How they got to 'Sesame Street': Interview with original cast member from NJ, Bob McGrath

The 50th anniversary of "Sesame Street" is brought to you by the letter H.

H — as in, How It's Done.

How — parents have asked for years— do you make kids want what's good for them?

Do you create a cartoon sailor, and make him a spinach-lover? Do you retell "The Iliad" as a comic book? Do you create vitamins in the shape of Fred Flintstone, or disguise broccoli to look like tater tots?

Of all the sugar-coated pills that have ever been devised by crafty adults to entice reluctant children, probably none has been so successful as "Sesame Street" — the TV show that made its debut on Nov. 10, 1969, 50 years ago Sunday, and quickly became a pop-culture juggernaut. 

A very gentle juggernaut — as Ernie, the Muppet doll in a rocking chair in Bob McGrath's TV room, could tell you.

"He takes a nap every day," said McGrath, removing a Muppet-size eye mask.

That is of course Ernie, as in Bert and Ernie — one of the Jim Henson Muppet creations that made "Sesame Street"  every child's favorite way to learn numbers and letters. Bert, Ernie, Kermit, Oscar the Grouch, Cookie Monster, Big Bird — a very big Muppet, but still a Muppet, McGrath says — are as much a part of childhood as birthday cake.

And McGrath? He was music teacher Bob Johnson — one of the four original human cast members of "Sesame Street," and a fixture on the show for 45 of its 50 years.

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McGrath has been a Bergen County resident for 59 years — first in Teaneck, and since 2017, in a handsome ranch house in Norwood, where he lives with his wife, Ann. But for most of these years, he's also had a second, equally important address: a street where sunny days sweep the clouds away. "Sesame Street" is, in some ways, almost as real as the street where he lives.

Everything's A-OK

"Beyond question, 'Sesame Street' was the number one thing of my life," said McGrath, who appeared on "Sesame Street's 50th Anniversary Celebration"  Saturday on HBO, the show's home since 2016.

Fellow cast member Roscoe Orman (Gordon) — for many years a Montclair resident — was also on hand, along with a raft of celebrity guests including Whoopi Goldberg, Patti LaBelle, Elvis Costello, Meghan Trainor, Itzhak Perlman, and many more. The show will be rebroadcast at 7 p.m. Nov. 17 on PBS.

Celebrities, in honor of the 50th, will be posting their favorite "Sesame Street" memories at #ThisIsMyStreet. The Empire State Building on Sunday will be lit in yellow and green, the "Sesame Street" colors. 

"Everyone has their own favorite cast member they identified with, and they all had their favorite Muppets, of course," McGrath said.

His own favorite is Big Bird — partly because he's had a rare bonhomie, through the years, with Carroll Spinney, the actor behind the beak. "We became very close friends off-camera," McGrath said.

An early sketch set the tone for their relationship. Big Bird asks, "What did you do before I knew you?"

Says Bob: "Well, I was in the army for one thing" (this is true: McGrath was stationed in Germany during the Korean conflict).

"Oh, what did you do?" asks Big Bird.

"I was a bugler in the army," McGrath says.

"Oh shame, Bob — you were a burglar?"

"It was such a funny piece for both of us, we have never met each other once in 50 years when he doesn't start by saying, 'Shame, Bob' instead of saying hello," McGrath said. "And we crack up."

However, as much the show impacted McGrath, it impacted America more. An estimated 86 million or more Americans have watched "Sesame Street" in its first half-century. 

Today, "Sesame Street"'s legacy is everywhere: in toys, movies, songs, albums, costumes, books, pajamas, fruit bars, potty seats, tumblers, plush animals, pillows, pullovers, shower curtains and stage shows.

Songs like "Rubber Duckie," "Sing" and "(It's Not Easy) Bein' Green" are part of the soundtrack of childhood. Other shows, including "The Electric Company" (produced by the "Sesame" team) and "Schoolhouse Rock," were inspired by it.

A "Sesame Place" theme park has been a big draw in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, since 1980. Other "Sesame Street" parks have opened at various times in Texas, Japan and Monterrey, Mexico. 

