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curriculum, in particular to overcome the disadvantages that poor children and children from minority groups were suffering when they entered school,” Morrisett said. “The results indicated you could teach children a great deal before they entered school in first grade. And the children who had that advantageous education early did better in the early school years. I thought that the evidence was pretty clear.
    “But one of the problems was that despite the money, [Carnegie was] only reaching a few hundred children. The problem was far greater than we were able to deal with on an experimental basis. There was really no mechanism for spreading this kind of activity. There was a dissonance, if you will, between the goals we were trying to achieve and the [distribution] mechanisms available.”
    In short, there were some powerful new strategies emerging to help disadvantaged children arrive at the school door better prepared for kindergarten and first grade, but too few means available to distribute and apply them. Listening to Freedman, Morrisett realized that perhaps television might provide an ideal electronic delivery system for some of these ideas.
    If Morrisett had been inspired by Freedman, so, too, did Cooney get knocked back a bit listening to Morrisett go on about Carnegie’s commitment to help children learn more. What he did not know is that Cooney had produced A Chance at the Beginning, a documentary for Channel Thirteen about an intervention experiment in Harlem for at-risk preschoolers. Cooney was already well versed in the ideas that had led to Head Start, the federal program initiated in 1965 that helped communities meet the needs of disadvantaged children. Its supporters believed the tyranny of America’s poverty cycle could be broken if the emotional, social, health, nutritional, and psychological needs of poor children could be met. 6
    Before good nights were exchanged, the fates of Joan Ganz Cooney and Lloyd Morrisett had become entwined like strands of DNA. A professional relationship that spanned five decades started with Morrisett’s ostensibly simple question, “Do you think television could be used to teach young children?”
    “I don’t know,” Cooney replied, “but I’d like to talk about it.”
    Within a week, Morrisett had invited Freedman and Cooney to Carnegie to do just that.

Chapter Two
    A s autumn turned to winter in 1929, a direful shadow crossed the continent, like biblical darkness falling upon Egypt. Indeed, it was as if God Almighty had unleashed an eleventh plague, one of pessimism and despair.
    In early December, President Herbert Hoover announced on radio that the worst of the financial crisis was over, but Sylvan Ganz knew too much about economics—and human nature—to believe it. As executive vice president of the First National Bank of Arizona, Ganz was obliged to assume an air of calm and confidence, and his upbeat veneer never faltered at work. But at night, his thoughts turned to what measures he might need to take to protect the bank should the nation’s economy reach a danger point.
    In the final weeks of 1929, the Ganz household was going through diapers at an astonishing rate. Three children had been born in a thirty-nine-month span to Ganz’s wife, Pauline. Baby Joan arrived on November 30, a month and a day after Black Tuesday, the third and most disastrous day of record losses on Wall Street. Across the nation, billions in assets had been wiped out in less than a week.
    The new sibling joined older brother Emil Paul, named for his grandfather and mother, and older sister Sylvia Rose, named for her father and maternal grandmother. “By the time I came along, Mother had run out of steam—and names,” Joan Ganz Cooney explained years later. “The joke in our family was they barely had time to name me at all, and it was after no one, except, possibly, Joan Crawford.”
    While Cooney’s father had not amassed the wealth of some of his neighbors, he was