz tended to finish up her Steel Hour work in half the time she was allotted.

Casting about for a way to fill out her schedule and engage herself politically, Ganz volunteered to arrange live events—debates, talks, and the like—for William Phillips, the cofounder of the leftist quarterly the Partisan Review. In so doing, she fell in with the city’s notoriously argumentative crowd of public intellectuals and literati, among them Lionel and Diana Trilling, Norman Podhoretz, and Norman Mailer.

It was heady stuff for Ganz, if occasionally humiliating. Like the snobs whom Minow encountered, this group had nothing but contempt for the medium that she so believed in. “I became a very looked-down-upon person because not only was I in television but publicity of television,” she said. “You can’t imagine a lower status among the Partisan Review crowd. But they had to put up with me because of William Phillips wanting me to help him put on fundraisers. I got to know everybody. I loved Lionel Trilling. Diana was a bitch.”

One of the few in the group with whom she developed a genuine friendship was, of all people, Mailer, America’s foremost pugilistic man of letters. Mailer embraced Ganz as a platonic confidante, someone he counted on to calm him down in his dark moments. She was, he joked, his “unpaid psychiatrist.” Ganz, for her part, found Mailer “very weird and scary, but irresistible.”

In 1960, this friendship came close to costing Ganz—and, by extension, the children of the United States—dearly. In the wee hours of November 20, her phone began to ring. “And I knew exactly who would be calling,” Ganz said, “because it was the only person who ever called me at four in the morning. I didn’t answer it.”

Her restraint proved wise. In Greenwich Village, as a party at their home was winding down, an inebriated Mailer had stabbed his wife, Adele Morales, with a penknife. Though Morales would recover physically and choose not to press charges against her husband, the stabbing became a lurid press sensation. Had Ganz taken Mailer’s call, she believes, her life might have unfolded differently. “He would have come to me, and I would have had to take him to the police station,” she said. “My name probably would have been associated with it. I never would have been chosen to lead Sesame Street.”

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Fortunately, bad press did not become an issue for Ganz. Indeed, in a decade’s time, when she was married and known as Joan Ganz Cooney, she acquired the nickname “Saint Joan” for her tireless, pioneering work in reinventing children’s television. But she wasn’t the field’s only saint. Sesame Street was destined to be thought of in tandem with, and occasionally in opposition to, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, the other revolutionary children’s program to emerge in the late 1960s. Together, the shows constituted a kind of Big Bang, abruptly shaking up the TV landscape and shaping the sensibilities of at least two generations.

Fred Rogers, as it happened, overlapped with Ganz during her early days in New York City, though the two did not know each other. In some respects, they were quite similar: young altruists who didn’t like much of what they saw on TV but were nonetheless excited by the medium’s potential. Like Ganz, Rogers had moved to the big city to work in television out of a sense of calling as much as career. In Rogers’s case, the religious overtones were even more explicit—he put off attending divinity school in his native western Pennsylvania to give TV a try, going to work for CBS’s chief competitor, NBC.

Rogers had attended Dartmouth College for two years before transferring to Rollins College in central Florida, where he majored in music. Home for spring break during his senior year, in 1951, Rogers had his first chance to watch television at length. Like John Bartlow Martin, he was appalled by most of its content, which he found lamentable. But he was fascinated by TV and announced to his parents that he was going to take some time after graduation to live in New York and give the field a try. They were flummoxed by this decision, noting to their son that he knew little about television. “Yes, I know,” Rogers later recalled telling them, “but I’ve seen enough to think that this is something I should do in the world before I go to the cloisters again.”

A child of even greater privilege than Ganz, Rogers grew up as a rich kid in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, a factory town where his parents owned the factories. His mother, Nancy McFeely Rogers, came from a family that had made its fortune in bricks; his father, James Hillis Rogers, was an industrialist who owned a die-casting company and assumed the management of his wife’s family’s firm. His parents were compassionate capitalists, philanthropic and devoted to the arts. Fred grew up a de facto only child, alone until his parents adopted his sister, Nancy Elaine, when he was eleven.

The original expectation had been that Fred would follow in his father’s footsteps and take over the family business. But Rogers, asthmatic as a young child and therefore compelled to spend a lot of time indoors, developed a more contemplative, ministerial disposition. His parents, observant Presbyterians, did not object to his seminarian path.

The TV thing, however, was a curveball. His parents had connections at NBC, since one of Nancy’s forebears had been an original investor in RCA, the parent company of the network at the time of its founding. At NBC, Fred started out as a gofer and ascended to floor-manager positions on the network’s music programs, which abounded in those pre-rock days. He worked on the popular-song showcases Your Hit Parade and The Kate Smith Hour, and the classical-music-oriented NBC Opera Theatre and The Voice of Firestone. Among his tasks for the latter, he recalled, was “hiring handsome but mute men for Risë Stevens”—an acclaimed mezzo-soprano—“to smile at while she sang.”

With his music background and affable, can-do manner, Rogers proved an adept TV hand, and NBC was happy to have him. He gave little consideration to getting involved in children’s television, though, until he was asked to. For NBC’s local New York affiliate, WNBT, he was assigned to work on The Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour, a Sunday-morning variety show that had migrated to television from radio, sponsored by the then thriving Automat chain. The program was devoted entirely to child performers, but Rogers, far from being charmed, was disturbed by the hustling, pushy stage parents and prematurely poised kids. “I think it was then,” he later said, “that I decided that children should never entertain children.”

He was more disturbed still by Pinky Lee and Soupy Sales, comedians who broke through with programs for kids in the midfifties, on NBC and ABC, respectively. In part, it was a simple clash of sensibilities—Lee (né Pincus Leff), a manic, baggy-pants refugee from vaudeville, and Sales (né Milton Supman), a young, urbane Jewish hipster, were the antithesis of wholesome, Presbyterian Fred. Rogers was especially put off by the violence, as he perceived it, of their signature schticks: in Lee’s case, squirting his adversaries in the face with seltzer water, and in Sales’s case, receiving a pie in his face. Some kids might have laughed, but others, sharing Rogers’s childhood sensitivity, to which he still had ready access as an adult, might have found the wocka-wocka antics downright frightening.

Suffice it to say, the young teetotal Fred Rogers did not travel in the same circles as Joan Ganz. Though he and his new wife, Joanne, a fellow Rollins alum and a trained concert pianist, would not become parents until 1959, children were already on Fred’s mind in the early 1950s, intuitively a part of his ministerial calling. “I don’t know why,” he remembered years later, “but practically every weekend while I was in New York, I took time off to visit day-care centers, orphanages, schools. It was probably some sort of a need to understand who I had been as well as who these kids are.” As for children’s television, Rogers came to believe that it represented the very worst of what his chosen medium had to offer—but, at the same time, it presented him with an opp...