[ Music ] >> Guy Lamolinara: Hello, and welcome to the National Book Festival from the Library of Congress. My name is Guy Lamolinara, and I work at the Library. I'm here today with David Kamp, whose featured book at the Festival is Sunny Days: The Children's Television Revolution that Changed America. David has also pre-recorded a video for us, and if you'd like to learn more about David's book and hear what he has to say about it, you can watch it, at nationalbookfestival.com, and David is appearing on the Family, Food, and Field Stage. Welcome, David, and thanks for being here. >> David Kamp: Guy, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me. >> Guy Lamolinara: Great. Let's begin. Tell us a bit about your book. How did you become interested in writing about children's television and the golden age of kid's TV? >> David Kamp: Well, the idea came about five years ago, in 2015. And even then, I sensed a certain brokenness to American society that we just weren't feeling good about ourselves, even though 2015, right about now, sounds like paradise. So, I started thinking about -- I wanted to write an American history book about what I would call a successful chapter in American ingenuity, where like-minded people put their heads together, to realize change and through hard work and actually succeeded, and I'm a child of that era. I was a toddler in '69 and '70, and I looked at this aggregation of shows, like Sesame Street, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Zoom, The Electric Company, Free to be You and Me, and I started to realize that they weren't just a slate of programming, that they together constituted a social movement, and so I thought, let me write about that, as a little sliver of American history that has a positive outcome. >> Guy Lamolinara: Great. Did you realize that when you were a child, that you were watching something revolutionary? Or did that come to you, as you became older? >> David Kamp: I mean, it -- one weird thing, guy, is that I never stopped thinking about these shows, meaning, you know, of course, when I was four and five, I wasn't aware of anything being revolutionary, because who is at that age? But I couldn't get it out of my head, even when I was in high school in the 1980s, that that really was an extraordinary period, in terms of recognizing the emotional intelligence of children, kind of recalibrating how we thought about American childhood and how we thought about representation, multi-culturalism, and sort of the older I got, the more I realized that this trade was kind of unprecedented before and even since, in terms of the sheer volume of what I would call innovative and progressive thinking about American childhood. >> Guy Lamolinara: Did you come to a point where you stopped watching the shows, as you grew older? Or are you still watching? >> David Kamp: Well, inevitably, you do. Like inevitably, there's an age where you kind of think you're too cool and you're too old, like Sesame Street's corny, Mister Rogers was corny, you know, Free to be You and Me. OMG, a doll really wants a doll? That's corny. We would ridicule those things, at adolescent age. But then as you get older, you realize this is genius, and you -- and then when you have your own kids, and you see how pertinent and useful it is, in rearing your own children with the values you hope to impart to them -- so, yeah. I mean, it's only appreciated in value, as I've gotten older, the worth of these programs. >> Guy Lamolinara: What do you attribute this golden age to? Why was it, at this particular time in history, all these new-found shows, found an audience? >> David Kamp: Well, with a confluence of factors. One was that TV was this growing force, much like, you know, the internet is this all-encompassing force that's reshaped our lives, in the last 20 years or so. Another thing is that we were coming out of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society era, when in the mid-60s, you had the Civil Rights Act passed, and you had the Elementary and Secondary Education Act passed, and you had the -- under the Corporation for Public Broadcasting being passed into law, or into existence, and on top of that, psychology and specifically, child psychology was increasingly accepted as a legitimate field of inquiry, as opposed to crockery, as many people thought the social sciences were in the old days. And so suddenly, you have all these things coming together, and you also have activism -- '60s activism. Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett, the people who co-created Sesame Street. Their original goal is not for Sesame Street to be for all preschool kids. It was specifically aimed at giving kids a leg up, who were from disadvantaged backgrounds, mostly black kids in the inner city, in the initial years of Sesame Street. So, you had that level of activism informing things, too. So, all these things came together at once, to create this incredibly fruitful period. >> Guy Lamolinara: What about the future of educational TV? Do you think it's moving away from television and will be in an app or a game? Or do you think educational TV is still relevant today? >> David Kamp: Well, I think all of the above, meaning we know from this improvised approach to remote learning, that we've had to muddle through these last few months, that is the semi-new normal, that even if we get over this pandemic in the next 12 months, for at least a generation, this is always going to be in the back of our minds, that we can go into lockdown again. We can go into remote learning again. So, I think it's pretty realistic that we're going to have to really devise a curriculum that does happen via apps and websites. But also, Guy, since you brought up broadcast television, you've got to remember, a lot of people still don't have access to high speed internet. They don't have access to state of the art laptops and hardware. So, broadcast TV still is an amazing medium through which to disseminate really good quality edutainment, kind of equitably. And I think that's something we really have to look at more strongly, going forward, is good old PBS and broadcast television disseminating really good quality educational content. >> Guy Lamolinara: You mentioned the pandemic. Do you think these shows have received increased viewership, due to the pandemic, and people being cooped up inside their houses more? I don't know if you follow TV ratings at all. >> David Kamp: No, I don't. But what I would say is that I've gotten a lot more inquiries as I've been discussing this book, about screen-based learning and saying, you know -- and the parallels are there, because in '69 and '70, when Sesame Street was being launched into the universe, there was a lot of intellectual news holding, about television being this maligned influence and how can it possibly be used to educate people. And Sesame Street and the Children's Television Workshop, basically proved that if you put enough rigorous preparation into it, you really could succeed in educating kids. And we're kind of experiencing the same thing now, where a lot of people are just saying, you know, that the internet is a maligned influence, and it just turns kid's brains into zombie. We've seen a really bad choice of words there, but nevertheless, that it's -- that this is all bad. Screen-based learning is all bad, and the fact is that if you put enough rigor and thought into it, it can work. And Sesame Street, The Electric Company proved that it could work. >> Guy Lamolinara: What was the response to these shows initially? Did many people watch them? Did they have to build up an audience over time? >> David Kamp: Well, I think it was a different era, when I think there was more public goodwill and public buy-in. So, even before Sesame Street premiered, on November 10, 1969, there was a big publicity launch for it, and especially to get it, to create awareness for Sesame Street among Black viewers. And I mean, because you already had a baseline of public TV viewers, who were basically middle class and affluent White people, but how to reach the original target audience, and the ingenuity of The Children's Television Workshop, which is now called The Sesame Workshop. And having literal promotional vehicles, driving around the street. They convinced Con Ed, the New York-based utility, to drive trucks around in a Black neighborhoods, like Bed-Stuy and Harlem, and say, we've got this show. They would have TVs with tapes of Sesame Street, test episodes, all in the Con Ed vehicles. They handed out leaflets at a football game, in the Fall of '69 between two historically Black colleges, Morgan State and Grambling State, you know, something like 50,000 leaflets, just so that -- because there was internet back then, and so that's how people became aware of Sesame Street. So, from day one, November 10, '69, there was a built-in audience that was ready to embrace this, and if anything, the backlash only came later on when, you know, Sesame Street was such a success, that anything in America that becomes big and successful invites scrutiny and backlash. So, to answer your question, the initial reaction to Sesame Street and The Electric Company was more or less a warm embrace. >> Guy Lamolinara: How about today? Do you see any new shows coming on board, that you think will have the same effect on society as Sesame Street or some of these other shows do -- did? >> David Kamp: I think we live in such an atomized sort of media landscape that nothing is ever going to have -- you know, we were getting kind of a mono-culture back then, where like everyone watched the same four TV channels, and listened to the same Top 40 radio. So, I don't know if any one thing can have the impact that Sesame Street had in the early '70s, but all that said, it can be done again. I don't think anyone's really attempted -- there's a lot of good children's programming out there, but I think -- like Paw Patrol, or Peppa Pig, they're good shows, but they don't have the ambition of Sesame Street. Sesame Street was this massive undertaking, that was also public-private. It's initial budget of $8 million a year, to produce an astounding 130 hours of television a season. That was half