RARE! “Sesame Street Founder” Joan Ganz Cooney Hand Signed Biography Page

Description: Up for auction a RARE! "Sesame Street" Joan Ganz Cooney Hand Signed Biography Page. ES-8073E Joan Ganz Cooney (born Joan Ganz; November 30, 1929) is an American television writer and producer. She is one of the founders of Sesame Workshop (formerly Children's Television Workshop or CTW), the organization famous for the creation of the children's television show Sesame Street, which was also co-created by her. Cooney grew up in Phoenix and earned a B.A. degree in education from the University of Arizona in 1951. After working for the State Department in Washington, D.C. and as a journalist in Phoenix, she worked as a publicist for television and production companies in New York City. In 1961, she became interested in working for educational television, and became a documentary producer for New York's first educational TV station WNET (Channel 13). Many of the programs she produced won local Emmys. In 1966, Cooney hosted what she called "a little dinner party" at her apartment near Gramercy Park. In attendance was her then-husband Tim Cooney, her boss Lewis Freedman, and Lloyd Morrisett, an executive at the Carnegie Corporation, in which the potential of television to teach young children was discussed. Cooney was chosen to oversee and direct the creation of what eventually became the children's television program Sesame Street, which premiered in 1969, and the CTW, the organization that oversaw its production. Cooney was named CTW's first executive director. As one of the first female executives in American television, her appointment was called "one of the most important television developments of the decade". Cooney remained executive director of the CTW until 1990 when she became the chair of CTW's executive board. She served on different boards, was the trustees of many organizations, and received many awards and honorary degrees. In 2007, the Sesame Workshop founded The Joan Ganz Cooney Center, named in her honor. Joan Ganz was born on November 30, 1929, in Phoenix, Arizona, to Sylvan Ganz, a banker, and Pauline (née Reddon), a homemaker. Her father was a native Phoenician who was born in the U.S. so that his mother could receive medical care after his birth. Her father was Jewish and her mother was Catholic. Her grandfather Emil Ganz was a tailor from Walldorf, Thuringia, in Germany, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1858 and was president of the First National Bank of Arizona and mayor of Phoenix for three terms. Joan Ganz was the youngest of three siblings. She described her childhood as "upper middle class, country club atmosphere" and stated, "I was raised in the most conventional way, raised to be a housewife and a mother, to work an interesting job when I got out of college, and to marry at the appropriate age, which would have been twenty-five". She attended North High School in Phoenix, where she was active in school plays. She stated that her biggest influence as a teenager was her teacher Bud Brown, whose lectures about the civil rights movement, poverty, the free press, and antisemitism in Europe "absolutely inflamed" her and changed her life. Brown was later investigated as a Communist. She went to Dominican College, an all-girls Catholic institution in San Rafael, California for a year before transferring to the University of Arizona in 1948, where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta. She stopped acting in college because her father refused to support her in that career. She chose education, even though she was not interested in becoming a teacher, on the recommendation of her mother and because as she later stated, "It was something that girls of my generation did because teaching was acceptable".

Price: 99.99 USD

Location: Fort Lauderdale, Florida

End Time: 2024-12-09T22:12:44.000Z

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