One night in the late winter of 1968, television producer Jon Stone saw a public service announcement that changed his life – and the lives of millions of children around the world.
It opened with a printed message: “Send your kid to the ghetto this summer.” It cut to a street scene in The Bronx, where a black actor named Lincoln Kilpatrick narrated a mock travelogue of an inner-city neighborhood, touting its supposed amenities. “We have all kinds of facilities here,” he said, pointing out “pools” (fire hydrants gushing into gutters) and “ball fields” (a car-lined street where children played stickball), not to mention “field trips” (to fetid, trash-strewn lots) and “cozy camp cabins” (where black children slept three or four to a bed).
“You don’t want your kids to play here this summer?” Kilpatrick asked. “Then don’t expect ours to.” The spot was part of a 50-city campaign to provide work for urban youngsters. Its final seconds included the lines “Give jobs. Give money. Give a damn.”
At the time, Stone was working on a children’s television show that had no title, no cast and no set. What it had was a mission – and $8 million in funding from the US Offi ce of Education, the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation and a nascent entity called the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The federal government and two of the nation’s philanthropic behemoths had laid down a whopper of a wager on the unproven notion that children’s television could educate while it entertained.
That program was “Sesame Street,” a product of the Great Society years of the late-1960s that was developed to assist the indigent but ended up teaching preschoolers in every social class, in 140 countries. Celebrating its 40th anniversary in 2009, the show not only instilled ABCs, it taught integration, fair play and diversity. If the younger generations that rallied around Barack Obama are more tolerant of racial and cultural differences, we have “Sesame Street” to thank. Its cozy block shaped a new America.
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It is no exaggeration to say that “Sesame Street” constituted revolutionary TV when it blinked on screens in November 1969. Until then, with a few blessed exceptions, the lessons kids learned from TV were that (a) cartoon mice most often get the better of cartoon cats and (b) milk goes down so much easier with a tablespoon or two of Bosco.
The new show’s benefactors had placed their bets on Children’s Television Workshop (CTW), a startup operating in cramped quarters on the Upper West Side. CTW had been charged with producing 130 episodes of an experimental series for preschoolers that would air on PBS, then in its infancy.
Joan Ganz Cooney, CTW’s executiv director, had been a public affairs producer at Channel Thirteen and a publicist for the CBS anthology drama series “The U.S. Steel Hour.” Cooney hired Stone – and two other clever writer-producers who had worked on CBS “Captain Kangaroo” – to bring the show to life. It was up to Stone to determine its look and feel, and ideas had eluded him until that “Give a Damn” PSA. The morning after seeing it, Stone met with his friend Charles Rosen, a movie set designer.
From previous conversations, Rosen knew the goal of the new show was to stimulate the intellectual lives of urban preschoolers
and address a yawning educational gap that was holding them back. As middle- and upper-class children entered kindergarten, they were miles ahead of underprivileged kids in school-readiness skills. Kids from the projects were almost a year behind.
Under Stone’s direction, Rosen sketched a set that would recall a Harlem neighborhood where kids ran through the hydrants on a summer’s day and jumped Double Dutch till dark. It would have a neighborhood store with a soda fountain and a stack of newspapers just outside the entrance. There would be galvanized trash cans on the sidewalk and zig-zagging fire escapes up the brick facades, some litter here and there and maybe an alley.
“For a preschool child in Harlem, the street is where the action is,” Stone once wrote. “Our set had to be an inner-city street, and more particularly it had to be a brownstone so the cast and kids could stoop in the age-old New York tradition, sitting on the front steps and watching the world go by.”
The creators of “Sesame Street” thought the show might last a season or two. They had good reason to be skeptical. No one had ever attempted to launch a children’s television how packed with so much brain power and ambition. The new series would be shaped by scientifically valid formative research, conducted in the field with children as subjects. Waves of summative research would later test the show’s impact on preschoolers.
There were challenges galore, not the least of which was that in many cities, including Washington and Los Angeles, the show would air on puny UHF channels that required no small amount of antenna futzing and snow-removal to tune in.
