Joan Ganz Cooney was born November 30, 1929, in Phoenix, Arizona, to a wealthy banking family with both Jewish and Catholic heritage.

Her grandfather, Emil Ganz, was a German Jew who came to America just before the Civil War, moved to Georgia and fought with the Confederate Army.

After the war, he moved west and settled in Phoenix, where he opened a liquor store and later became president of a local bank.

He was a Democrat who was elected mayor of Phoenix three times.

Joan's mother, Pauline Reardon Ganz, was a Catholic from Michigan; her father, Sylvan Cleveland Ganz, was president of his father's bank for 44 years.

“I was raised in the most conventional way,” Joan said, “raised to be a housewife and mother, to work in an interesting job when I got out of college, and to marry at the appropriate time, which would have been 25.”

Joan grew up within a “countryclub atmosphere,” but she became concerned about poverty in high school.

She was inspired by Father James Keller, a Maryknoll priest who founded The Christophers, a group that encouraged people to use their God-given talents to make a positive difference in the world.

The movement borrowed an ancient Chinese proverb: “It's better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.”

She went to the Dominican College of San Raphael, a Catholic college in California, but transferred to the University of Arizona, where she graduated with a bachelor's degree in education in 1951.

Joan had no interest in teaching.

So right after college, she and a friend moved to Washington, DC, to work as clerks using a typewriter to create letters and other documents for the State Department.

“I just wanted to see what it was like to live in Washington and work for the federal government.”

She returned to Phoenix for a year to work on the local newspaper, The Arizona Republic, and save money for her next goal: moving to New York City.

Her mother said: “You know you are a big fish in a little pond in Phoenix; why do you want to be a little fish in a big pond?”

Joan's response: “How do you know I won't be a big fish in a big pond?”

Joan was 23 when she arrived in New York in the fall of 1953.

“When I came to New York I thought I would probably work in print, but of course this great new medium of television was blossoming.”

Her newspaper work helped her get an entry-level job in RCA's publicity department, which quickly led to her getting a job making $65 a week writing summaries of soap operas for the NBC television network.

In 1954, she stepped up to a job as a publicist for U.S. Steel Corporation on their show, The U.S. Steel Hour (ABC, 1953-55; CBS, 1955-63), which aired a variety of critically praised dramas.

She was aware of the emergence of educational television, and became “obsessed” with being part of it.

“It just hit me as exactly what I wanted to do with my life,” she said.

“I wanted to see the medium do constructive things, and I could see that that was really the way.”

When WNDT, Channel 13, established a public television station in New York in 1962, she jumped at the opportunity to join, even though she knew it meant a cut in pay.

She tried to get a job as a publicist, but the general manager said they didn't need publicists; they needed producers, particularly one for a weekly live debate show called Court of Reason.

She had no experience as a producer, but was undeterred.

She told the general manager: “I don't know all the people personally that you would have on the air, but I know what the issues are and I know who the people are who espouse what positions on what issues. I can do that show.”

She was hired-and her yearly pay fell from $12,000 at U.S. Steel to $9,000 on Channel 13.

“I had a thousand dollars in the bank,” she said; “I figured I would need a hundred dollars more a month to live, but by the time I ran out of money, I would get a raise, and that's just the way it worked out.”

Joan graduated to short documentaries.

One of her suppliers for ideas was Tim Cooney, director of public relations for the New York City Department of Labor.

He called her in 1964 to alert her to an experimental reading program underway with four-yearolds in Harlem.

This experiment-like one being conducted by psychologist Susan Gray in Tennessee-would become a model for the inception of Head Start that year.

Joan met with researchers Lillian and Martin Deutsch and produced a documentary called A Chance at the Beginning.

After Head Start was launched, the federal program bought 125 prints of the documentary to use as training films for their teachers.

Joan married Cooney in February 1964.

Her June 1965 documentary called Poverty, Anti-Poverty and the Poor caught the attention of Jack Gould, an influential television critic for The New York Times.

He described the format as similar to a “teach-in” held earlier in Washington, DC, joining public officials, experts and the general public.

“The floor participants queued up before microphones in the aisles and let fly with statements, criticisms, challenges and, occasionally, questions.”

By early 1966, Joan said she “had become absolutely involved intellectually and spiritually with the Civil Rights movement and with the educational deficit that poverty created; I was not necessarily focused on young children, though.”

That moment came at a dinner party she held at her apartment in February 1966.

For the next three years, she was involved in a swirl of activity that would bring together the educational experts, television artists and the money that would enable the launch of the first season of Sesame Street in 1969-70.

Many Americans were hoping for sunshine and sweetness as the 1969-70 television season opened, and what little there was came from an improbable source: a new television show for preschoolers called Sesame Street.

The show first aired as the Vietnam War and protests against it were reaching a feverish pitch.

