'Street Gang' by Michael Davis
BOOK REVIEW
Could TV be more than just junk food for children's minds? The author's book shows how the creator envisioned something entertaining and nutritional in 'Sesame Street.'
Big Bird snorts cocaine. Mr. Hooper uses his store as a front for stolen goods. Oscar the Grouch keeps pornography in his trash can.
If these are the stories you are looking for, too bad. "Street Gang: The Complete History of Sesame Street" is not a Hollywood tell-all. No puppeteer hung himself by his own strings; Cookie Monster was not discovered on a casting couch. It is not even set in Hollywood. "Sesame Street" was inspired, imagined, sold and created out of the civil rights movement in New York City. And seemingly everyone involved with it was as altruistic and munificent as the theme song:
Sunny day
Sweeping the clouds away,
On my way
to where the air is sweet.
Can you tell me how to get,
how to get to Sesame Street?
Yes, we get a little past-tense womanizing, a lot of drinking and a psychotic breakdown later in the book, but it all seems sad, not salacious, and not germane to the basic story. "Street Gang" is journalist Michael Davis' tale of a woman, Joan Ganz Cooney, who had an idea at a dinner party and, despite plenty of opposition, fought her way to creating a show for preschoolers that would change television as we know it.
Cooney, a producer of documentaries and public service programs, recognized that there was a disparity in children entering kindergarten, between those from middle-class homes and those born in poverty. Lloyd Morrisett, the host of that fateful dinner party, was a psychologist and vice president of the Carnegie Corp. with a mandate to close the learning gap between rich and poor. He also had a 4-year-old daughter who loved television and could sing a variety of commercial jingles. Morrisett talked about his daughter and wondered if television could be used to really teach children. "If cartoons and westerns were ice cream, educational TV was spinach," Davis writes. "What . . . Cooney hoped for would be more like raspberry yogurt, TV that was both tangy and nutritious."
The implications were amazing, both in what the children could learn and how many could be reached. Education would be sold as entertainment, in the same 30 seconds as commercials, with bright colors, funny characters and lots of music. It seems a no-brainer now, but it was a hard sell in the 1960s. It took four years from the dinner party to the airing of the first "Sesame Street" in November 1969.
