At reunion: proud of past, concerned for future
The man who put New York Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia on the radio, reading the comics during a newspaper strike — M.S. "Morrie" Novik — talked the other day about his first trip west of Chicago.
That excursion to Iowa more than 50 years ago was also the first time the head of New York's municipal radio station, WNYC, had much contact with the midwesterners who were big in "educational radio." Novik recognized they were up to the same thing he was, and he joined a fellowship that continues today.
He was among his fellows again Oct. 8-9, during a Public Broadcasting Reunion, where a big roomful of admitted idealists reminisced, ribbed each other, tut-tutted about things these days, and unabashedly proclaimed their values.
As did William Harley, once president of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters: "Not many can say to themselves, 'I did something worthwhile today — I stretched some minds, I nurtured some souls, I opened some windows on the world.'"
He and his colleagues could say so, as the inheritors of educational radio and the founders of public television.
These people had attended many a meeting over the years, but this one somehow left many of them elated. "People, for the first time in many conferences, had a really good time," said Donald McNeil, who organized the reunion. "There was an emotional pitch about the connection between the past and the future."
By the end, retirees and working stiffs alike were talking about pushing for improved training — and a renewed sense of mission — to help their successors carry on in the multichannel era.
Before leaving D.C., they saw the new National Public Broadcasting Archives, founded by McNeil, where artifacts of their careers will reside.
The grayheads turned up their hearing aids, commiserated over illnesses, called people "pups" if they had worked in the field just 10 years, and congratulated a colleague for his child's achievements (Bob Schenkkan's son Robert won a Pulitzer for his play "The Kentucky Cycle"). The straight and tall Harley, one of the grandest old men present, celebrated his 82nd birthday during the reunion.
As they indulged themselves in nostalgia, listening to oral-history tapes of colleagues no longer alive, there were little gasps around the room at the mention of half-forgotten names.
The old-timers talked about:
In his retelling of NAEB's history, Harley recalled the pivotal grant from the Ford Foundation's Fund for Adult Education that led to the foundation's vital support for early public TV. NAEB won that grant in the '50s to demonstrate that educational radio could be as entertaining as the programs on CBS or NBC, Harley said, and the proof was in such series as the 1951 docudrama The Jeffersonian Heritage, with Jefferson's words elegantly enunciated by Claude Rains.
Ford Foundation officials were impressed. "In a way," Harley said, "educational radio gave the start for public television."
Harley also looked back at the tense period during the Nixon Administration when the White House canned CPB's first president, John Macy, and brought in Henry Loomis, who "wanted to crack down" on PBS programming.
Loomis happened to be in the audience and later stood up to deny the charge. He told Nixon aides that he wouldn't work against public affairs programming on public TV, he said. Though Nixon's assistants did write memos about cracking down on PBS, "that doesn't mean it was accepted or anybody did anything about it," Loomis said.
On the second day of the conference, nostalgia gave way to admonitions about the future.
Chalmers "Chuck" Marquis — public TV's man on Capitol Hill for more than two decades — noted that federal aid generally has declined as a portion of the field's funding. "That tells you a great deal about what programming will be," said Marquis, candidly, "because the programming follows the money."
Loomis, the second CPB president, observed that the quality of appointees to the CPB Board quickly declined from the "first-class people" appointed by Lyndon Johnson to a group of "fourth- or fifth-level patronage" appointees and "ideologues."
James Loper, former president of KCET in Los Angeles, who went on to run the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, advised public TV stations to pay no attention to ratings and to take Lawrence Welk reruns off the air. "We don't want to look like a cheap imitation of the Family Channel," he said.
Bob Schenkkan, former head of KLRU in Austin, agreed that education holds a special power as a motivator of supporters, including station board members. "When you say something to that board about education," he said, "everybody sits up a little straighter. ... There is an enormous amount of concern out there about the education of children."
In an address linking past to future, Nebraska ETV General Manager Jack McBride urged pubcasters to avoid "overemphasis on audience numbers," which could turn PTV away from "the ideals of the pioneers."
"The opportunities are greater in the future if our successors are wise enough to take advantage of them," McBride said. But he said it remains a "serious, serious question" who will replace the current generation of station leaders.
Margaret Chisholm, a prominent lay board member from Seattle, specifically urged the field to found a "leadership institute" that would identify potential leaders and train them for the future.
Mike Soper and Sandy Welch, two of the younger participants, voiced their own worries. Soper, the development chief at WETA in Washington, wondered how well the field can compete for bright newcomers. "How do we paint a bright future for public broadcasting," he asked, "instead of an uncertain future?"