Jim Henson's Muppets — made famous by "Sesame Street," though not introduced there — have had a colorful life of their own, most notably in the 2011 Jason Segel "Muppet Movie."

"Avenue Q," an adult but affectionate parody, opened on Broadway in 2003 and had a long run off-Broadway before closing in May. McGrath is a fan.

"It was incredible," he said. "I thought it was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen."

All in the research

All this, and more, is the fruit of "Sesame Street."  But the show itself was the fruit of two years of intensive research — and before that, years of controversy that go back to FCC chief Newton Minnow famously calling TV a "vast wasteland" in 1961.

"Sesame Street" was the better mousetrap that TV reformers, psychologists and educators had been trying for years to build.

"People had been worried about children's TV," said  Ryan Lintelman, curator of the entertainment collection of the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian.  

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In fact,  Kermit, Elmo, and the Count, among the other "Sesame" veterans who are now part of the Smithsonian's permanent collection (the museum also has McGrath's Bob Johnson outfit) are the happy outcome of a culture war. 

"TV had become a flashpoint," Lintelman said. "There's this fear that if all children are seeing is violence, silly humor, advertising, then what are they going to do when they go back into the classroom?"

Remember Mike TeaVee, the TV-addicted kid in "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory"? That's what parents, in the '60s, were afraid their children were turning into.

Brainless, soulless, violence-addicted pushovers for whatever sugary breakfast cereal or cheap plastic toy was being marketed during the nearly eight hours a day — according to Nielsen data — that the average preschooler watched TV.

"This was on the nightly news," Lintelman said. "There's this fear about how close children are sitting to the TV, how many hours they're watching, what they're watching."

That was what Action for Children's Television, or ACT, the group founded by activist Peggy Charren and several others in 1968, set itself up to fight. And it's what TV producer Joan Ganz Cooney and Carnegie Foundation vice-president Lloyd Morrisett were addressing when they founded the Children's Television Workshop (now known as the Sesame Workshop) in 1966.

"It was Joan's idea," said Rosemarie Truglio, senior vice president for curriculum and content for Sesame Workshop. "She saw the power of television, and how children responded to television. Her question was, can television help to teach children who are disadvantaged to be better prepared for school?"

A leg up

In particular, Cooney wanted to reach kids whose parents could not afford pre-school — kids who had been left behind. She wanted them to see themselves in "Sesame Street." Hence, the groundbreaking multi-racial cast that was one of the show's instant trademarks.

"It was to make sure kids saw themselves reflected on the street," Truglio said. "It was a window for them, a mirror for them. But it was also a window for others, so that children who are not African American, not Latino, not living in these diverse communities, could see other kinds of people."

Armed with $8 million in grants from the Carnegie Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the U.S. federal government, Cooney and her researchers set to work.

Three distinct breeds of expert — developmental psychologists, educators and the "creative" team — were engaged to develop "Sesame Street." The Children's Television Workshop Model, as it was then called, was something new under the sun.  

"She called it a marriage,"  Truglio said. "You need to work with people who know how to study how children learn. You need to talk to the teachers, the ones who know how to create a curriculum. And you need the producers, writers, animators and filmmakers."

Word began leaking about this curious new project. Among the first people who caught wind was McGrath.

The Illinois native had already made a name for himself as a featured singer on the popular 1960s TV show "Sing Along With Mitch." Then an old fraternity brother from Michigan, an erstwhile producer-director on the popular "Captain Kangaroo" children's program, approached McGrath about the new show he was working on.

"He said, 'How would you like to do a children's show?' " McGrath recalled. "I said, 'Not in the least.' A couple of months went by and they said, 'We'd like you to come by and take a look.' I came in, they showed me 10 minutes or so. That was all it took."

What he had seen were the Muppets — Henson's distinctive hand-puppet characters, who were to become "Sesame Street"'s secret weapon.

"The key to it was the creativity of Jim Henson," said Ron Simon, curator of television and radio at the Paley Center for Media. "This was the perfect format for his imagination."