underwritten by the federal government -- $4 million of that $8 million, the federal government, to a magnitude not seen before or since, was in the TV productive business. And you know, that -- I asked Lloyd Morrisett if that could even happen again. He said, "Not with this government." But it could happen again. I mean, I honestly think it's something that should be on the table. Should there be more federal investment in screen-based learning, since we know we have to live with it for awhile? >> Guy Lamolinara: You mentioned, early in your conversation, about the creators of Sesame Street. Can you tell us a little about their background, how they came to create the show? Did they meet any resistance, when they were trying to sell it? >> David Kemp: Well, the creators were Joan Ganz Cooney, who got her start in TV production -- TV publicity at CBS, in the '50s, but then she really wanted to make documentaries addressing poverty. So, her issue wasn't even children. It was poverty, and she met this guy, Lloyd Morrisett, through a mutual friend. Well, as Lloyd's cousin and her friend -- so, excuse me -- her cousin and Lloyd's friend, Julian [assumed spelling] Ganz, introduced them, and together, Lloyd Morrisett was working for the philanthropic Carnegie Corporation, and they had a dinner party, where Lloyd Morrisett was saying, "I'm trying to address early childhood education, and the inequities in how it's distributed, basically, like there are bad inner city schools and good public schools in the affluent suburbs. And Joan Ganz Cooney's issue was more, how can I use TV, to alleviate the effect of poverty, to get the word out, about good programs?" They combined their two ideas, and out of that, became the three year process, that gave us Sesame Street. Now, I just want to talk about that three year process, because part of it was studying educational methods, but part of it was also recruited seasoned entertainment professionals, like Jim Henson, who was already a big deal, by the age of 30. He was already a millionaire guy, who was a successful ad-man, successful puppeteer, successful maker of short films. They got a bunch of guys from Captain Kangaroo, the children's TV program on network TV, CBS, Jon Stone, who was the Chief Showrunner of Sesame Street, in the early days. And Jon Stone, again, was a guy who wanted to really make it in commercial TV. He wants to graduate from kid's TV, meaning Captain Kangaroo to, you know, writing sitcoms for CBS. But the big point is, that these brilliant minds from the entertainment world, also doubled down on this idealistic commitment to educational TV. And Jon Stone said that that was Joan Ganz Cooney's master stroke, with not try to turn teachers into entertainers, but to turn entertainers into teachers. And by doing that, by pulling academics's consultants, but having entertainment people do the actual TV part, that's what made Sesame Street so persuasive and successful and watchable, not just to little kids, but to their parents and guardians who were watching along with them. >> Guy Lamolinara: You spoke about government funding a little while ago. Do you think government funding is the only way to promote the production of these types of shows, to all demographic groups? >> David Kamp: Well, it certainly wouldn't hurt because, you know, if there's sort of a federal mandate, a coordinated response to, you know, the shortcomings in our educational system, that goes a long way to -- you know, the FCC was more activist in those days too, and it never issued any kind of -- there were never any laws passed, saying that you must -- you must air this much TV, but there were these kind of loosely-enforced mandates that the FCC put out, to broadcasters, saying like, "You should have a certain amount of programming that serves the public interest." And that was enough to make even the commercial networks comply with some educational programming. And on top of that, I would say, I think we need to put out more of a call to the entertainment industry, to say, "Hey, you guys are needed too. You need to do your bit to advance the cause of educational TV and screen-based learning, because what we're doing isn't enough right now. We know we're going to have to live with screen-based learning, at least for another couple of years probably, and probably forevermore, to some degree. So, let's get the entertainment industry involved. Your salaries might not be as good. Rita Moreno, who -- Rita Moreno, who starred on The Electric Company, she said to me that being on The Electric Company was public service, in every aspect of the word "public," including the salary. But what she meant by that -- so, obviously she meant that the pay was not comparable to what she made, being Anita in West Side Story or working with Mike Nichols in the movie, Carnal Knowledge, for example or the Rockford Files, which she also did in the '70s. But she still said, "I think it's the best thing I've ever done." She had a daughter the same age as me, and she said, "I just looked at my daughter," and she said, "all of my actor friends, when I got the offer to