A Gofer's Notes

A reader could conceivably wonder why read the memoirs of an occasionally lucky Irish-American with an undistinguished record.

When I get writer’s block, I ask that of myself.

After all, I’m the academic who used to “brag” to his fellow scholars that he did a reverse Horatio Alger in his university career. High school teacher (1952-55), Fund for the Republic fellow in New York (1955-56) to speculate how homebody English teachers throughout the country should deal with the new medium of television, assistant professor of English at the blue collar commuter college Trenton State (1956-57), Carnegie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania ‘s Department of American Civilization (1957-59) to write a new course on “The Mass Society” (first semester, “Mass Production”—industrial design, architecture, urban planning; second semester, “Mass Communication”—print, graphics, broadcasting.).

Serendipitously, in the middle of my second year at Penn, Walter Annenberg gave Penn $2 million to found “the first Ivy League graduate school of communication”, a boast that mendaciously flew in the face of Columbia’s J-School and Harvard’s Nieman Fellowship program.

Faute de mieux (except for exceptionally catholic scholars like Herb Gans in their Urban Planning Institute, Penn had no serious study of media to institutionalize, I became the gofer (1959-61) for the as yet unfounded school, charged with following my nose around the United States to help publicize its founding. I taught the history of communication at Annenberg and wrote the first curriculum (one of the chores of an untenured assistant professor is to be an amanuensis, a grim task that can be illuminated if you do some creative thinking in your reports.)

David Riesman had taken a cotton to me because as an unheard of English teacher at East Lansing High School, I ended up critting his series of lectures the University of Nebraska was publishing. How he found me I never learned, but I thrilled at the ecumenical spirit he displayed in looking for bottom up (to use historian Gary Nash’s concept of American historiography) for rewrite guidance. My only real insight was to criticize his narrow reliance on social science for “humanizing” the higher education enterprise.

I cited Father Walter Ong, S.J.and his prize student Marshall McLuhan for evidence that the humanities could have that function in an open-minded discussion. Professor Riesman recommended me to be the first director of the Institute of American Studies at the East West Center in the University of Hawaii (1961-62), citing my Ph.D. in American Culture from Western Reserve and some experience in public media and zest for more, inasmuch as the warrant for the Honolulu institute was to mediate between Asian students and American mores.

For personal reasons (more about that later) I resigned from that post halfway through the year, effective in the fall of 1962, so that I had to hustle me a post quickly, no sinecure from so far in the Pacific. Two slots looked attractive, English department chairman at SUNY Purchase and the same at Beaver College, Glenside, PA. WHAT? WHERE? Because we had just purchased an AIA award winning house in Greenbelt Knoll, Northeast Philly, we opted for Beaver.

And thus Alger Horatio completed his creative tailspin going from associate professor at an esteemed state university to full professor and chairman at an also ran girl’s school. (I don’t mean to knock the tenure of president Edward Gates and dean Margaret Leclair—they soon put a sleepy institution on a fast track that Bette Landman perfected at Arcadia University.) I just mean that in career terms, it was a tail spin. I remember in the summer of 1962 when I drove Riesman to Philadelphia International telling him my sense of wholesale relief at having stepped off the treadmill of ambition.

I should add that the greater freedom becoming a bit player, a minor leaguer, so to speak, allowed me to develop my media side in very satisfying ways—hosting two University of the Air series on WFIL-TV (Walter’s station, about which more later), one on mass communication as language and a second on the man-made landscape, where I deployed what I had learned in setting my Penn course on “The Mass Society”, and consultant work for Charles Benton’s TV contract with NBC, and Peter Roebeck’s Time Life Film liaison with the BBC.

It left time for peculiar but satisfying roles like American correspondent for the British Film Institute’s TV quarterly magazine “Contrast”, assessing every three months the biggest stories about American TV, and staging exhibitions like “24 Hours on Unseen American Television” for the Royal College of Art in London.