Meanwhile, scores of Americans were suspicious of congressionally sanctioned public TV. Some saw it as castor oil in a new bottle, just a rebranding of chalk-dusted and fussy “educational TV.”
But “Sesame Street” won them over, with a melodious, fast-paced, visually arresting, witty, well-written hour of television that not only roped in the kiddies but most adults within earshot. Its pace deliberately mimicked “Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In,” the quick-take gag fest on NBC that was all the rage.
Instead of populating the show with child actors, the producers invited neighborhood kids to sit on the stoop at the brownstone with the address 123 Sesame Street. (A working title of the show was “123 Avenue B,” but it was discarded after producers decided it was
Much went awry in the months leading to launch. A test audience of preschoolers found the live-action scenes shot on the street lacking. But puppeteer Jim Henson signed on before the show officially launched, bringing with him an idea he had hatched long before for a walk-around bird character.
At first, Big Bird was an ungainly doofus with a tiny head and an outsized body. After the production team had 130 episodes under their belt in the show’s first year, however, Big Bird had an ugly-duckling metamorphosis. The character was redesigned (with an elegant plume of yellow feathers) and Caroll Spinney, the performer within the 8-foot bird, re-imagined Bird as less of a dolt and more of an inquisitive, sensitive child.
Big Bird made the cover of Time in season two and public television had its first star, at least in the eyes of viewers who preferred their beverages in sippy cups.
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With musical guests Sly and the Family Stone and a talking green trash-can creature, “Sesame Street” looked and sounded
That black, white and Hispanic children
There’s no way to be certain, but “Sesame Street” may have helped to usher in the age of Obama. Ask any thoughtful adult in the 25-40 age bracket where they got their first evidence that people could live harmoniously despite their differences in race and ethnicity. Ask where they first saw a demonstration that people with disabilities could easily blend into the community. Ask where they first learned the basics of conflict resolution and cooperation. Ask where they learned their first Spanish vocabulary words. And yes, ask where they learned to count to 20, forward and backwards.
Through the decades, “Sesame Street” has weathered criticism from the left and the right. Opponents of PBS have even suggested the show has a hidden liberal agenda.
After watching hundreds of hours of the series over five years, it’s clear to me that the writers’ only agenda is teaching cultural literacy to at least two generations of preschoolers by exposing them to poets (Maya Angelou), statesmen (Kofi Annan), historical figures (Jackie Robinson, Buzz Aldrin, Sally Ride), filmmakers (Spike Lee, Robert Townsend), actors (Denzel Washington, Burt Lancaster), folk singers (Pete Seeger, Odetta), titans of jazz (Dizzy Gillespie, Herbie Hancock), rock (REM, Billy Joel), Motown (the Four Tops, Stevie Wonder), rhythm and blues (Ray Charles), classical (Yo Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman), opera (Placido Domingo), hiphop (Destiny’s Child, Chris Brown), comedy (Richard Pryor, Robin Williams) and legends like Bo Diddley, Lena Horne and Tito Puente. To make a celebrity appearance on “Sesame Street” is to gain admission to an alumni association without peer.
James Taylor described his three “Sesame Street” appearances – he sang his cover of Gerry Goffen and Carole King’s “Up on the Roof” with his band in 1983 – as “magical days. It was wonderful to get caught up in the energy of that set. It was great to be part of that vitality, humor and spontaneity.”
Taylor said, “The wonder of ‘Sesame Street’ is that it never tried to wrap children up in cellophane. It’s as if the show has been saying, ‘Come on and join the real world,’ helping children relate to that world.”
That effort can be traced back to Joan Cooney, Jon Stone and a host of others who vowed to make the landscape of television more habitable for children.
SESAME STREET
First episode: Nov. 10, 1969
Rejected show name: “123 Avenue B”
Reach: 140 countries on six continents
Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street? Sure. Take the R or V subway to Kaufman-Astoria Studios in Queens, where the show is filmed.
Color us surprised: Grover was originally brown, and Oscar the Grouch was orange. Both changed after the first season.
And it doesn’t start with C! Cookie Monster has a real name. In 2004, it was revealed to be Sid.
Michael Davis is the author of “Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street” (Viking, streetgangthebook.com), out this week.