Street Gang (36 page)

 

Quoted elsewhere, Spock predicted that such “well-conceived” television would result in “better-trained citizens, fewer unemployables in the next generation, fewer people on welfare, and smaller jail populations.” This was high praise indeed from the man who, at the time, was revered as the nation’s baby doctor.

The show was not just a boon to kids and parents, but also a cultural triumph. For the programs aired in its inaugural season,
Sesame Street
won a Peabody Award, three Emmys, and the top honor from the Prix Jeunesse Foundation, an international body formed in 1964 to promote excellence in children’s television.

Even the president sent a fan letter.
⁶

 

Cooney was inundated with attention. “The press requests were endless,” she said. “We were going into 1970 and the women’s movement was becoming a very big thing in America. There were very few women to make a fuss about. . . . No one said, ‘Why are they making so much of her?’ Even here, the men who resented each other getting press had less resentment of me getting press. I begged Bob Hatch to get the press to interview anybody but me, and the press wouldn’t. So I frequently insisted that David Connell sit with me, so that he would be quoted in the article, even if it was a profile of me. But there was no way to get Gerry [Lesser] involved, no reporter cared about the academic adviser. It was simpler to focus on ‘Saint Joan,’ and that became a way of doing the story. We had
Look
magazine trailing me around, going to hearings with me.”

Working his Washington connections, Bob Hatch had arranged for Cooney to testify before Congressional hearings on children and television even before
Sesame Street
debuted. “We were a Washington presence,” Cooney said.

At one education conference held in D.C., Cooney shared a platform with Bob Keeshan. He exhorted the audience to “back her one hundred percent,” but he couldn’t resist getting in a little dig. “I know she has the best possible staff to do the job,” he said. “She stole them all from me.”

“Keeshan used to drive me crazy,” Cooney recalled. “He greatly resented
Sesame Street
. And it was because of him I was determined to have multiple hosts on the show. I never wanted anyone to own it or be able to blackmail me for higher wages. That whole concept of how we ran things must have outraged him.”

 

Though
Sesame Street
was almost universally greeted with huzzahs, even before Thanksgiving feasts were served that November certain educators who were upholders of traditional classroom methods were finding aspects of the series objectionable or even threatening. Kindergarten teachers began to wonder of what use their time-tested lesson plans would be if students arrived in the fall having already mastered the alphabet, counting, sorting, identifying geometric shapes, and knowing the difference between near and far, around and over, under and through.

In 1970, Loretta Long told a reporter about an encounter she’d had while addressing a group at a Massachusetts university. “Loretta described one man, presumably an educator, who asked her what he was supposed to do with his lesson plans if children started coming to school already knowing letters and numbers. [She] told him, ‘If you feel threatened, I think you need more creative schools of education. I would hate to see a teacher view
Sesame Street
as a threat or an enemy rather than an ally.’ ”
⁷

Thoughtful criticism of
Sesame Street
also began to bubble up from that segment of media theorists and cultural critics that was renowned for its narrow-eyed wariness of television.
Sesame Street
’s rapid pace and high entertainment quotient were roundly scrutinized. In his landmark 1985 book
Amusing Ourselves to Death,
Neil Postman argued that parents embraced
Sesame Street
because it “relieved them of their responsibility to teach their children to read.” The series, in his eyes, provided children a questionable introduction to an amusement-obsessed culture and undermined American education.

That
Sesame Street
was subject to such serious review indicated that the project had ascended to a level of importance not usually associated with children’s television. It made
Sesame Street
a topic worthy of debate—something that could not be said for, say,
Huckleberry Hound
.

“I thought there would be mixed reaction,” Cooney said. “While I felt that the TV critics would understand what we were trying to do, I was very concerned that teachers and educators would not. The conservative early-childhood people didn’t like what we’re doing at all.”
⁸

Preschool authority Carl Bereiter of the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, in Toronto, whom Joan Cooney had consulted while researching the original feasibility study, weighed in on the pages of the
Wall Street Journal
the morning after the premiere. He complained that what he had seen of
Sesame Street
was too removed from “structured” teaching and warned that the show could flop because “it’s based entirely on audience appeal and is not really teaching anything in particular.”
⁹

There were other dissenting voices:

 

CTW corporate response to such criticism was measured and non-confrontational, a reflection of a style preferred by Cooney and her public relations adviser, Hatch. For pragmatic purposes, it was best to be reasonable. “First, you can’t be saintly all of the time and maintain the interest of the press,” Hatch said. “Second, if somebody has something legitimate to say—or something semilegitimate . . . that may be contrary—it gives you and others something to chew on and rebut.”

