Joan Ganz Cooney was a founder of the immensely successful children's television show Sesame Street. At a time when women did not fill such roles, she served as a producer of the show, which premiered in 1969 and celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2019 with broadcasts in more than 150 countries.

She was born on Nov. 30, 1929, in Phoenix. Her father, Sylvan Ganz, was a banker; her mother, Pauline, was a homemaker. Immigrants both, her parents encouraged Joan as she was growing up to follow in Pauline's footsteps and be a housewife and mother. Joan graduated from Phoenix's North High School and then Dominican College, an all-girls Catholic school in San Rafael, Calif. An early interest in acting carried her through her secondary school years, but her father's refusal to support such a lifestyle helped convince her to abandon the theater as a career. Instead, like many women her age, she chose education.

Joan Ganz moved to Washington, D.C., in 1951, taking a job as a clerk and typist in the State Department. She found inspiration for a media career and, returning to Phoenix, got a job as a reporter with the Arizona Republic newspaper. Returning to the East Coast, she went to New York and served as publicist for first RCA and then NBC. She then moved on to WNDT, a non-commercial TV station in New York, serving as a producer. Working for Lewis Freedman, she produced the TV debate shows Court of Reason and Poverty, Anti-Poverty, and the World, winning Emmy awards for the latter.

In 1964, Ganz married Timothy Cooney, who worked for then-New York mayor Robert Wagner, Jr. The two had a circle of influential friends, one of whom was Lloyd Morrisett, who worked at the Carnegie Corporation, which provided funding for educational research. At a dinner party attended by the Cooneys, the Morrisetts (Lloyd and his wife, Mary), and Freedman, Joan Ganz Cooney floated the idea of television's being used to educate young children. Next came a feasibility study that resulted in her paper "The Potential Uses of Television in Preschool Education." Out of that came the idea for Sesame Street.

WNDT rejected the idea, so Cooney went to work for Morrisett and the Carnegie Corporation. In the process, they established the Children's Television Workshop (CTW), which produced Sesame Street. The show premiered on Nov. 10, 1969, with Cooney as executive producer. Human characters Bob, Gordon, and Maria interacted with Muppets Big Bird, Oscar the Grouch, and Ernie & Bert. (One of the now most recognizable Muppets, Elmo, debuted in 1980.) In its first season alone, the show won three Emmy awards and a Peabody award.

Through a mix of live action, animation, and puppetry (employing the now-famous Jim Henson Muppets), Sesame Street emphasized the importance of learning, not only traditional school subjects like English, Math, and Science but also subjects of cultural importance, such as racial harmony and the need to appreciate class differences. Longtime cast member Linda (right), who was deaf and used American Sign Language to communicate, reminded children that it was important to appreciate other kinds of differences as well.

More fundamentally, the show illustrated its characters at times struggling with their emotions, so (the producers intended) that children watching would not be afraid to do the same. The show also did not avoid controversial topics. When Will Lee, the real-life actor who played Mister Hooper on the show, died, the producers incorporated the events into the show, depicting the other characters discussing the death of one of their own and their struggles with accepting it.

Following on from that success, Ganz Cooney and the CTW produced other children's shows, including Electric Company, 3-2-1 Contact, Dragon Tales, and Square One TV.

Timothy and Joan Ganz Cooney divorced in 1975. That same year, she had surgery after a cancer diagnosis. Joan married Peter Peterson in 1980. He died in 2018.

Ganz Cooney was the driving force behind Sesame Street until she retired, in 1990. The year before, she had received an Emmy Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2007, Sesame Workshop (the former Children's Television Workshop) established the Joan Ganz Cooney Center, to help improve children's literacy. Among her other honors are these:

• Presidential Medal of Freedom
• National Humanities Medal
• Woman of the Decade award
• National Women's Hall of Fame inductee
• Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame.

Sesame Street continues, having won, as of 2018, 11 Emmys and 11 Grammy Awards. No other children's TV show has won more. A relatively recent survey found that 95 percent of all American preschoolers had seen the show by the time they were 3. Now, more than 150 countries broadcast the show.