Naval Reserve, and was voted one of the outstanding men of the year in 1962 by the Boston Junior Chamber of Commerce.
[3] In 1969 as manager of WGBH-TV, Gunn invited Fred Rogers to accompany him and testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications in support of the full funding of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
[5] In 1970 he was chosen as the first president of the Public Broadcasting Service, at least in part due to his "widely acknowledged success in the 1960s at the Boston television station WGBH".
He was senior vice president and general manager of KCET, (at the time it was the public TV station in Los Angeles) from 1979 until 1983.
[6] On January 2, 1986, Gunn died of multi-focal leukoencephalopathy, a rare, cancer-related illness at Massachusetts General Hospital at the age of 59.