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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Kamp
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June 14 - June 14, 2022
only wealth that entered into Cooney and Morrisett’s considerations was “human wealth”—a coinage of Morrisett’s that he used to describe what society was squandering: the untapped potential of disadvantaged children, the contributions that these kids might make to the wider world if only given the chance.
They didn’t patronize their audiences, and they acknowledged the interior lives of kids.
The average American was watching six hours of TV a day.
In 1970, just 20 percent of all U.S. three- and four-year-olds
year-olds were enrolled in a preschool program. Half the country’s school districts didn’t even offer kindergarten to their five-year-olds.
“Friday morning,” he told them one day, “we’re going to meet with Christ and his dog.” Christ turned out to be Jim Henson,
Henson, who really did resemble Jesus, was a bearded, lanky, laconic figure who, though he was only thirty years old in 1966, had already amassed a considerable fortune.
“My great curiosity is about childhood as a state of being, how all children manage to get through childhood from one day to the next, how they defeat boredom, fear, pain, and anxiety, and find joy.”
“to teach the children how to think, not what to think.”
Cooney, Rogers, and Nordstrom were children’s advocates because they had high regard for children,
believing them capable of intellectual and emotional engagement, and of seeing through cutesy artifice.
Some of this anti-war sentiment found its way into a TV film that he worked on with Jim Henson that winter and spring, Youth 68: Everything’s Changing… or Maybe It Isn’t.
Youth 68, which aired on April 19, 1968, offers a glimpse of the directions in which Stone’s and Henson’s careers might have gone had Cooney not intervened. Neither man was particularly disposed toward creating content for young children.
Rather than find teachers and teach them how to be television professionals, Joan went looking for television professionals with the intention of turning them into teachers.”
While he never became an expressly political person, as Stone increasingly would, Henson did become, in his quiet way, a children’s advocate, vigilant in controlling how his Muppets were used.
Monsters were not scary beasts but agents of comedy and catharsis.
The sheer otherness of Henson World—fantastical but self-assured, powered by its own internal logic—sparked
there was this man sitting at the back of the room with long hair and a leather vest and beads,” she said. “I whispered, ‘How do we know that man back there isn’t going to kill us?’ Dave said, ‘Not likely. That’s Jim Henson.’ ”
The goals fell broadly into four main categories: symbolic representation, which included learning shapes, the numbers 1 to 10, and the letters of the alphabet; cognitive processes, which included understanding relational concepts such as size, shape, position, and distance; reasoning and problem-solving; and “the child and his world,” which included teaching the concepts of the self, social units, and natural environments versus man-made ones.
gentle a man as he was, Fred Rogers was not soft.
“The good kids never made any mistakes,” she said. “The bad kids couldn’t spell if you paid them, but they had feelings.”
“You don’t want your kids to play here this summer? Then don’t expect ours to.” The ad closed with a voice-over artist intoning the Urban Coalition’s slogan: “Give jobs. Give money. Give a damn.”
“I felt immediately that this was where I wanted to be,” he said, and he accepted the role of Bobby “on the condition that they drop the B-Y.”
The integrated nature of the cast was so novel that, in the early days, it actually presented technical challenges. “Big Bird had to be totally re-dyed, because he was so light,” Long recalled. “The light bounced off of him and the iris of the lenses would go down, and then they’d shoot Matt and me, and all you’d see were eyes and teeth. We had a lighting designer win an award for learning how to light interracial groups of people.”
Sesame Street’s debut, on Monday, November 10, 1969, drew a lot of eyeballs, reaching roughly two million households.
It included Sesame Street’s first celebrity cameo (by Carol Burnett, saying, “Wow, Wanda the Witch is weird!”)
Sesame Street’s songs, the composer and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda later observed, “are the closest thing we have to a shared childhood songbook.”
Jackie Robinson, gray-haired and stoic, turned up to recite the alphabet. James Earl Jones, in a black mock turtleneck, Method-counted from one to ten. The R&B crooner Lou Rawls spiffed up the street in a smart peak-lapel striped suit and led five kids in an R&B reinterpretation of the alphabet song. Grace Slick, Jefferson Airplane’s female vocalist, was heard but not seen, singing atonally over acid-rock jamming in a series of animated counting shorts.
“Rubber Duckie,” issued as a single the same year, was a surprise chart hit, making it to No.16 on the Billboard Hot 100. That the song was written by Jeff Moss, Sesame Street’s head writer, rather than Raposo, and that its success stoked their ego-driven rivalry—Moss also wrote such staples of the show as “I Love Trash,” “The People in Your Neighborhood,” and “Five People in My Family”—was immaterial to its delighted listeners.
“Sesame Street is changing its aim from teaching children basics in learning and living with others to some sort of mini protest movement.”
Stranger still was the discovery that “Lloyd N. Morrisett” was among the names on the extended version of Nixon’s infamous “Enemies List,” a secret
“Like, when I was a girl, I would find shapes in the cracks of the ceiling of my room. And Sesame Street was doing films where it was ‘What shapes do you see in this?’ That’s exactly how my mind used to work when I was in the South Bronx.”
“Except for Bob, who was always right on it, we were like a bunch of rowdy kids, man,”
“Most complaints were of reverse racism, that Sesame Street is too black, too integrated, or that black adults and children are shown as better and smarter than others. On the other hand, it was also observed that Sesame Street displays racism by not being black enough or by sugar-coating the realities of the ghetto, teaching minority-group children to accept quietly middle-class America’s corrupt demands to subjugate themselves.”
“This aim to reach the disadvantaged child just won’t be realized, I’m afraid,” he said. “These kids need less fantasy and… more realism in black-oriented problems.”
My Name Is Roosevelt Franklin.)
But Roosevelt became so popular that, nearly thirty years before the Elmo-mania of the 1990s begat Elmo’s World, he was given his own dedicated segment on Sesame Street, “Roosevelt Franklin Elementary School.”
“Somewhere around four or five,” Robinson continued, “a black kid is going to learn he’s black. He’s going to learn that’s positive or negative. What I want to project is a positive image.”
