Obituary: NAEB’s Bill Harley, statesman in a pivotal period for pubcasting
"Bill was one hell of a bridge-builder. He could adjudicate things between people and institutions that were clearly almost impossible for others," recalls Karl Schmidt about Bill Harley. "He could grin and smile and disarm your argument almost immediately."
William Gardner Harley, 87, who died Nov. 7 after a long illness, was remembered this month as public broadcasting's leading statesman, who led the field's major association during the steepest part of its ascent into national prominence.
"The wonderful thing about Bill Harley was that he could make peace with anybody--he never got hot-tempered in a meeting," says Chalmers Marquis, a former NAEB associate who recently retired as public TV's longtime voice on Capitol Hill. "Bill was absolutely the guy you wanted to have at a hearing. The congressional folks could have rapport with him. The rest of us looked kind of different."
Between 1960 and 1975, Harley served as president of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters, a diverse family of pubcasters that ranged from penniless college radio stations to major-market TV operations and state networks. NAEB, Harley once said, was "held together by a shared mission, Scotch tape and just enough money to do what it had to do."
And by Harley himself. As Marquis testifies, "Harley was the cement that held all those things together."
Impressing Ford
Before his NAEB years, Harley had a career in education and radio, teaching at the University of Wisconsin since 1936 and serving as program director of its state radio network since 1940. He lived across Lake Mendota from the university, and when the lake wasn't frozen, he motored to WHA, wearing a yachting cap, recalls Schmidt, a WHA colleague who later produced the national Earplay radio drama series.
Harley's involvement in NAEB dated back to 1950, when it held its Allerton House seminars at the University of Illinois. Already 25 years old, NAEB had become the national clearinghouse for educational radio, operating a tape distribution network and leading the campaign for the reserved FM frequencies, approved by the FCC in 1940 and 1945. TV channels would be reserved in 1952.
Harley took a leave of absence in 1952 to supervise NAEB's Adult Education Project, which aimed to show that radio programs could be both educational and appealing. Backed with $300,000 from the Ford Foundation's Fund for Adult Education, the project produced The Jeffersonian Heritage with Claude Rains, a cultural anthropology series called Ways of Mankind and People Under Communism, made in conjunction with Russian scholars at Harvard University. Much of the production work was actually done at the CBC in Toronto, according to Schmidt.
In a 1993 talk to fellow public broadcasting "old timers," Harley said the early-1950s radio project eventually helped launch educational TV in the 1960s by impressing the Ford Foundation, which became the first major funder of public TV's start-up.
"Ford saw they could entrust someone like Bill to do that work," says Schmidt. "He demonstrated with those series that a little bit of money could go a long way, if you had it."
Harley was already putting his hopes in television, though he remained deeply connected with educational radio and its long struggle. In 1954, he became the first head of the university's WHA-TV in Madison, the fourth ETV station in the country. In 1959, he said later, NAEB elected him president because its leaders thought he "had feet in both camps."
"A guy they wanted at the helm"
The new president was tall and handsome, with a voice befitting the former chief announcer of WHA. Among a number of gifted leaders in NAEB, Harley had a rare combination of skills, including leadership, says Prof. Robert Avery, a media historian at the University of Utah. "People recognized that this was a guy they wanted at the helm. He was revered by his contemporaries. When he spoke, he spoke with credibility and integrity."
"What was paramount about Harley's contribution," Avery says, "was that he moved the NAEB from what was an academic association to a professional organization that gave direction to the whole movement."
He was a masterly organizer, says James Fellows, then an NAEB staffer and later Harley's successor as NAEB president. "He had the ability to extract from people what was really distinctive about them and put the bothersome stuff toward the side."
Soon after taking office in NAEB, Harley proposed that NAEB move its headquarters from Urbana to Washington, "where the action was," as he said later. The group's executive secretary, Harry Skornia, was set to head the new D.C. office (taking the title of president), but Skornia opted to take a faculty job in Urbana, and it was Harley who opened the Washington office in 1960.
Washington connections enabled NAEB to launch a landmark experiment with television in the island territory of American Samoa, a six-channel system led by Vernon Bronson and funded by the Kennedy Administration.
"It demonstrated without any question that you could undertake a major program of educational reform through intelligent use of television, with related materials," says Fellows. "Kids were learning Samoan better, they were learning English better ... as a second language."
NAEB continued to suffer a profound divide between its original radio constituents and the TV upstarts, typically a generation younger, including some who expected radio to be entirely supplanted by TV.
"ETV managers operating with budgets in the millions didn't like being placed on the same level with radio station managers with budgets of, say, $40,000," Harley recalled in 1993. When major Eastern TV stations were talking secession, Harley and NAEB leader Richard Hull confronted the rebels in 1963 and "broke the rebellion" by promising to restructure NAEB, creating autonomous divisions for radio, TV, instructional systems and individual members, Harley recalled.
The cure killed NAEB
Perhaps NAEB's greatest hour was the period in the late 1960s when it helped translate enthusiasm for TV's educational potential into the federal law creating CPB. Leonard Marks, NAEB's pro bono attorney and counsel to the Johnson family, became a key intermediary with Senate supporters of federal aid for the field, including Warren Magnuson, John Pastore and Johnson.
The curtain-raiser was Congress's 1962 approval of matching grants to help build educational TV stations.
For the main act, NAEB brought in C. Scott Fletcher, former head of the Fund for Adult Education, to stage the pivotal First Conference on Long-Range Financing in 1964, notably including station trustees, which called for a presidentially appointed commission to study funding options. President Johnson declined to name an official commission, but did prompt the Carnegie Corp. of New York to put up money for the Carnegie Commission on Educational Television. Carnegie's recommendations in 1967 led swiftly to a Second Conference on Long-Range Financing and the Public Broadcasting Act, which created CPB.
In the middle of NAEB's annual conference at Denver in 1967, Harley introduced President Johnson. LBJ was speaking via audio hook-up from Washington, where he was signing the Public Broadcasting Act.
NAEB's radio and TV wings had been so far apart that television's drive for federal aid, up through the Carnegie Commission report, completely omitted radio. But NAEB had brought radio to Washington, too. Its radio division, led by Jerrold Sandler, came from behind and persuaded Congress to expand the Act to include radio as well.
But that victory built on what TV was achieving, says Avery. "It really required the success of educational television to make the argument that radio could do it, too."
Just two years after the creation of CPB, pubcasting faced its first crisis, when President Nixon attempted to put control of PBS programs under his appointed CPB Board. Harley asked Dallas businessman and KERA founder Ralph Rogers to intervene. With Rogers as chair, PBS governance was reorganized with a board of lay "governors," and NAEB's TV and radio divisions were folded into PBS and NPR. "But arresting the disease almost killed one of the parents: NAEB," Harley observed later. Weakened by the loss of major operating functions, plus Reagan Administration cutbacks, NAEB fell into bankruptcy and closed in 1982.
Harley had begun his third career in 1975. A 12-year member of the U.S. National Commission for UNESCO, he became a consultant to the State Department for a decade, travelling widely. His 1993 book, Creative Compromise: the MacBride Commission (University Press of America) dealt with UNESCO's International Commission for the Study of Communications Problems, 1976-80.
Retired in Falls Church, Va., Harley was again wearing his captain's hat, Chuck Marquis recalls, motoring silently around Lake Barcroft in an electric boat, martini in hand.
His family held a funeral Nov. 14 [1998] in Madison. He is survived by his wife, Jewell, two daughters, Cynthia and Linda, and six grandchildren.
Web page created Nov. 23, 1998
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