The photo above is a picture of woman born in 1929, taken in 1985.

Odds are, 99 out of 100 people have never heard her name, nor would the public-at-large recognise her face.

A native of Phoenix, Arizona, with Jewish and Catholic parents, she would team-up in New York City with a man born to Oklahoma Dust Bowl refugees, and together they would start the “Children’s Television Workshop”, a non-profit organization which would go on to create the acclaimed children’s television series “Sesame Street”.

If a category existed for public education television under UNESCO World Heritage designations, there has never been a TV show more worthy of earning such an accolade.

The woman in the photo is Joan Ganz, and her collaborator was a man named Lloyd Morrisett, also born in 1929.

At the very height of some of the worst civil strife ever seen in the USA since the Civil War, Ganz and Morrisett decided to channel their activism into education.

Three years after the JFK assassination, in the middle of Vietnam protests and attacks on the Civil Rights Movement (including the further assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy), Ganz and Morrisett kept trying to raise money to further develop their “Sesame Street” project.

Ms. Ganz freely admits to having been greatly influenced by certain high school teachers in 1940s Arizona, who spoke powerfully about poverty in America, and the importance of the nascent Civil Rights Movement. One of her teachers would later be investigated during the McCarthy era communist witch hunts.

Airing for the first time in 1969, “Sesame Street” made Joan Ganz one of the first female executive directors in the history of television, winning multiple Emmys and other awards for her achievements.

An unapologetic idealist, Ms. Ganz once said “I could do a thousand documentaries on poverty and poor people that would be watched by a handful of the convinced, but I was never really going to have an influence on my times”.

And so it was that generations of children (including many children from very difficult backgrounds) learned about spelling, fairness, mathematics, reading, tolerance, civic duty, honesty, and kindness from the likes of Bert and Ernie, Big Bird, and The Cookie Monster.

 

Mr. Morrisett passed away in 2023 aged 93, but Ms. Ganz is still with us today, aged 95.

Perhaps innate decency is the secret to a long life…

Needless to say, such programming, rooted in idealism rather than profit, eventually found its home on the PBS (Public Broadcasting Service).

*****

The PBS evolved from a collaboration between National Educational Television (NET, which was owned by the Ford Foundation), and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (cpb) – the latter coming into being after President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Public Broadcasting Act into law in 1967.

The PBS effectively absorbed both the cpb and NET under its new “brand name”, mostly due to conservative objections to public funds being allocated to NET. National Educational Television had committed the “sin” of producing unblinking documentaries exploring poverty and racism in the USA.

With Mister Roger’s Neighborhood going on air in 1968, and Sesame Street debuting the year after, producers of both shows remained undeterred in their vision of using children’s television as a way to eliminate the scourge of racism, while educating and entertaining.

Sesame Street in particular, with its urban setting and multi-ethnic cast (not to mention the ethnically ambiguous Muppets), was utterly groundbreaking.

So much so that the show was even banned for a short time in the state of Mississippi.

Sounding eerily like the “Newspeak” being used by certain groups today, a retired local politician from Jackson, Mississippi named Allen Cavett Thompson formed a group called “FOCUS” which claimed to be a “protector” of “choice”.

FOCUS was mightily vexed that taxpayer dollars should be spent on programming which was “forcing” liberal values on conservative Mississippians’ children, who were “not ready for it [integration] yet”.

A state commission was convened, and voted to back-up FOCUS’s demand for a statewide ban on the broadcast of Sesame Street.

When news of the ban reached the national press, however, the furor led to state legislators backing-down, and overturning the prohibition.

If only public shame still existed…

*****

Without doubt, one of the high points in the history of Sesame Street has to be the April 1973 episode including a 22-year-old Stevie Wonder as featured guest.

Mr. Wonder had just recently got out from under the thumb of Berry Gordy at Motown Records, and was enjoying his first real spell of artistic freedom.

His album “Talking Book” had just been released to critical acclaim in late 1972, with its pioneering use of new keyboard and synth sounds.

Stevie Wonder didn’t really need to go on Sesame Street to plug his latest album.

It seems to have been a genuine act of generosity, and wow.

I defy anyone to watch this segment, and not come away with an ear to ear smile on their face (check out a young Ray Parker, Jr. funking-out in the background, long before “Ghostbusters“).

Check out the kid on the fire escape headbanging with delight.

Of course, America was in a bad place back then.  But then again, before so many of us had been propagandized by corporate and social media, society was in many ways more intellectually and spiritually advanced half a century ago.

Most of us knew our country had work to do, progress to make.

Hell, even Tricky Dick Nixon did some things right, like creating the Environmental Protection Agency.

Sesame Street could have never been made today.

Too diverse.

Too equitable.

Too inclusive.

The musical genius which is Stevie Wonder would be called a “DEI hire” – “He’s only on public broadcast TV because he’s Black and disabled”.

Even worse, DOGE and the Project 2025 goons are gunning for public television and radio altogether.

I hope we still have fighters ready to step into the shoes of people like Joan Ganz and Lloyd Morrisett.