COONEY, Joan Ganz

(b. 30 November 1929 in Phoenix, Arizona), producer of children's television programs who co-founded and headed the Children's Television Workshop, the company responsible for creating and producing Sesame Street, The Electric Company, 3-2-1 Contact, Square One TV, and other series aired on the Public Broadcasting System, and a pioneer in the licensing of products based on television characters.

Cooney was the youngest of three children born to Sylvan C. Ganz, a banker, and Pauline (Reardan) Ganz, a homemaker. Cooney's father was Jewish, but her mother was a practicing Roman Catholic who raised her children in that faith. Cooney attended both parochial and public schools, graduating from North Phoenix High School in 1947. She attended the Dominican College of San Rafael in California before transferring to and graduating from the University of Arizona in Tucson, cum laude, with a B.A. in education in 1951.

After briefly working as a reporter for the Arizona Republic in Phoenix, Cooney decided to work in the television industry, partly owing to the influence of Father James Keller, founder of the Christopher movement, whom she greatly admired. "Father Keller encouraged idealistic people—people who wanted to do good—to go into media … I … took that … seriously and came to New York in 1954 to get into … television." Using her family connections, Cooney was introduced to David Sarnoff, chair of the Radio Corporation of America, who arranged a job for her in the National Broadcasting Company's publicity department. A year later she became a publicist for the prestigious Columbia Broadcasting System drama series the United States Steel Hour.

By the early 1960s, however, most of the high-quality programs that are remembered as making up "the golden age of television" had been cancelled in favor of more profitable, formulaic dramas and situation comedies. Cooney concluded that there was little room in commercial television for the kind of work she hoped to do, and in 1962 she went to work for the nonprofit Educational Broadcasting Corporation, which had just been awarded the license to operate New York City's Channel Thirteen. Taking a 25 percent pay cut, she became the producer of Court of Reason, a weekly series that pitted teams of experts debating each other on the day's issues.

In 1964 she met Timothy J. Cooney, a civil rights activist, whom she married later that year; they were divorced in 1975 and had no children. At his urging she produced a documentary, "A Chance at the Beginning," concerning the pilot program being conducted at a Harlem school for what would eventually become Headstart. The film was later bought by Project Headstart and used for promotional and recruiting purposes. In 1966 Cooney produced a three-hour television documentary, Poverty, Anti-Poverty, and the Poor, for which she won her first Emmy Award. A bright career as a producer of public affairs documentaries beckoned.

In 1966, Cooney hosted a dinner party at her apartment that included Lloyd Morrisette, the head of the Carnegie Foundation. At this party a conversation took place that led to the creation of Sesame Street. "[We were] talking about the great educational potential of television and how it was untapped. Something clicked in Lloyd's mind. Carnegie … was doing research on child development—cognitive acquisition in children." Impressed by Cooney's degree in education, the documentary on preschool education she had done, and her twelve years of experience in television, Morrisette hired her to conduct a study. Her report, "The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education," which was submitted later that year, was among the first to catalog basic facts about the influence that television had exerted on family life in America during its two decades of existence. More than 96 percent of American homes had television sets, and they were in operation for approximately sixty hours per week, thus, on a cumulative basis, stimulating children's cognitive abilities for an entire year before they entered school. The report expressed the hope that with the expert development of educational programs, television might function positively for preschoolers as a "classroom without walls."

The Children's Television Workshop (CTW) was founded in 1968 as a direct result of the report, with an $8 million budget that came from the Carnegie Foundation, other private foundations, and federal funds. Cooney, as head of CTW, initiated a series of seminars, bringing together experts in education and television to gather input for programming ideas. The result was a consensus on five curriculum goals for a program aimed at preschoolers. Three were simple: recognition of the letters of the alphabet, recognition of the numbers one through ten, and the introduction of new vocabulary words. Two goals were more complex: exercise of the child's early reasoning skills and, as Cooney put it, "increased awareness of self and world." Cooney served as president of CTW in 1970, chair and chief executive officer in 1988, and chair of the executive committee in 1990.

While content goals are basic for all educational television programs, Cooney and her team of collaborators departed from previous attempts by never losing sight of the medium in which they were working. Studies were conducted for CTW that involved observing children while they watched television in order to learn what attracted them. "[We] found that kids were fascinated by commercials with fast actions, catchy music, and cartoons. We wanted our show to jump and move," she told Reader's Digest.

Sesame Street, whose title was taken from the "Open Sesame" phrase in Tales from the Arabian Nights, premiered on 10 November 1969. It was indeed unlike any previous children's television program, with an accelerated pace that resembled Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, then the most popular show on prime-time television. Sesame Street also made full use of children's familiarity with television convention, with letters and numbers "sponsoring" the program and presenting "commercials" for themselves. Most critics loved it, praising Cooney for her bold innovations and for the show's urban setting, racially integrated cast, and multicultural emphasis. (Mississippi Public Television dropped Sesame Street temporarily because of its racial integration.) Others criticized her for capitulating to the medium's fast-cutting format, which they thought was destroying the attention span of children and thus their ability to learn, regardless of content. Cooney underwent a radical double mastectomy for breast cancer in 1975. In 1980 she married Peter G. Peterson, chairman of the Bell and Howell Company, and together they established a foundation to support children's television programs.

Sesame Street is one of the most successful television programs of any type in terms of longevity and worldwide popularity, reaching an estimated 235 million viewers each week. Seventeen licensed foreign productions make the show available in more than 140 countries around the world. After the success of Sesame Street, CTW went on to expand programming to reach older children with The Electric Company (1971) and Feelin' Good (1974). More CTW shows focused on science, in 3-2-1 Contact (1980); mathematics, in Square One TV (1987); and teenage writing, in Ghostwriter (1992).

Sesame Street survived to become an institution of American culture, something that few noncommercial television series have achieved. Cooney has won numerous honors as a television producer, including several Emmy, Peabody, and Christopher Awards, and she has emerged as a dominant figure in children's television. In 1989 she won an Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 1995 she was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest national award given to a civilian. In 1999, after three decades on public television, Cooney brought CTW into a joint broadcasting venture with the commercial cable channel Nickelodeon, known as Noggin, a digital cable channel aimed at fast learners. She also initiated CTW's educational Web site and CTW's continuing production of magazines, software, toys, films, and community outreach programs for children.

There is no autobiography or biography of Cooney, but biographical information is in Cary O'Dell, Women Pioneers in Television (1996), and David Stewart, The PBS Companion: A History of Public Television (1999). Articles about Cooney include "The First Lady of Sesame Street," Broadcasting (7 June 1971); "Growing Up with Joan Ganz Cooney," Public Telecommunications Review (Nov.–Dec. 1978); "Cooney Casts Light on a Vision," Variety (13 Dec. 1989); and "Street Smart," People Weekly (2 Nov. 1998). Cooney also wrote the foreword for David Borgenicht, Sesame Street Unpaved: Scripts, Stories, Secrets, and Songs (1998), which is an insider's guide for adults that includes interviews and photographs of the Sesame Street family.

David Marc