My story about WGBH is pretty bizarre . . . very American . . .

In the early 1970, Stan Calderwood, through Dr. Land’s art director Bill Field at Polaroid, contacted me, inquiring about my interests in working with Calderwood for the WGBH Foundation. Stan Calderwood, had resigned from his role as chairman of the board of the Polaroid Corporation, and was on the way to be appointed President of the WGBH Educational Foundation. He invited me to make elaborate design presentations to him about concepts for upgrading the station’s visual identity and graphic systems. We met several times over the summer and things looked great. I received my appointment and was looking forward to the first day. However, in what I recall was in the latter part of July, Stan Calderwood would be embroiled in a situation with activists in Boston’s black community. It was about the use of socially unacceptable profanity on prime time television. He had cancelled the “Say Brother” show, because its producer would not edit out the expletives. Responding to public pressure, the WGBH board reinstated “Say Brother” and called the prior cancellation a “mistake.” Calderwood felt slighted by his own WGBH board and resigned on the spot.

Well, for me the situation could not as easily be resolved. MIT had already advertised for my replacement, and I would have had a crack in my pride to ask for my old assignment back. So, when I arrived on my first day at WGBH, Stan Calderwood was gone and the whole administrative landscape had shifted, with David Ives now taking command. David Ives had no clue to my discussions with Stan Calderwood, and so, all bets were off. The politics were heavy. When before I would have worked directly with Calderwood, 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 unravelled 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 program grants and general funding from the Ford Foundation. Nobody dared to cross Sylvia. A free-for-all ensued, decision powers were assigned according to the politics of the day or who had the ear of either Michael Rice, vice president, Robert Larsen, general manager or David Ives, at that time interim and soon permanent president. There was no regard for 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, Calderwood was very disappointed. He did not understand that Paul Child, the husband of the cooking star, had opted to instruct the producer to abandon the original 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 – as local or national. I learned quickly, that “public television” had nothing to do with the public. The station catered to the special interests of audiences consisting mostly of the educated classes of Harvard and MIT and the many other institutions of higher education and people living mostly in the northern and western suburbs of the Boston area. The larger segment of the blue-color communities, including the Blacks, were not seriously considered. Although some attempts were made to deliver general nightly news, the larger community did not find a true voice.

The WGBH employment picture was very bleak. The station had the bad habit of letting unpaid volunteers compete for the same jobs as did the sons and daughters of the affluent, like of the Morgenthau and Rockefeller families, which were kept on with the hope that there would be heavy family donations in the future even though some produced rather very little. The volunteers depressed the salaries of the staff, which meant highly qualified designers would not even think to work for those meager pittance. It got so bad that the station’s employees unionized.

The other reason for resigning from the WGBH position was that Sylvia Davis, without ever discussing it, made contact with Chermayeff & Geismar , who without providing collegiate support for a pretty well functioning design team at WGBH, took the assignment behind the staff’s back, while the staff itself was involved in preparing its own presentations for the station’s identity. Chermayeff engages Marsden, a young Yale graduate, who took advantage of one of Gene Mackles experiments. Gene was one of the WGBH design staffers, who, for some of the show titles tried to give bold san-serif letters some spatial dimensionality by adding strong double shadows as if the letters were hit simultaneously by light from front and back. Mackles  also implemented this style for the on-screen logo of the “Advocates” show. In retrospect, I don’t think Gene was ever given credit for evolving the style or the logo. Chermayeff and Geismar took it all. If you ask me who appointed Chris, I would think it was Davis and Rice on recommendations from Chermayeff.

There were other signs of public manipulation. Whenever there was a threat that the funds would be curtailed, that the station had usually received from federal sources, the community was activated with messages that all children shows would be the first programming to be cut and cancelled. Also, to my biggest surprise, some members of upper levels with high salaries lived in government subsidized housing. So much for social responsibility?

I left to work as an educator at a recently established design program at a new public institution, Southeastern Massachusetts University, located between Fall River and New Bedford. Both cities, when their industries, fisheries, whale oil and textile production, were flourishing, were healthy, but as soon their zenith sank, became isolated and poor, with large groups of poor and under-educated citizens and a large group of immigrants from Portugal and Cape Verde. It was the ideal place for socially responsible education of young people. The original top group of academic administrators were establishing a very strong philosophy for the university: No secrets! No surprises! Open communication between all university constituencies, internal and external to the campus, including the board of trustees, made my first decade in education an amazingly idealistic and productive experience. I love to look back on my experience at SMU, the Harvard Business School and later on working on the Brandeis University publication project as the highlights of my career after I left MIT.

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