50th Anniversary Special Recalls Pleasant Memories For Pioneer Of Thirteen

By Nancy K. Crevier

“Can you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street?” is a question people have been asking ever since the educational children’s television show first aired in 1970. Newtown resident Ray Sipherd can answer that, having walked the path that led to Sesame Street, where he was a writer for the first 17 years of the show.

Mr Sipherd’s journey to Sesame Street and beyond grew out of his affiliation with Channel 13 WNET (known as Thirteen), and as one of the original writers for the public television channel, he is featured in a special program to be aired on Channel 13 on Monday, September 17, at 8 pm. For those who cannot wait, the full interview with Mr Sipherd can be viewed at watch.thirteen.org (pick Thirteen Specials, then Pioneers of Thirteen: Ray Sipherd). The interview is one of several included in the 50th anniversary celebration of Thirteen’s initial airdate, September 16, 1962.

“The irony of this,” chuckled Mr Sipherd during a recent interview, “is that they are preempting the Antiques Roadshow. It’s kind of like replacing one antique with another, isn’t it?”

As a young man, Mr Sipherd planned to go into theater, writing plays. He majored in English and drama at Yale University and spent his summers working at Westport Playhouse. But he had the opportunity to work as an assistant to producer Jack Landau at CBS, doing some scriptwriting for dramas and suggesting ideas for shows, as well as reading submissions cold sent to the studio, and that changed the course of his career.

“Those were what they call the golden years of television. TV was still young then and innovative,” he said. It was while he worked for CBS that he came to know comic novelist Peter DeVries, who offered to set him up for an offer from the New Yorker Magazine, as a fact checker. At about the same time, his colleague Charles Schulz told Mr Sipherd he was moving to the new public television station Channel 13, as program director, and asked if he would like to go, too. A group of wealthy New Yorkers had taken on the idea of a public television station and were making it happen in the New York area.

It was a difficult decision.

“Should I go with the chance to become a New Yorker writer eventually, or go with the possibility of becoming a producer at Thirteen? All of life is making choices, though, and I’m not sorry I made the choice I did, to go with Thirteen,” reflected Mr Sipherd. It was a risk, but young and unmarried, he saw it as an exciting opportunity.

Mr Sipherd was hired at Thirteen as an associate producer in the Arts and Cultural Division.

“We did documentaries and features. It captivated me immediately. The studio experience was magical: the cables laid out on the floor, the scenery lighted. It was another world,” he said. Prior to 1962, an earlier conception of Channel 13 had sponsored a weekly theatrical play, but nothing like this new focus on educational, noncommercial television had been done before.

One of his earliest assignments was writing and putting together a remote show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, about the collection of Joseph Hirschhorn.

In 1963, he produced “Years Without Harvest,” based on a Museum of Modern Art photo show, an historic documentary on the farm depression and Dust Bowl of the 1930s. “I went to the New York Public Library, where they had a complete WPA collection of photos, and chose 220 photographs,” Mr Sipherd said. Rather than straight narration, he chose excerpts from The Grapes of Wrath and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, as well as a reading of a “dry government report on farm tenancy,” he said, over a background of music. “It was done in the Ken Burns style, before the Ken Burns style existed,” Mr Sipherd said. It was the groundbreaking type of show that was gaining the new Thirteen an audience, and which was nominated for an Emmy that year.

Only a grainy 16 mm kinescope of that show exists today, said Mr Sipherd, because in a constant struggle to stay solvent, Thirteen in the early days reused tapes to record new shows. Many original shows are lost, he said, as they were not put on kinescope. He paid for the cost of converting “Years Without Harvest” to kinescope, himself.

‘All Things Considered’

In 1964, Mr Sipherd introduced Thirteen television viewers to a new 1½-hour show about arts and culture in New York City. All Things Considered was “a potpourri of what was a happening weekly in the City,” Mr Sipherd said. Still working under the constraints of an actors’ union strike against Thirteen that had plagued them since airing in 1962, the first All Things Considered featured a review of the current opera opening.

“Because we still couldn’t use union actors, a friend of mine put on a tux and reviewed the production. Mary Poppins opened in movie theaters that week, as well, so we had a local critic review the film,” he said. A longer segment involved an interview with educator Paul Goodman. “Then we decided we needed some humor to break up the talking heads, and I thought of a friend of mine from Yale, a stand-up comic. I told him he could choose any subject and do a comic monologue,” said Mr Sipherd. Dick Cavett did a fine job.

As public television and radio shows have always done, Thirteen fought a constant battle for funding.

“We relied on private donations, strictly,” Mr Sipherd said, and he became the producer for the first fundraising special on Thirteen.

“I picked some readers: Lee Remick, James Earl Jones, and Julie Harris, and four young singers from New Jersey — Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, and in between, we then asked for money. Maybe,” mused Mr Sipherd, “it didn’t work so well.”

In 1966, due to budgetary constraints, Mr Sipherd and two dozen other producers were let go by Thirteen, reducing the number of producers to just four.

“It was a cordial departure, though,” he stressed, “and I did always feel a kindred spirit with Channel 13.”

So how did he get to Sesame Street?

After he was fired, he took a job writing for soap operas. “I cringed, but for a young writer who wants to write drama, it’s road work. You’re writing every day and get to see it on television. You get to see what does and doesn’t work,” he said.

He was also freelancing, producing a documentary for CBS and a children’s program for NBC. Then a former Thirteen colleague, Joan Cooney, contacted him about an idea she was putting together for a children’s television series. “I had written some scripts for art shows for Joan. She had also left Thirteen by then,” he said.

When Ms Cooney mentioned Jim Henson and several other creative people Mr Sipherd had known at Yale and CBS, he was intrigued. He worked up a couple of scripts for Sesame Street’s stars Bert, Ernie, Big Bird, Oscar, and the other street puppets.

“My first script was the Thursday show of the first week, ‘Number 4,’” recalled Mr Sipherd. It was the beginning of a 17-year relationship with the Sesame Street puppeteers Jim Henson and Frank Oz, and the collection of now-famous puppets. It was also a reconnection to Thirteen, which picked up the popular education children’s program from the newly formed Public Broadcasting Station (PBS).

“Sesame Street was great fun. Jim Henson was a comic genius. It was a hoot,” said Mr Sipherd, also praising the musical talent of Joe Raposo, who did most of the music for the program.

In 1986, Mr Sipherd moved out of the Sesame Street neighborhood to pursue his other writing interests. He is the author of The Christmas Store, Courtship of Peggy McCoy, Dance of the Scarecrows, The Devil’s Hawk, and a collection of short stories, as well as a number of children’s books. He is currently working on a play.

“It’s about the life of Mathew Brady, the Civil War photographer, and I’m pretty excited about it,” he said.

He is pleased to have been asked to participate in the 50th anniversary celebration of Thirteen, where he first experienced the thrills of early television. Reminded by his friend Joan Cooney last year of the upcoming 50th anniversary of Thirteen, Mr Sipherd contacted the Thirteen general manager, Neal Shapiro, and offered his help.

“The interview was originally scheduled during last year’s October storm, but obviously, I couldn’t get to it,” he said. Instead, it was filmed in New York City in December.

If he watches broadcast television, Mr Sipherd said, it often is Thirteen that he chooses. The producers of the early 1960s could not even image the technology that would exist 50 years later, said Mr Sipherd.

“We didn’t even have color television yet, then,” he laughed. “But I see certain techniques today, watching television, and I think, ‘I was there first! We helped develop them!’ I have no regrets,” he said, “about taking that chance on Thirteen.”