For the past three years, Jim and Anabel Robertson have been collaborating on an oral history of the beginnings of public television as recalled by those who were the pioneers in the medium during the 1950's and 1960's. The project was a natural outgrowth of Jim Robertson's involvement with broadcasting during that period and extending back to his high school days in the late 1930's.
A native of Madison, Jim attended high school and the university there. Anabel was born in Colorado but moved to Madison where she met Jim while both were students at West High School. Jim spent seventeen years in commercial radio and television in Madison, Marinette, Janesville, and Milwaukee, and then twenty-seven years with noncommercial broadcasting in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Madison, and Washington, D.C. From 1959 until 1964, he held various positions with the National Educational Television (NET) and Radio Center in New York City, including that of vice-president for network affairs; and from 1970 to 1973, he was the director of the National Educational Radio division of the National Association of Educational Broadcasters (NAEB) in Washington, D.C. Since 1974, the Robertsons have lived in Port Charlotte, Florida, where they have operated Robertson Associates, Inc., an independent consulting firm in educational communications.
Columns interviewed the Robertsons during their visit to the State Historical Society in December, 1982, to deposit in the Mass Communications History Center the reels and transcripts developed during their project. Working together as they have throughout the project, Anabel and Jim responded to questions collectively.
COLUMNS: You call your project an oral history of “Public Television's Roots.” Precisely what is the project all about?
ROBERTSONS: The project was conceived as a way to seek out and describe the beginnings of noncommercial educational television in this country as recalled by the principal participants. A few books have been written about the early period, but none of them tell the story of human involvement on a broad spectrum--the deep commitment, the spirit, the hopes, of a relatively small group of pioneers in different communities across the country who devoted themselves to the new medium of public communication. Many people think that public television began in 1967 with the passage of the Public Broadcasting Act. Our project deals with the earlier years, from about 1950 to 1967. We decided that the best way to approach the problem was to personally interview the people who were involved. Since they were scattered about the country, we had to develop a plan to contact them, do the interviews, transcribe the material, arrange for the final depository of the material, and find funds to help pay for it.
COLUMNS: What was your plan? This sounds like a big undertaking for two people.
JIM ROBERTSON: I worked closely with most of the people in the early days of educational TV. I knew them personally, and I was in a position to take the time to interview them. We drew up a list of about three hundred names. From that group, we eventually interviewed fifty-five people, and one of the interviewees interviewed me as one of that early group.
So, the project includes fifty-six interviews with people like Newton N. Minow, chairman of the FCC in the early sixties; James R. Killian of M.I.T., who was chairman of the 1966-1967 Carnegie Commission; Norman Cousins, a longtime board member of NET: Richard B. Hull, a leader in the fight to reserve TV channels for educational purposes in 1950 and 1951; Wisconsinites Harold B. McCarty, who was the head of WHA and Wisconsin educational radio and TV for many years and who testified at the 1950-1951 hearings; William G. Harley, also a WHA veteran who became president of NAEB; and others who worked at both local and national levels. Each interview is personal, and a variety of questions are asked, but we wanted two specific pieces of information. First, we wanted to record their voices describing what they had done--describing the hopes and dreams they had for public television when they first started in it. And, second, we wanted to find out what they thought about today's public television. In other words, what has happened to their dreams? Finally, we wanted to arrange all of this information in usable form for future researchers, and perhaps write a book about the findings.
COLUMNS: Obviously your plan worked, and you are in the final stages of the project. How did you actually complete it?
ROBERTSONS: The interviewing and gathering of information is finished, but the book isn't written yet. We're just beginning to work on that. How did we actually do the interviewing? First, let me interrupt here to say that there are others whom we didn't interview who also contributed greatly to the medium. But we couldn't interview everybody, so we had to select a representative group. The ones we taped are certainly among the most influential, and they convey the idealism, the spirit, the motive power of those early years.
Now, for the actual interviewing, each person was contacted by mail, and a schedule of appointments was set up. Then we bought a twenty-six-foot motorhome, and for eight-and-a-half months we drove more than 19,000 miles in thirty-five states conducting the interviews. We failed to complete only one. One man was in the hospital, so we sent a set of questions to him and he sent us his answers on cassettes later. The interviews average about two-and-a-half hours, although one is only forty-five minutes and a couple are four to five hours long.