Meet the Muppets

Though Henson had been active in TV since the 1950s (Kermit the Frog, his most famous character, had been introduced as early as 1955), it was the warmth and whimsy of these characters, above all else, that sold "Sesame Street" to the public. 

McGrath himself remembers the late Henson, who died in 1990, with great affection.

"Jim Henson was one of the most gentle, kind, peaceful men I ever met in my life," he said.

It was the Muppets, more than anything, that clicked with kids. And kids were the other key part of "Sesame's" research team. "Kids played an important part in what ended up on the show," McGrath said. "(Researchers) had a room with two windows looking inside, with a black-and-white TV on the right side showing our show, and a color TV on the left side showing cartoons.

"The kids couldn't see them watching, of course. Every few seconds, they were noting whether they were watching the right side or the left side. If they were watching cartoons, they knew that piece wouldn't work. That was a very smart little technique they had. And that was just one of thousands of tests."

But adults were not forgotten in "Sesame Street's" master plan. The goal was to have children view the show with their parents, who could then reinforce each episode's academic content. Hence the guest stars like Itzhak Perlman and Whoopi Goldberg, and the occasional jokes that might go over the head of a 6-year-old. 

"It was written to make sure the adults would stay interested," Truglio said. "The show was written on two levels. There was always humor, nods, to the adults. 'We know you're in the room — wink, wink. Keep watching.'"

Amid the hosannas for "Sesame Street," from educators and industry people (the show has won 193 Emmys and 11 Grammys, and been seen in 120 countries), there have been nay-sayers.

Among them: The late media theorist Neil Postman ("Amusing Ourselves to Death"), who charged the show in 1985 with trivializing education, and salving the conscience of guilty parents over their kids' excessive TV viewing. 

"'Sesame Street' appeared to justify allowing a 4- or 5-year-old to sit transfixed in front of the television for unnatural periods of time," Postman wrote.

But there are have also been studies — over 1,000, Truglio said — that point to "Sesame Street" as a true aid to learning.

Teaching aid

A joint study, in 1994, by the University of Kansas and the University of Massachusetts Amherst, compared groups of high school kids who had watched "Sesame Street" as children in the 1980s to those who had not.

"They outperformed by 16% their peers, not only in academic achievement but also in social and emotional behaviors, and motivation to learn," Truglio said.

Moreover, the show has helped kids deal, not just with spelling and subtraction, but also with more personal issues. It's dealt with death, divorce, 9/11. In Africa, an HIV-positive Muppet, Kami, teaches kids not to fear children with AIDS.

For his part, McGrath does not need to see studies. He knows the impact of "Sesame Street," just from all the kids he's met over the years doing live shows.

"At once concert, there was a father with a little child about 5 years old," McGrath recalled. "And he said, 'I want to thank you for making it possible for my daughter to walk.'"

What, McGrath wanted to know, was this all about?

It was about an offshoot of his "Sesame Street" career,  an album he recorded called "Bob McGrath from Sesame Street." It contained a tune called "I Can Do It!!" (never featured on the show, McGrath says).

For this disabled little girl, that song became an anthem. "Every time she walked with pain, we played that song over and over," the father told McGrath.

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"He lifted her across the stage and said, 'Show Bob,'" McGrath recalled. "And she walked across the stage … He said he went through four or five LPs during her therapy. It inspired her. It never would have worked if we didn't have that song, he said. You never know what small things in life you might do that might have an impact for life on somebody."

That's the kind of experience that makes McGrath happy to have been connected to "Sesame Street." Happy to have adults recognize him in the street as Big Bird's sidekick.

Happy even to have Ernie as a permanent sleepover guest — rent free — in his TV room.

"I love the little guy," he said.

Jim Beckerman is an entertainment and culture reporter for NorthJersey.com. For unlimited access to his insightful reports about how you spend your leisure time, please subscribe or activate your digital account today.

Email: beckerman@northjersey.com Twitter: @jimbeckerman1