But I mean to tell you what an academic gofer does. I used to grandiosely tease Gilbert Seldes (my selection as the first dean of the Annenberg School) as John the Baptist to his Jesus, good Jew that he was! And with the possible exception of his brother George, the first really global investigative reporter in American journalism, the most insightful pioneer critic of the popular arts, beginning with “The Seven Lively Arts” (1924), three years before I was born. Few books did more to inspire me, such as John Kouwenhoven’s “Made in America: The Arts in Modern Civilization” (1948), and Marshall McLuhan’s “The Mechanical Bride: The Folklore of Industrial Man” (1951).

It is not unkind of me to say that Gilbert was over the hill: he drank too much, and his generous spirit couldn’t be bothered with academic politics. Cruelly, Walter used his clout to retire him early to avoid more embarrassment. You have to admit that their replacement, George Gerbner was an inspired—critic of his native Hungary, service in the OSS during World War II, impressive performance in the San Francisco media before entering academic life. I always regretted fate kept me from being George’s gofer.

What does an academic gofer do? He makes appearances. At business conferences like the annual do of the Advertising Association of America at Greenbrier, West Virginia. I must concede that I goggle-eyed creative admen like William Bernbach of Doyle, Dane and Bernbach. I sometimes was too busy learning from them to tell them much about our plans. Or academic Edens like Stanford’s the Center for Behavioral Science where I silently but greedily listened to the likes of Daniel Bell improvise on the agendas of the day.

It was better than graduate school, I’ll tell you. Not so inspiring were the touchdowns with J-School leaders across the country. In the 1950’s they were mostly staffed by burnt out reporters and editors, and they were almost universally scornful of my flogging Annenberg. They didn’t even hide their sneers, informing me with brutal candor that when William Randolph Hearst had tried in the 1940’s to do penance for his lousey but profitable journalism, J-Schools almost uniformly told him to stuff his cash and get lost.

Except there was a new cadre forming in the wings. Communication research. Social science adapted for media education. More than one of these asssistant professors sidled up to me silently and discreetly asked what the salary situation was like at Annenberg. That was a touchy point with Walter. I’ll never forget that Monday morning when the first meeting of the schools brass met with Annenberg. The day before, the Sunday edition of the Inquirer had made much hoopla over the expansion of its colored comics section.

Just to kill time, I decided to tease Walter about his great breakthrough the day before in “higher standards” with his expansion of colored comics. A deathly silence greeted my light-hearted remarks. I was sitting across the table from President Gaylord Harnwell who suddenly looked like he was the brink of a stroke over my indiscreet joke. Finally, gradually, Walter got the joke, and he smiled nervously. I perceived that one of the problems of academic/donor relations was that the donor expected and the academic supinely complied in a reverence usually saved for beatification rituals.

Moreover, Walter’s belated smile showed me that one of the pains of being such a big shot is that he had forgotten what it was like to be teased. George W. Bush reminds me of Walter A. Gentleman C, drunk and druggie, AWOL Champaign Squadron flier, serial bankrupt until he was given a “patrimony” with the Texas Rangers, Annenberg was a long time Playboy pain to his father Moe Annenberg, something of a thug himself in his Milwaukee and Chicago newspaper distribution days. When I finally, after a frisking in the elevator to his eyrie, was granted entrance to his office, I was stunned by the sign on his desk. I WILL SO LIVE MY LIFE AS TO HONOR THE MEMORY OF MY FATHER.

That visit is worth summarizing because it spelled the end of my days at Annenberg. Leon Sullivan, my neighbor at Morris Milgrim’s experiment in integrated housing, Greenbelt Knoll, started joshing me one Saturday next to the pool about the farce of Annenberg’s raising standards in journalism. Leon, the Lion from Zion, had organized a Taystee Kake boycott, based on the premise, you don’t hire us, we don’t eat your cakes.

