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. Continue reading →