do The Electric Company, to a person, were saying, "Don't do it, because you'll be forevermore pigeon-holed as just a children's performer. Your career will never recover." Well, Rita Moreno is still doing network TV. She's in One Day at a Time, with -- the reboot, with Norman Lear right now. It didn't adversely affect her career, and more to the point, it's probably, or at least, arguably, the thing that Rita Moreno is best known for, is being on The Electric Company. So, the point is, sometimes -- and the point I want to get out to people in the TV industry is that sometimes, following your ideals is actually the answer to having the best career. It's not about what's most lucrative or what's the most flashy it is, just following what feels right will lead you down the right path. And Rita Moreno is a testament to that. >> Guy Lamolinara: Okay. Here's the fun question. Do you have a favorite Sesame Street character, and if you do, why? >> David Kamp: Well, mine is -- I talk about him a lot in the book. Mine is Roosevelt Franklin, who is a Muppet character who was discontinued. He was invented by Matt Robinson, who was a writer and producer on the show, and also was the original actor who played Gordon, the paternal Black figure, and he said, "We needed a Muppet character who kind of represented Black experience and Black English and Black behavioral aspects." He said, you know, "the kids watching at home needs to have a character -- Black kids watching at home need to have a character who they recognized. They see themselves in that character." And so Roosevelt Franklin was this more dynamic -- I don't know, he was just brilliant. Like he sang these funky songs about the alphabet and counting, and he was voiced by Matt Robinson, atypical for a Muppet, and that he wasn't developed by Jim Henson or Frank Oz or any of the other puppeteers -- -- but he just had this brilliance and spirit, and they had these really great songs that were almost Stax Records R and B, soul songs, and I loved him. Every other kid in the universe loved him, but within Sesame Street, he was controversial. Within the executive ranks of Sesame Street, specifically the Black executive ranks of Sesame Street, because he spoke in a sort of quote, unquote, "street vernacular, because Matt Robinson said it was important that kids learn that not all legitimate English is what he called 6:00 news English. And Roosevelt Franklin spoke in a kind of jive speak. I think that was part of the reason he got across to us, but within -- there was a more Bourgeoisie Black contingent within the ranks of the Children's Television Network who thought, "That's the image of American Blackness that we're trying to get away from." And Joan Ganz Cooney was a great listener, and she was great at hearing both sides of the argument, and generally, she came down on the correct side, in terms of long-term cultural impact. But this is a rare case, where I think she made the wrong choice, and chose to phase out Roosevelt Franklin. But to those of us aficionados of Roosevelt, go down the YouTube rabbit hole and watch all the Roosevelt Franklin videos you can. He's a little purple guy. He's fantastic. You'll love him. >> Guy Lamolinara: Here's a question. Can you comment on educational programming's move to paid TV? >> David Kamp: Yeah. The optics of it are not good. So, I think what that question is alluding to is that Sesame Street -- a new episode of Sesame Street now launch on HBO, and I think there's kind of a nine month period, where new episodes are exclusive to HBO, before they're then moved over to PBS, where they're widely accessible. Now, HBO -- or HBO Max, I guess we call it now, we all know that's a premium streaming service now. So, again the optics aren't good, because this is a program that was invented to address the most marginalized and resource-deprived kids. Of course, it reaches all kids now. But as Lloyd Morrisett put it to me -- again, he's one of the co-founders, with Joan Ganz Cooney, of the program -- "Our revenue streams have dried up. You know, you have to remember, that for a long time, so much of Sesame Street's revenues came from sales of DVDs, sales of toys and, you know, that stream has dried up, just like, you know, how record sales has dried up as a revenue stream for musicians. And so the choice is between having Sesame Street on HBO -- or having no Sesame Street." So, if you look at -- if you weight those factors, if you make a pro and con list on a yellow legal pad, it's pretty obvious why you would be pro the show being on HBO right now. >> Guy Lamolinara: Let's talk some of the other programs that you have written about, such as Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. How did Fred Rogers come to have his own show? >> David Kamp: What's interesting about Fred Rogers is that he, like Joan Ganz Cooney both -- they both worked in network TV, as young people in the '50s. Fred Rogers was at NBC. Joan Ganz Cooney was at CBS. And they both felt a religious calling. It was faith in the most generous sense of the term, faith. Fred was a devout Presbyterian, who would later