More complicated was how to respond to an outright broadcast ban of
Sesame Street
in Mississippi, where members of the newly convened State Commission for Educational Television were opposed to the show’s integrated cast. During the first week in May 1970, word leaked out of the state capitol in Jackson that the five-member commission had voted 3 to 2 to block the show from airing on the state’s educational TV system. One commissioner, granted anonymity by the
New York Times
, said, “Mississippi was not yet ready” for a program in which black, Latino, and white children played together.
¹⁵
A second commissioner, quoted anonymously in the
Chicago Sun-Times,
¹⁶
said the state “had enough problems to face up to without adding to them.”

Speaking on the record, Joan Ganz Cooney called the ban “a tragedy for both the white and black children of Mississippi.”
¹⁷

The Mississippi commission ultimately reversed its decision, but only after the initial ban had made national news.

 

As the waves of attention washed over
Sesame Street
, a CBS media relations team attempted to pump up some publicity for Bob Keeshan’s venerable morning program, which had begun to seem stodgy and tortoise-slow compared to the new show that followed it at nine in many markets. In May, publicists scheduled an hour-long closed-circuit event for TV critics and network affiliates during which Keeshan reaffirmed
Captain Kangaroo
’s philosophy and took questions from Peggy Hudson, television editor of
Scholastic
magazine. When asked whether the success of
Sesame Street
had affected his show, Keeshan said it had not and that the shows were not in competition. He was quick to reiterate, however, that its cast notwithstanding, almost all of
Sesame Street
’s creative talent had trained under him. “We like to say there’s over fifteen years of
Captain Kangaroo
behind
Sesame Street
.”
¹⁸

Writing in the
Indianapolis News
, critic Richard K. Shull responded with a sympathetic column on May 7. “It’s no secret [Keeshan’s] feelings have been hurt . . . by the adultation and gushing over
Sesame Street
,” he wrote, adding, “this year the nation has tended to forget who pioneered the field of intelligent programming for children.”

Sesame Street
, Shull continued, “operates out of a privileged, sheltered position, with multi-million-dollar grants to assure that it isn’t tainted by advertising. The Captain made his mark the hard way, working within the hard-sell work of commercialism.”

On August 21, 1970, Clarence Petersen of the
Chicago Tribune
offered his take on the virtues of
Captain Kangaroo
, in which Keeshan was quoted in a put-down of the competition. “When someone writes a history of television, there should be a chapter on
Sesame Street
as the classic case of how to promote and publicize a television show.”

 

Joan Cooney used to quote a saying credited to Sophie Tucker: “‘I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and rich is better.’ I eventually formulated an aphorism of my own a couple of years after we’d been on the air: ‘I’ve known success and I’ve know failure, but success is better . . .
in some respects
.’

“I said ‘
some
respects’ because your telephone never stops ringing. Every toy manufacturer in the world is after you. All the power people in the commercial world are trying to figure out how to cash in. ‘How do we take this over and squeeze it to death for all the money that’s in it now? And then
,
throw them out [because] they don’t know what they’re doing.’ The nonprofit world, public television, had never known this kind of success, with this kind of potential for moneymaking. That’s what the commercial world saw.”

And yet, getting
Sesame Street
on the air was no guarantee it would
stay
on the air. For there to be sufficient funding for a season two, and for the core staff of CTW to remain employed, cofounders Cooney and Morrisett would need to move swiftly. “As soon as we got on the air, we had to think about survival,” Cooney said.

Morrisett was quick to remind Cooney that foundations like Ford and Carnegie exist to seed projects, not sustain them. Grants are like sun showers nurturing tiny shoots. As soon as projects take root and bloom, philanthropies move on to water someone else’s idea.

CTW needed a revenue stream, and within weeks of
Sesame Street
’s debut there was no shortage of opportunities to capitalize on its rising popularity. Cooney began fielding cold calls from marketers eager to attach the likenesses of Muppet characters onto products, in exchange for a licensing fee. In commercial television, such entreaties would be looked upon as manna. But in the nascent world of public television, no one was quite prepared for come-ons from toy companies. Complicating things further, not-for-profit CTW was the oddest of contraptions, a television production operation with one power cord plugged into the federal government, another into megafoundations, and a speaker wire hooked into NET.