In the early seventies (1970), Hartford Gunn resigned as general manager of WGBH to assume the presidency of the newly formed Public Broadcasting Service in Washington. Stan Calderwood, former chairman of the board of the Polaroid Corporation, having just been appointed president of the WGBH Educational Foundation, invited me to make an elaborate design presentation of concepts for upgrading the station’s visual identity and graphic systems. As board member, he had become accustomed to the quite strong graphic quality, produced under the design direction of Paul Giambarba and Bill Field for the Polaroid Corporation and hoped to accomplish the same at WGBH. My presentation was very well received. Calderwood gave me a clear mandate, two titles: Art Director of the Station and Director of the Design Office, an employment contract signed and sealed, and I was looking forward to a great new assignment. Everything looked rosy.
Then, in the words of Paul Giambarba, a close friend of Stan Calderwood:
Little did any of us know that before the summer’s end in 1970 that Stan Calderwood would be embroiled in a no-win situation with activists in Boston’s black community. It was about the use of socially unacceptable profanity on prime time television. The irony here is that PBS lost a good man who had done what he could to help recruit minorities, especially Blacks, at Polaroid. Along with being insulted and jostled at confrontations, he began receiving death threats for canceling the “Say Brother Show” show. Responding to public pressure, WGBH reinstated the Show and called the prior cancellation a “mistake.” Stan quit in disgust.
Say Brother History
Say Brother made its debut July 15, 1968. Ray Richardson, one of the show’s first producers, was a brilliant young man in his early 20s. He never wavered in his commitment to portraying all facets and accomplishments of black life. Say Brother grappled with issues of housing, employment, and education; showcased local and national performers from all segments of the arts; provided a platform for political discussions; and much more, all from a black perspective. This is what Ray Richardson said in 1969 on the show’s first anniversary: “We attempted to create an outlet for many of the viewpoints that exist in our community and to deal with political, educational, and cultural activities relevant to black people. We have had successes, occasional failures, and many memorable incidents.”
But this was not a situation where they lived happily ever after. In late 1969, there were race riots in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Ray Richardson and some of his small staff went there for several days. They did interviews and documented the smoke and the fire, the role of the police, and the frustration of New Bedford blacks. Some blacks swore during their interviews. WGBH management warned Ray about the content of the show and instructed him to remove certain sections. (At this time, FCC rules did not allow profanity to be broadcast.) This was a turning point for Richardson and the rest of the staff. They questioned how the program could be by, for, and about black people if final decisions did not rest with them. Richardson aired the show as it was and WGBH fired him. This infuriated the staff, leaders in the black community, and viewers. WGBH was picketed and blanketed with critical phone calls and letters. There was media coverage, but management did not relent, and a new producer was hired. This period also saw the establishment of the Say Brother Community Committee. This committee was to make sure that the program was continued, and that the interests of the black community were represented. It was also responsible for creating an open dialogue between staff and management, so conflicts could be addressed and additional firings forestalled.
So, when I arrived on my first day, Stan Calderwood was gone and the whole administrative landscape had shifted, with David Ives now taking command. Ives had no clue to my discussions with Stan Calderwood, and so all bets were off. The politics were heavy. I was asked to report to Robert Larsen, general manager, a very nice person, unfortunately without much design sense. Most of the crucial design decisions were unraveled by Sylvia Davis, Director of Promotion and Publicity, with a heavy advertising background. She was the divorced wife of David Davis, a former WGBH staffer who ended up at the Ford Foundation and was frequently responsible for providing WGBH very large program grants and general funding from the Ford Foundation. No WGBH staffer dared to cross Sylvia. I considered Sylvia a vulgarian who showed little concern for visual aesthetics. She seemed the street-hawker incarnate. The sound-pratfall of the station’s on-air identity is still: “Ta daaah!”
A free-for-all ensued, decision powers were assigned according to the politics of the day or to whomever had the ear of either Michael Rice, vice-president, Robert Larsen, general manager or David Ives, at that time interim, later becoming permanent, president. There was no regard for a central design integrity. Every producer could override any of the decisions made by the design staff. When we tried to implement some of the Calderwood solutions for “The French Chef with Julia Child,” which received serious underwriting from Polaroid. Bill Field confided that Stan Calderwood was very disappointed. He did not understand that Paul Child had opted to instruct the producer to abandon our original styling proposal. What was left was a truly emaciated design, with only minimal portions implemented. Also, during that time there were no directives to clarify the framework for the station’s identity—local or national.
Gene Mackles, a member of the design staff, had developed a style for some of the show titles. He had taken bold and heavy sans-serif letters, and by using negative and positive photocopies had combined them into letters with shadows that allude to a spatial forward and backward movement. For a concept example, look at the title-graphics for “The Advocates.”
Michael Rice and Sylvia Davis, on one of their trips to New York for the development of the sound-fanfare for the station identity, also made an appointment with Chermayeff and Geismar, a well-known design studio, responsible for the Mobil Oil identity and also for the redesign of Herb Lubalin’s design of the PBS symbol. Without consulting me, they asked them to design a new station identity. They adapted Gene Mackle’s concept of the double-shadow. I wonder if they ever gave him credit.
I quit a few days after that decision. When Calderwood invited me, WGBH held all the promises, which soon evaporated and turned into nothing but mediocrity. With Calderwood, each show opening would have been a graphic animation. Without his directives, each producer could circumvent any design initiative. It was time to move on. I never looked back.