be ordained as a Presbyterian minister. Joan Ganz Cooney was part of a group of progressive -- a Catholic group, called the Christophers, and they both recognized TV as this medium through which they felt they could address children. Well, initially, for Joan Ganz Cooney, it was poor people, but it later became poor children. For Fred Rogers, it was how can I use this new medium of television to reach children and address their emotional intelligence, basically, to basically say, you know, Sesame Street was more explicitly curricular -- let's learn how to count to 20. Let's learn the alphabet. Let's learn about rural environments versus urban environments. Mister Rogers was more about emotional intelligence -- let's let kids learn how to deal with anger, deal with anxiety, deal with abject joy, deal with even things like -- like insecurity about being able to -- being able to keep their pee in. He famously had one episode where he took a water hose and held it over a fish tank, for something like one minute, which in TV time, is an eternity. No TV producer would ever sanction this now. But he said -- and there were real psychological underpinnings to this, just to show kids that a vessel can contain fluids. Psychologically, it crosses over to a kid's mind -- to an innate understanding that therefore, I can contain my fluids. And the other thing about Fred Rogers, if he wasn't this -- just this uncommonly kind, decent, man, he also was someone who was deeply interested in child psychiatry, and had a consultant he worked with for the entire duration of Mister Roberts' Neighborhood, a Pittsburgh child psychiatrist named Dr. Margaret McFarland, who helped him incorporate these deeply researched psychological lessons into his programming, his curriculum. >> Guy Lamolinara: I take it from what you say that Fred Rogers was the same off-camera as he was on. >> David Kamp: Yeah, very much so. And I find what's interesting now is we've all come to this moment, where we all love Fred Rogers. He was the subject of the documentary, Won't You Be My Neighbor, a couple of years ago, and last year, Tom Hanks played him, in the feature film, It's a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. But again, let's go back to one of your earlier questions, about did you grow out of these shows. There was a period when I -- yeah, I found Fred Rogers completely corny and laughable, and we all did. I mean, we all did for awhile. We thought Fred Rogers was corny. Eddie Murphy did Mister Robinson's Neighborhood. Christopher Guess did a parody of him on some National Lampoon Records in the '70s. I think what we've all come to recognize now was that he was -- as Tom Junod, who wrote the Esquire article that was the basis for the Tom Hank's movie, Tom Junod is a friend of mine said, "Fred Rogers was the face of radical kindness, radical empathy. And I think as we live in this more fractured, polarized society, we've all kind of come to realize that that kind of radical kindness is something we need to sort of get ourselves back in touch with." How did that man pull it off? How did he carry it out? It wasn't my being wimpy. It was actually by being very willful and strong-minded. And I think that's why people are sort of reconnecting with him, posthumously right now. >> Guy Lamolinara; Okay. Here's a question, going back to Sesame Street and its origins. Did the creators and producers, promoters of Sesame Street meet any resistance or hesitation from the Black community, considering that this was a show created by White people? And how did they research the needs of their original target audience? >> David Kamp: Well, first of all, Sesame Workshop, even though the two people who conceived of it -- Lloyd Morrisett, Joan Ganz Cooney -- were White, Joan Ganz Cooney was pretty shrewd early on, in saying like, "I can't do this by myself." And so there were a lot of people involved, like Matt Robinson, who I said, didn't just play Gordon. He was a producer and writer on the show, and there was a consultant named Jane O'Connor, who was a school teacher and was one of the formative consultants -- -- and there was a community outreach person named Evelyn Payne Davis. She was the one whose job it was to create awareness of Sesame Street, in urban environments, you know, not just New York City, but also in Oakland, in Dallas, Texas, in Chicago. And she had representatives, most of whom came out of Black organizations, like The Urban League, to make sure that awareness of Sesame Street was promoted in '69, '70, when you have to remember, much like people don't have access to like Mac laptops and broadband wi-fi now, a lot of people didn't have access to color TVs. So, there was this infrastructure within The Children's Television Workshop, mostly formed by Black individuals, many of them of parent ago, wherein Sesame Street was made available in churches, in Ward Eight in Washington, D.C., even in a 7-11. They were determined to have these Sesame Street viewing centers, all across American cities. But to answer the question of, did Sesame Street encounter some resistance from Black people, like