During the entire trip, we only had one disaster. The day before we were to arrive home, we had parked near Disney World and while we were having lunch, someone burglarized our motorhome. They took our camera and television and one box of interview tapes. Fortunately the people on the stolen tapes lived in the Washington, D.C. and South Carolina areas, which are a lot closer to our home in Florida, than, say, San Francisco! We arranged two more trips and redid those nine interviews.
COLUMNS: You mentioned funding a while back. How did you fund this project?
ROBERTSONS: CPB [Corporation for Public Broadcasting]--which has an archival responsibility--gave us the first grant of $15,000, and we were able to do all the traveling and taping with that. Then, in return for nonexclusive rights to the materials for a set period of time, our consulting firm did all of the follow-up work gratis and CPB gave us a second grant of $7,400 to cover the actual out-of-pocket costs for final typing, editing, and duplicating of the transcripts, which total some 2,500 pages; reproducing transcripts for each of the participants; making reels from the cassettes for the State Historical Society's collections; and physically getting all the materials here to Madison for permanent storage. We also received a couple of minor supplementary contributions from private donors.
COLUMNS: What can researchers hope to get from your materials?
ROBERTSONS: One area of interest right now that the interviews get into is the ideological split between educational television and public television. The early television pioneers thought of what they were doing as educational television. It wasn't until 1966, when the first Carnegie Commission on Educational Television met, that a distinction was made. The Commission adopted and recommended the term public television, which emphasized the ideological split among the proponents of each. Eventually the term public embraced both functions. The people we interviewed were all part of this ideological battle, and they talk about the differences and what happened. I mention this aspect of the tapes because it is important for researchers to understand what started this country on its noncommercial broadcasting path and what has happened since.
Other topics are covered, too: the primitive conditions under which some of the early stations began, for instance. Problems of early programming. Efforts to interest professional educators in the medium. Just about every aspect of the development of public television in its first formative years. And there are loads of interesting anecdotes.
COLUMNS: How much of all this are you going to include in your book?
ROBERTSONS: It won't be a scholarly or pedantic book. It will be written for anyone who is interested in public television's past and its future direction. Its very tentative title is Public Television: How it Came to Be and What It Could Become. The story will be told through the words of the people who created and were part of the early drama. Regardless of what goes into our book, however, the raw material that's now here at the Society contains nearly unlimited possibilities for research.
COLUMNS: Has anything like this been done before?
ROBERTSONS: Not quite like this project. Burt Harrison, the head of radio at Washington State University in Pullman, did a similar study on educational radio, and Frank Gillard has been working on an oral history of the beginnings of the British Broadcasting Corporation.
COLUMNS: Can you briefly summarize the general reaction of the interviewees to public television today?
ROBERTSONS: The comments weren't at all unanimous, so a summary isn't possible, but we can pick a few responses to the last question in each interview. Each person was asked, “Well now, having gone through all this, how does public television today match your dreams of it?” The responses varied, of course, but in some respects they feel it has surpassed their dreams while in other ways many felt that the medium has fallen short of their early dreams. Many expressed regret at the limited use of television for general public education.
One of the most concise expressions of the early dream for educational TV was given by Norman Cousins, who likened it to building a blackboard for the American people. He said he wasn't thinking of a formal prop. He was thinking of those things “that had to fit into a survival existence....I saw ETV as a magnificently designed instrument which, better than anything else, could tell the American people what they had to know--if American history was to come to anything.”
Newton Minow said he thinks today's public television fulfills his early dream during about four or five hours a week. “In children's programming, it has been outstanding,” he said. “In the arts, music, ballet, opera, brilliant. I think occasionally we will do a documentary or a public affairs program which is great....” Minow was more optimistic than some interviewees and said that he sees a bright future for public television.
COLUMNS: What materials have you deposited with the Society?
ROBERTSONS: There are ninety-three reels of the interviews and about 2,500 pages of written transcripts. There is a register of the material, and we'll be sending a cross-index eventually. The only restriction is that permission must be obtained to reproduce substantial segments of the interviews in a publication.
The contents list below provides the numbers assigned to the taped interviews and the box and folder locations of the transcripts. The biographical notes were supplied by Mr. Robertson.