Four protesters were shot and killed on the campus of Kent State University in Ohio in May 1970.

It was also a time when interest in preschool education was high and disdain for popular television intense.

“The timing was incredible,” Joan said. “Every night the TV set brought you bad news. Finally, it was as if the public was saying ‘So do something!’ to the TV set, and one day they turned on the TV set and the TV set did something. And everyone understood that, for a change, TV was doing something.

“There was huge idealism because we were trying to reach inner-city children as well as others.”

The way to Sesame Street had begun in the early 1960s when Joan met Lloyd N. Morrisett, who would become the show's co-creator.

Morrisett was a psychologist and executive at the Carnegie Corporation of New York, which was established by steel mill owner Andrew Carnegie in 1911 “to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding.”

Morrisett was about the same age as Joan.

He moved to New York in 1959 to work for Carnegie, one of the nation's biggest private funders for educational and social improvement programs.

He and Joan met a couple years later.

In the early 1960s, Carnegie became increasingly interested in funding programs that would help children from poor households be successful in school.

While several projects were funded, all were experiments involving only a few hundred children.

Morrisett and his wife, Mary, were bemused and not a little worried when they woke up 6 a.m. on a Sunday morning in 1965 and found their three-year-old daughter, Sarah, had turned on the television herself and was intently watching.

Even more concerning was that the only thing on the screen at that hour was what was a test pattern-a still image that was broadcast when the network was “off the air.”

For Morrisett, it helped reinforce his belief in the “the utter fascination that little kids had with television.”

He brought up the subject at a dinner party hosted by Joan and her husband in February 1966.

As they chatted, Lloyd Morrisett asked: “Do you think television could be used to teach children?”

“Lloyd talked about the possibility of Carnegie financing…A little three-month study,” Joan said, “where [an] investigator would go around the country talking to various child development people.

“I didn't know until that moment that I would be interested,” Joan said. “I suddenly saw that this was a way of making television do something for the people that needed the help.”

With a $15,000 Carnegie grant to WNDT to cover Joan's salary and expenses, she traveled around the country from June to October 1966 talking with educators and child development psychologists.

Joan left public television station WNDT in early 1967 and became an employee at Carnegie, where she would continue to shape the show.

This was just a few years after the 1965 launch of Head Start, and in the peak of the “preschool moment.”

Educators, researchers and parents were keenly interested in early childhood education, not only as a way to help all children succeed in school, but especially to help children from impoverished backgrounds overcome their social obstacles.

And the poor included a disproportionate number of black households.

The preschool movement coincided with the Civil Rights movement.

While Joan knew little about preschool educational theories, she, like many white liberals, supported the efforts of blacks to end segregation and gain equal footing in all spheres of life, from education to housing.

But specifically targeting minority children had its own dangers.

Louis Housman, a former commercial TV executive and a federal government advisor on the project, said a minority-oriented show would draw the ire of black parents who would consider it “demeaning” and “patronizing,” while driving away the white, middle-class audience.

Joan and Morrisett were continually asked by potential backers whether television could teach.

She and Morrisett believed it could.

After all, preschoolers were memorizing television commercials for products ranging from bread to beer.

Joan decided that, while the creative people would be the final judges of what went on the air, they would work closely with educators and researchers to test and improve the show at every step.

They enlisted funders to a show that would be an experiment.

By early 1968, Joan and Morrisett had lined up $8 million in funding for a two-year experimental project that would produce six months of programs for the 1969-70 season.

Half came from federal government sources, including $650,000 from Head Start.

The rest came from Carnegie, the Ford Foundation, and other private sources; Carnegie's $1.5 million grant was one of its largest ever.

With the funding in place, Carnegie announced in March 1968 the creation of the Children's Television Workshop with Joan as its executive director.

Joan took to heart a key piece of advice from a public television executive: Keep the goals for the program simple and modest.

“We would teach the alphabet, the recitation of the alphabet, recognition of letters, recognition of numbers when you see them, certain sounds of letters; because we were phonetic, we believed that phonics was the way to go, that learning the sounds of letters was useful.”

Joan had hired David D. Connell as executive producer.

Connell had the same role for 12 years with the company that produced Captain Kangaroo,an hour-long children's television show on CBS since 1955.

How would the show's producers know if they were truly engaging the preschoolers?

The researchers would watch them.

Young actor James Earl Jones caught the attention of the test audiences by reciting the alphabet slowly in his deep voice.

Each letter appeared above his head a moment before Jones pronounced it, and researchers saw the value of repetition as the kids began to shout each letter before Jones said it.

The insert made it into the show's second episode in 1969.

The show's street scenes were originally filmed without any puppets—a move intended to clearly separate the show's “real” parts from “fantasy” ones.

