How We Got to Sesame Street

When I was a kid, TV was for adults. I remember the variety shows like Laugh-In! and watching Dean Martin with a martini glass in hand. Even if I didn’t get the jokes, I ached to stay up late with my big brothers and sisters just to gather round the tube. Kids TV offered little. Uncle Gus seemed mildly bored, Captain Kangeroo was kinda creepy, and tromping around in circles on romper room never grabbed me. Then came Sesame Street.

Sesame Street opened up a universe apart from my home in Concord, NH. Here was a gritty city landscape with stoops and garbage cans. Because of Sesame Street, we grew up with people and creatures who didn’t look like us. Susan and Bob, Bert and Ernie, Oscar the Grouch and Kermit the Frog. Black people! People who spoke Spanish! Over the past decade, other countries have picked up on this appreciation for diversity and planted Sesame Streets on their own soil.

Sesame Street is a place of animation and color and fantasy and play where you could be anything, as long as you learned the value of co-op-er-a-tion and shared your toys. Learning is fun. Reading is an achievement. My mother only allowed us to watch one half-hour of TV after school. Then Sesame Street came along and we got an hour-long pass. I grew up in a world of great achievement and great fear. A world reeling from political assassinations. My mother fearing that my brothers would be drafted to Vietnam. Sesame Sesame Street was a refuge in the afternoon from the evening news, Watergate, and urban riots.

I bowed out when Snuffalupagus was still a secret and Elmo hadn't yet appeared. Now Cookie Monster eats fruit I am told. The set looks more Park Slope than Lower East Side, both places I ended up living as an adult. I hear the songs and remember it all. So do our listeners. Eric Palson raised his kids on Sesame Street. He wrote in to say what a positive effect it had on his family:

“It was always something we could share and discuss with our kids because we both enjoyed it. It was clever and accessible for our young guys without talking down to any of us. Sesame Street was also an avenue to introduce new topics that might not have come up. I remember Bert and Ernie. Bert was the quintessential nerd and Ernie the free-spirit. They were perfect reflections of our two sons, who naturally took up their respective sides in the situation at hand. This was often the framework for our earliest ethics debates.”

Sesame Street isn't just for kids. Famous big-kids like Julia Roberts, Ben Stiller, and this week, Michelle Obama stopped by that iconic brownstone on 123 Sesame Street.

There are shows brought to you by the letter N. Interviews brought to you by the number 9, and friends and neighbors on every corner. Sesame Sesame Street is a place to hang out and explore the world, without leaving the living room.