saying, "Who are you to talk about, you know, our experience?" Of course. Yeah. I mean, there was some blowback. And New York Magazine ran an article in the early '70s, about how a lot of people said Sesame Street painted too rosy a picture of Black life, or inner city life, like -- that the set should be dirty or that the experience -- there should be -- there should be people with drug and alcohol problems, walking across the screen. And Lloyd Morrisett said that they actually contemplated painting a picture of Sesame Street that was more like that, but everything in the research told them not to, because part of what the Sesame Street experience was meant to be, for kids watching at home, and particularly, Black kids watching at home, was aspirational, that they -- that stoop looks like a stoop in my neighborhood. But it's a stoop where, where people of all races and different age groups are interacting. Mr. Hooper, the old shopkeeper, who in Jon Stone's mind -- Jon Stone created him -- was an old Jewish man, and Gordon and Susan were a Black couple, and they had this White guy, Bob, coming through, and then -- just to go to your question of criticism, the Latin community was like, "Where are we?" They were kind of really angry for two seasons, and then -- and Joan Ganz Cooney, again, was willing to admit, "Oh my God. I got that wrong. I ignored the concerns of a huge segment of our audience." And that's why you had Sonia Manzano come on in Season Three, as Maria, and then Emilio Delgado come on as Luis, and they were both on the show for 40-odd years. And again, that was where a lot of people -- not just White viewers, but Black viewers really acclimated to the Hispanic experience for the first time. >> Guy Lamolinara: Great. I'm sorry, but we just have time for one more question, and the question is, what do you think of the longevity of educational children's programming? Do you think it has a future? >> David Kamp: I think it totally does, because, for the myriad factors we've discussed today. That we know now that this is the new semi-normal, that we're going to have to live with screens. And so rather than -- there's nothing that's ever going to replace in-person learning, pupils and teachers. Nothing's ever going to be better than that. But at the very least, in a supplemental way -- and at the most, sort of a Heads Start Program, like -- because Sesame Street was a sibling to Lyndon Johnson's Great Society Head Start Program, which was aimed at giving inner city kids a leg up when they entered kindergarten. We know that we're going to be in this situation for a long time, where there's inequities in the educational system, and just across the board, parents are saying, "Oh my God. What about -- how am I supposed to teach my kid at home?" So, I think, more and more, we need to get more ambitious about what our screen content, vis-à-vis educational programming. There has to be more entertaining. It has to be more thorough. It isn't just for preschoolers. We'll probably have to go all the way up to the senior year in high school, that we're going to have to have more screen-based learning, not as a replacement for in-person learning, but as a really important supplement. So, I think all systems go. More investment, public and private, in educational programming. >> Guy Lamolinara: Okay. I promised one more. If you can tell us in about 30 seconds, what is your research and writing process? Do you keep quote, unquote, "business hours?" >> David Kamp: No. What writer does? Although research -- one research process is interview everyone old as fast as you can, before they die. Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrissett are both 90-years-old, so when you're writing about something that happened 50 years ago, you make sure you reach people -- and fortunately, they're very much with us. Some people did pass away. And the other thing is archives. Everyone loves your librarians, because they're there to help you, and there's all these amazing, open and closed collections, where librarians are just waiting to help you out. Without the National Archives and The Children's Television Workshop Archives at the University of Maryland, this book would have been nothing. So, I just want you all to love your librarians and especially for The National Book Festival, give your librarians love, I urge you. >> Guy Lamolinara: David, thank you. This has been such a pleasure. I wish we had another half hour to talk. But unfortunately, we don't. >> David Kamp: Well, I'll be here next year. >> Guy Lamolinara: Great. I hope so. We've been talking with David Kamp, who's the author of Sunny Days: The Children's Television Revolution that Changed America. And if we want to hear more from David and listen to his video, which he recorded exclusively for the Book Festival, you should go to the Family, Food, and Field Stage and log on at nationalbookfestival.com. I also want to take a moment to thank our audience. Thank you for your wonderful questions, and I hope you'll take some more time to explore our programs and the remainder of the Festival. [ Music ]