But researchers saw kids' attention fall away on the street scenes, and pick up only when the show switched to animation or puppets.

“So it turned into a street where Oscar can come out of a trash can or Big Bird can come wandering by,” Connell said.

Jim Henson and his Muppets were hired for the project in 1968, and the Muppets multiplied with researchers' suggestions.

Suggestion: Children ought to be taught that it's okay not to be happy all the time, and not to be pleasant all the time.

Result: Oscar the Grouch.

Suggestion: Show a child being smarter than the adults, so that you're modeling smart kids.

Result: Bert and Ernie.

Suggestion: Show a child as a child is—awkward and forever asking questions.

Result: Big Bird.

One of the last elements to fall into place was the show's name.

The Muppets acted out the tortured naming process in a promotional video shown to potential funders in 1968.

After a board of grousing Muppets came up with a name spanning a few dozen words, Kermit the Frog said, “Why don't you call your show ‘Sesame Street.’ You know, like ‘open sesame.’ It kind of gives the idea of a street where neat things happen.”

After the first season, the workshop released a study finding that 90 percent of preschoolers surveyed in a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn had seen Sesame Street in its first season.

The 611 children surveyed lived in households with TV sets, and did not go off to daycare or nursery schools.

Of them, 60 percent saw the show at least once a day.

Separately, the independent Nielsen Rating Service estimated that half of the nation's 12 million children ages three to five had watched Sesame Street in its first season.

Studies of 120 children in Maine, New York, and Tennessee showed thinking and reading skills improved more among preschoolers who watched the show compared with those who did not.

The show won an Emmy award in 1970 for Outstanding Achievement in Children's Programming.

And there were other signs of success.

“Rubber Duckie,” Ernie's signature tribute song to his beloved bathtub toy, reached No. 16 on Billboard's “Hot 100 Singles” chart in 1970.

The song was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Recording for Children, but it lost to The Sesame Street Book & Record, which included the song.

And the weekly news magazine Time featured Sesame Street in its November 23, 1970, issue.

“When Big Bird hit the cover of Time, I knew we had something that would last forever,” Joan said.

The Workshop didn't want to depend on government for funding.

Most foundations like Carnegie made large grants to start up projects, expecting that recipients would find their own funds to continue the programs—usually government funds.

The Workshop sought a new funding model for Sesame Street.

By April 1970, Joan was talking about selling books and records to reinforce the show's lessons—and raise money.

That month, the Children's Television Workshop broke away from its parent, National Educational Television, and became a non-profit company with Joan as its president.

While Sesame Street allowed the public to meet the Muppets, it also brought them into a world that was urban and integrated.

A cast with educated black men and women in prominent roles might have escaped the notice of preschool viewers, but it was one of the most noticeable aspects of the show to older children and adults—both black and white—who had grown up with their own notions of racial identity.

“It was the first show that really worked at integration—not only black and white men and women, but Muppets and human beings,” Joan said.

“It was a show that really taught kindness to one another.”

The racially mixed cast scared public officials in Mississippi.

The state was one of the last to start an educational television network, and its first station in the state went on the air February 1, 1970, in Jackson, the state capital.

Shortly afterward, the state legislature voted to spend $5.3 million to establish stations across the state.

But the all-white state commission overseeing educational television voted to postpone showing Sesame Street even though it cost the state no money to air it.

The New York Times carried a short news story noting that the commission chairman, Jackson banker James McKay, was the son-in-law of Jackson's former mayor, Allen Thompson.

“Mr. Thompson is president and leading spokesman for FOCUS, a new group in Mississippi that is seeking to re-establish the principle of ‘freedom of choice’ in public schools.”

But the most telling aspect of the outcry was that some of the loudest voices were Mississippians.

Newspaper editorials blasted the decision, and WDAM, a commercial station in Jackson, said it would offer airtime for Sesame Street if the commission didn't reverse its decision when it met again later that month.

The Delta Democratic-Times, a family-owned newspaper in Greenville whose editor was Hodding Carter III, published two editorials languidly eviscerating the commission for the blocking of Big Bird.

The May 5 editorial read: “We are penalized again, and our children more than adults, by the official determination to pretend that reality doesn't exist.”

On May 12, the Carters, who were longtime Democrats, took another tack: a tongue-in-cheek appeal to the Republican sensibilities of some of its readers.

The editorial noted Sesame Street had the seal of approval from Republican Vice President Spiro Agnew.

The editorial suggested, “white Mississippians, who like what he has to say about left-wing intellectuals, radical youths and school busing,” should embrace the show and claim victory in the name of President Nixon's goal of bridging the generation gap.

“We can't think of a bigger gap than between our three-year-olds' world and our own.”

And, by following Agnew, “radicals in the kindergarten would be thwarted.”

In late May, the commission met again and reversed its decision.