The first time Cooney had seen a television set was in 1952, when she watched Adlai Stevenson accept the Democratic nomination. Not much later, Morrisett fell into a dinner-party conversation with Joan Ganz Cooney, a public-affairs producer at New York’s Channel 13. She’d have watched anything, even “The Itty-Bitty, Farm and City, Witty-Ditty, Nitty-Gritty, Dog and Kitty, Pretty Little Kiddie Show.” in experimental psychology from Yale, got up one Sunday morning, at about six-thirty, a half hour before the networks began their day’s programming, to find his three-year-old daughter, Sarah, lying on the living-room floor in her pink footie pajamas, watching the test pattern. In 1965, the year the Johnson Administration founded Head Start, Lloyd Morrisett, a vice-president of the Carnegie Corporation with a Ph.D. Half a century ago, before “ Sesame Street,” and long before the age of quarantine, kids under the age of six spent a crazy amount of time indoors, watching television, a bleary-eyed average of fifty-four hours a week. “They just might think of the right one.” “You never can tell, Kermit,” Rowlf says, with a hopefulness known only to dogs. “Are you really gonna depend on that bunch to come up with a title?” The frog, named Kermit, shakes his head at his dog friend, Rowlf. “But we oughta say something about the show telling it like it is! Maybe ‘The Nitty Gritty Little Kiddie Show’?” “Howzabout we call it ‘The Little Kiddie Show’?” Then they try out a title that keeps getting longer and longer.
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