'Sesame Street' Visionary Honored

Former students, colleagues, and family members of Gerald S. “Gerry” Lesser, one of the biggest forces behind the formation of “Sesame Street,” gathered yesterday evening at a Harvard Graduate School of Education panel to honor the legacy of the longtime Ed School professor.

Lesser passed away last September at age 84, following a distinguished career which also included a 27-year stint as the chairperson of the Children’s Television Workshop—a nonprofit organization, now known as the Sesame Workshop, which helps to create educational children’s programs. Lesser was honored yesterday in order to allow his family proper time to grieve and to invite speakers who knew him best, according to Ed School spokesperson Michael G. Rodman.

Although Lesser spent 35 years on the Ed School faculty, many of those who spoke at the event emphasized his most well-known legacy: the creation of “Sesame Street” and the partnership he fostered between what speaker Sam Gibbon called “egocentric television producers and egocentric professors.”

“Nobody thought it would work,” said Gibbon, a former producer of several educational children’s shows. Many speakers mentioned that, prior to “Sesame Street,” television was generally viewed as detrimental to a child’s learning, and it was Lesser’s work that helped to alter that mindset.

“He trailblazed a path—from entertainment to education—for an entire industry,” said Gary Knell, the current President and CEO of Sesame Workshop. “It was about the power of razzle dazzle to pull children in.”

Many of the speakers expressed admiration for Lesser, who was known for his leadership and approachability while he was working simultaneously at Harvard and “Sesame Street.”

Dina L. G. Borzekowski, Associate Professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, spoke of “Gerry Lesser the Professor,” who always took attendance in his classes and showed clips of “Sesame Street” before lectures.

“When he was on that fourth floor [in his office],” Borzekowski said, “his door was always open.”

Lesser was never featured as a character on “Sesame Street,” but he appeared in a film clip conversing with Kermit the Frog about how “Sesame Street” would teach children about the alphabet. The video also exhibited how the show would teach the letter “J” using an animation of “Joe and his Junebug.”

Lesser asked children to watch these scenes and tested them afterwards. It was this research that created the curriculum for “Sesame Street” and demonstrated how television could serve an educational purpose.

“It’s not as if we’ve solved these problems, [but] we can now move the needle with media,” said Robert Lippincott, Senior Vice President of Education at PBS.

A “Sesame Street” initiative to connect with ethnic minorities led Saman Rouhani ’14 to appear on two televised episodes of Sesame Street. Rouhani, who is of Persian descent, said scouts found his sister and him as young children in elementary school.

“In the ’90s, they were trying to recruit kids to reflect diversity in New York City,” Rouhani said. As a “Grouchketeer,” Rouhani donned an Oscar the Grouch costume and a tin garbage lid as a hat.

“I was totally psyched,” he said. “It was ‘Sesame Street!’”

—Staff writer Michelle M. Hu can be reached at michellehu@college.harvard.edu.