Celebrating Bob Ferrante

I’d like to raise a glass to Bob. He was a really special person. We all miss him terribly. There’s an awful lot to savor and celebrate.

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Fifty Years of Media Accessibility

50 years ago in 1972, GBH pioneers invented open broadcast captions so that Julia Child’s “The French Chef” could be enjoyed by those that were dear or hard of hearing through displaying the text of dialogue and other audio elements of the program.

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David Mugar, 82, Philanthropist

David Mugar, a Boston philanthropist and the man behind the annual Fourth of July Boston Pops Fireworks Spectacular, died Tuesday night at the age of 82.

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Why We Turned to PBS: WGBH Programs and Captioning

The New York Times: We asked our writers to reflect on PBS’s lasting imprint on our culture, while Rachael Ray, Gary Clark Jr., Damon Lindelof, Kal Penn and others share first-person reminiscences about the television that changed their lives.

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Why has WGBH had such an impact? Five views

Fred Barzyk: “I have asked several long time producers at WGBH to take a crack at the question of ‘Why does WGBH, a local public TV station in Boston, have such an impressive impact on media, culture and innovation?’ What follows are several responses to the question.”

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Ted Conant, 89, filmmaker

Ted worked on several special projects for WGBH under the direction of then President, Hartford Gunn, and for a time was the Manager of WGBX-TV, Channel 44.

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Peggy Charren, 86, children’s TV pioneer

Jon Abbott: “Peggy Charren … took on the giants of the commercial television industry in the 1970s and brought about substantive programming and legislative changes that bettered the lives of millions.”

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Mike Sullivan, 67, Frontline producer

Broadcast journalist and producer Mike Sullivan — one of the guiding figures behind FRONTLINE for more than two decades — passed away suddenly at his home in Marblehead, Mass., on Sunday, June 23.

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Nat Johnson: My Early Radio Days

Nat Johnson at WBCN

I aired, for the first time in America, a stereo broadcast of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Listeners were astounded – and generally seemed quite captivated.

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Don Fouser, Executive Producer

From Fred Barzyk: I worked with Don Fouser as his director on one of the early docu shows called Dollar Diplomacy. It was a 6-part series on America’s Vietnam experience. Don traveled with a 16 mil. Bolex film camera and shot all the material himself.

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A Boy from Milwaukee

From Fred Barzyk: My Mom had this vision for me. She thought it would be wonderful if I could be in show business… I announced that I would become a piano player! Only problem was we didn’t have a piano.

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A stranger in a strange land

From Fred Barzyk: Bill insisted I try to get into the scholarship program. You studied for your graduate degree at Boston University and worked three days a week at the Educational Television station. Free tuition and you got $600 to live a year in Boston!

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A reel deal for blind, deaf

WGBH staffers in Brighton and in Burbank, Calif., caption on average 110 movies for the deaf and hearing-impaired annually and narrate 70 films a year for blind moviegoers.

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Joan Wilson bids for masterpieces

Boston Globe — 12/13/1980 (Found in the Jeremy Brett archive.) It’s been said she has the best job in television. She jets to Europe several times a year — to London, Cannes and occasionally Italy. She hobnobs in New York with powerful oil magnates. She makes critical programming decisions which determine what millions of Americans…

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