We recently mentioned how we rarely get to link to Hertzberg written commentary, and here is one more of those rare opportunities. The man he writes about, unknown to any of us at Raxa Collective, was involved in the creation of an institution that several of us were deeply influenced by.
Channel 13, serving the New York City metropolitan area television community, started several Raxa Collective contributors (and many millions of our generation and subsequent generations) on Sesame Street as children in the 1970s, and well into adulthood we were still watching Channel 13’s excellent programming. But none of us remembers this particular show Hertzberg writes about.
Technology, including television, is neither good nor bad; it is how we use it that makes it one or the other or somewhere in between. Television today seems mostly to have abandoned its potential for good, but here was a man continuing to stick to its potential for good well into his 80s. Anyone so important to the history of Channel 13 is a community-building hero, even if it is otherwise difficult to associate television with heroism or community:
In the spring of 1954, my parents finally allowed themselves to bring a TV set into our home—a state-of-the-art DuMont, black and white, of course, with the aspect of an alien insect: spindly legs, pointy antennae, a body entirely dominated by a single bulging, bulbous eye. Reception was spotty: ghosts, chance of snow, iffy horizontal hold. But what a wondrous treat.
Mom and Pop maintained that they had bought the set for the Army-McCarthy hearings. I believed them. I still believe them. But even at our tender ages, my sister (age eight) and I (ten) were perceptive enough to notice that they had grown awfully tired of having to wangle invitations from people as their only access to Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca.
Us kids were permitted a time allowance in front of the set, which we spent mainly on “Howdy Doody,” “Rootie Kazootie,” and “Captain Video.” But there were a couple of shows we could watch for free, off the clock. One was “Omnibus,” a highbrow arts-and-humanities program hosted by Alistair Cooke, who was to fifties television what Adlai Stevenson was to fifties politics. The other was “The Open Mind.”
In 1956, when it first aired, “The Open Mind” was a weekly half hour of calm conversation between two people seated across from each other at a table in an otherwise darkened studio: an always intelligent interlocutor and an almost always intelligent guest. In 1956, the interlocutor was Richard D. Heffner. In 2013, fifty-seven years later, incredibly, “The Open Mind,” still weekly, was still on the air. More incredibly, the interlocutor, as intelligent as ever, was still Richard D. Heffner.
Dick Heffner was thirty-one years old when “The Open Mind” débuted. He was eighty-eight when he died, last Tuesday. His final “Open Mind” will be broadcast this Saturday. There has never been a television career like his and there is unlikely ever to be another. “Meet the Press” has had a longer continuous run—it’s been around since 1947. But it has had eleven regular moderators, and its format is forever subject to the tinkering of nervous network executives. At “The Open Mind,” the format never changed, and, except for a few years during the early sixties when the press of other business kept him away, Heffner was its sole conductor.
He leaves quite a legacy. Every “Open Mind”—there are just short of nineteen hundred episodes—has been preserved, and each one can be viewed, and its transcript read, on the program’s Web archive, cross-referenced by guest, date, topic, and title…
Read the whole post here.
Organikos 