McBride could offer no assurance. Public broadcasting's future will always be indefinite, he said. "I do not think the day will ever come when we have truly adequate funding."
John Witherspoon, a onetime CPB official now teaching at San Diego State University, was more encouraging by implication: "If [Mike Soper] thinks the future is uncertain today, he should have been here in 1963."
Like Soper, Welch, executive v.p. for education at PBS, said that she was concerned that many workers in the field today don't know its history or understand its ideals. She picked up on a point made earlier by McBride: "They're struggling, because we currently have no systematized program of training for people to move through the ranks."
In her 20 years at Kentucky ETV, before coming to PBS, Welch said her boss, Len Press, had given his staffers that kind of "training and nurturing."
"He made it clear what business we were in — helping people. We were there to help the people no one else was helping."
She thanked Press for occasionally "yanking us by the hair."
"We had the Nielsen book at KET, but we hid it whenever Len came in the room."
And Welch testified to Press's editorial integrity. "It was a miracle that he could cozy up to all those governors and legislators, and never let them touch the programming."
As Witherspoon and others have observed, Welch contended that public broadcasting was a good way to spend a life.
She remembered the advent of ETV in Lexington, Ky., in 1968, when she was a school librarian and saw kids nearly "riot" to get copies of The Wind in the Willows after the children's book was featured on educational TV's reading series Cover to Cover.
"Seeing youngsters respond, seeing adults with tears streaming down their faces because they learned to read — these are the rewards I am so enriched by."
But would today's public broadcasters be motivated in the same way? Though some folks had doubts, Schenkkan said he isn't too worried about a shortage of younger idealists. "If we give them the opportunity to participate in a new crusade," he predicted, "I think they'll pick up their swords and their shields and be off to the Holy Land."
The old-timers wandered curiously among the shelves, munching cookies and poking into file boxes, looking casually for their footprints in the history of public broadcasting.
It was the concluding field trip of this month's Public Broadcasting Reunion — a bus ride from Washington to nearby University of Maryland at College Park, where the new National Public Broadcasting Archives is open for business.
Donald R. McNeil, the founding director, and Thomas Connors, his designated successor, showed off a facility that already has:
Five hundred file boxes from Children's Television Workshop are on the way, and 800 more reels from NPR.
Standing in the high-ceilinged, half-empty room in the basement of the university's Hornbake Library, Connors invited the visitors to talk with the archives about old correspondence, reports and other items that might make the day of some future historian.
Many irreplaceble files and programs were snatched from the jaws of a dumpster by history-conscious station staffers. Indeed, McNeil said the idea for the archives arose when longtime PTV lobbyist Chuck Marquis mentioned wearily that he'd just dumped 119 old file folders.
That conversation, circa 1988, drew McNeil back to the world of archives where he'd worked soon after receiving his history degree in Madison. He managed the Wisconsin State Historical Society's archives before going on to high university posts in Wisconsin, Maine and California and heading the University of Mid-America distance-learning network in the '80s.
The new archives project broadened after McNeil proposed it to the University of Maryland, said H. Joanne Harrar, the university's director of libraries. She consulted Maryland faculty, who expressed interest in the papers but really wanted access to the audio and video.
McNeil set to work soliciting donations of cash for the first four years of operation — nearly $800,000, including $200,000 from CPB, $135,000 from the Ford Foundation and $100,000 from PBS — as well as the donations of files and programs that make up the archives. The facility was dedicated in 1990 and opened to users (with appointments) this year, and will become a university project, directed by Connors on Jan. 1.
With this archives up and running, the university is talking with other media-related repositories about locating on campus. The struggling Broadcast Pioneers Library, long housed at the National Association of Broadcasters, has approved a proposed move to the campus. The university is talking with PBS about obtaining part of its videotape library. And the National Archives is expected to move a big chunk of its collection, including its audiovisual division, to the campus.
The audio, video and film deposits of the public broadcasting archives are housed upstairs from the paper storage and supervised by Allan Rough, head of the library's nonprint media services. Rough plans to eventually preserve audio and video in duplicate analog and digital forms "to hedge our bets."
The value of archives was demonstrated during the Washington reunion, when retired public broadcasting leader William Harley asked for a recording of a significant radio series to play during his remarks.
Though archivists couldn't find The Jeffersonian Heritage where it was expected to be, they had the contacts to quickly track it down at NPR, which had kept it in its library.
This emergency search behind him, Connors stood among his visitors, leafing through the fully indexed, boxed papers of one of their elder colleagues. "Making order out of chaos," he remarked, "is very satisfying work."
Web page posted Oct. 29, 1999
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