In attendance was her then-husband Tim Cooney, her boss Lewis Freedman, and Lloyd Morrisett, an executive at the Carnegie Corporation, in which the potential of television to teach young children was discussed.

Cooney was chosen to oversee and direct the creation of what eventually became the children's television program Sesame Street, which premiered in 1969, and the CTW, the organization that oversaw its production.

[5] Her grandfather Emil Ganz was a tailor from Walldorf, Thuringia, in Germany, who immigrated to the U.S. in 1858 and was president of the First National Bank of Arizona and mayor of Phoenix for three terms.

She stated that her biggest influence as a teenager was her teacher Bud Brown, whose lectures about the civil rights movement, poverty, the free press, and antisemitism in Europe "absolutely inflamed"[4] her and changed her life.

[9] She went to Dominican College, an all-girls Catholic institution in San Rafael, California, for a year before transferring to the University of Arizona in 1948, where she was a member of Kappa Alpha Theta.

Eighteen months later, in 1953 and at the age of 23, she moved to New York City and was a publicist for the next ten years, initially for David Sarnoff at RCA, then at NBC writing press releases and soap opera synopses,[12] and then for the United States Steel Hour at CBS.

[15] Her literary contacts, political savvy, and vast interest in the "world of ideas"—in addition to disarming self-confidence—got her hired [at Channel 13].

[17] When channel 13 became non-commercial two years later as WNDT, Cooney applied for a position as the station's publicist, but the general manager told her they needed producers.

[12] According to television historian Cary O'Dell, WNDT hired her because of the ties she had made through her political activities and associations with Partisan Review.

[16] Taking a pay cut,[18] Cooney and her boss Lewis Freedman produced what author Michael Davis called "a series of teach-ins on major issues".

[19] One of her first programs was called Court of Reason, a weekly live debate show; notable guests included Malcolm X and Calvin Butts.

[14][16][17] Although the ratings were low, Cooney and Freedman won Emmys for its production, and as Davis stated, "the viewers who did tune in were serious-minded adults who cared about matters of race, injustice, and the imbalance of opportunity in New York and beyond".

[21] Davis called the Cooneys "a delightfully unmatched set, a Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn twosome who married despite differences in upbringing, station, and sobriety".

[25] A week later, Cooney and Freedman met with Morrisett at the offices of Carnegie Corporation to discuss doing a feasibility study on creating an educational television program for preschoolers.

[1] In the summer of 1967, Cooney took a leave of absence from WNDT and, funded by Carnegie Corporation, traveled the U.S. and Canada interviewing experts in child development, education, and television.

[1][note 1] Cooney later stated that her undergraduate training in Education helped her research and write the study, and that it, along with her Emmy, provided her with credibility in the eyes of both the experts she interviewed and the new show's funding sources.

[1] Davis credited Cooney's motivation to be involved with the project with her journalism skills, learned early in her career, and her idealism, which drove her to want to, as she put it, "make a difference".

[30] She later told an interviewer, "I could do a thousand documentaries on poverty and poor people that would be watched by a handful of the convinced, but I was never really going to have an influence on my times".

[32] For the next two years, Cooney and Morrisett worked on researching and developing the new show, raising $8 million for Sesame Street, and establishing the CTW.

Davis also speculated that sexism was involved, stating, "Doubters also questioned whether a woman could gain the full confidence of a quorum of men from the federal government and two elite philanthropies, institutions whose wealth exceeded the gross national product of entire countries".

[38][39] According to Newsday, "Scores of glowing newspaper and magazine stories fluttered down on Mrs. Cooney and her workshop like confetti onto the heads of conquering heroes".

[43] In 1969, the Cooneys, who were childless,[44] became "de facto foster parents to an inner-city black child"[45] whom Tim met while working in Harlem for a civil rights organization.