He hadn’t been able to get a stick of coverage at either the Bulletin or the Inquirer. I told Leon I would take his complaint personally to Annenberg bright and early Monday morning. Leon was skeptical it would do any good! When I told Walter about Leon’s complaint, he look stunned. A gofer coming down here from his subsidized school to complain about the way he ran the paper?

After he got over his shock, he called in his executive editor, one E.Z. Dimitman. E.Z. said he had hired a colored boy the previous summer, but he hadn’t worked out! It was my turn to be astonished. “What has that got to do with suppressing the news?” I asked, my voice rising in frustration. I concluded my harangue by telling them “The Reporter” magazine was breaking the story next week, and if they had any pride they’d beat that New York magazine to their very Philly story. They didn’t.

The same kind of contradictions amazed our first graduating class. They’d quietly knock on my door and relate how confused they were by the low standards of Walter’s media. WFIL, both radio and TV, were the worst in town, Dick Clark being their contribution to American Culture. And the papers weren’t much better. Walter was absolutely ruthless when crossed editorially. If he had a snarl with Gaylord Harnwell, Penn basketball coverage would disappear. And so on.

It was only because one of his “star investigative reporters”, Harry Karafin got too greedy that Annenberg sold his papers as soon as he could find a buyer. And the tackiness extended to the curriculum. One of my favorite ideas was “Media Today”, a weekly open forum to which we’d invite high level media policymakers for a no holds barred interview on their medium’s performance. 99 and 44/100ths of the discussions were love fests where our staff, especially vice dean Charles Lee, stroked the bigwigs. It began at dinner in the Faculty Club.

How professors with tenure were too timid to ask tough questions of media policymakers boggled my mind. It seemed symptomatic of a moral and intellectual flabbiness that prefigured what our students would find when they entered the media world. Both George Gerbner and Kathleen Jamison showed that such flabby “leadership” was not necessary. But I was than a little intrigued, then, when I interviewed for the Honolulu job.

KAIM-FM was the WQXR of Honolulu, and their station manager was thrilled by our American Studies staff giving them “free” serious programming. Dave Funt, who later formed his own production company in New York, followed me from Annenberg to Honolulu to give a professional edge to our increasingly less amateur offerings. My favorite show was a weekly hour interview, “Pacific Profile”, where I quizzed the amazingly interesting and powerful figures who pass through Honolulu. I remember figures like the leading journalist of Karela in India, as leftist as we got on that show.

As I drove him after the show to Honolulu International he told me a story about Thomas Jefferson that explains perfectly the task we had talking to Asian students. Jefferson loved his Virginia yeoman farmers and whenever he traveled he was looking for ways to help them. In Italy they had nurtured a kind of rice that was so much better than normal that there was a death penalty for stealing any. The gentleman from Virginia had a hollow cane designed for such creative filching. I was stunned at this Kerala editor knowing some Jeffersonianisms that I had never even heard of. I told the staff we had to learn how to walk in the zoris of our Asian students if we want to reach.

My wife Mary (who taught English at the UH) and I did a Sunday TV show called “Coffee Break” where we tried to take advantage of visual experiences happening in Hawaii. One of my favorite was a session with Alfred Frankenstein, art critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, who had just written a book on the Painted Churches of Hawaii. First he took me on a tour of them on the Big Island. Alfred was of my dearest mentors. He taught me how to be fresh and scholarly, a lesson sorely needed after writing a 600 page dissertation on a topic I didn’t want to do.

The McLuhan bug had bitten me so I want to write a thesis on 'Theories of Popular Culture in America”. UnUh. So I settled for “John Fiske as American Scholar: The Testing of a Native American Tradition” (1957), Fiske was the first historian in America to earn his keep by writing and lecturing on America. Before him you had to either have private means (Henry Adams) or have a college teaching job.

Alas, it was no snap and Fiske eventually declined into a filiopietistic voice, and president of the American Immigration Restriction League. Alfred taught me how to write brightly about art, but it wasn’t until the 70’s that the Christian Science Monitor and eventually Nessa Forman of the Evening Bulletin published my art crit.