Serious TV

For Ron Simon ’73 entertainment is a subject of inquiry

By Sherri Kimmel

Ron Simon puts TV in perspective.

Back in the early ’70s, when Ron Simon was attending Dickinson, watching TV was just a pastime, certainly not a subject worthy of classroom dissection. Thirty years later, Simon was back on campus lecturing, but not in the fields in which he earned his B.A. in 1973—English and religion. For a capacity crowd in Rubendall Recital Hall, he showed scenes from the 1950s’ Candid Camera and game shows like Juvenile Jury as well as the ground-breaking 1970s drama, An American Family. He brought his viewers up to date with Big Brother and Survivor. His topic: Reality TV.

Simon, one of three curators at the Museum of Television & Radio in New York City, says what he does for a living is not considered “just watching television anymore; it’s a legitimate profession. Now you can get a degree in something I helped to pioneer,” Simon remarks.

Simon, who returned to campus as a Metzger-Conway Fellow—a short residency program that enables distinguished alumni to enrich the curriculum—is no stranger to the classroom. He teaches graduate courses at Columbia and New York universities and Hunter College, publishes widely and is on the editorial board of Television Quarterly.

At Dickinson in October he spoke in two American-studies courses, sociology’s Gender and the Media and the freshman seminar Mediated Realities: The Pleasures and Perils of Representation. At Dickinson, he says, professors are using “new conceptual ways of dealing with television. They integrate it into a lot of classes.”

The museum where Simon has worked for nearly 20 years seeks to collect and preserve television and radio heritage and to make it accessible to the public. “The core of the collection is radio and television programs,” he explains. “There are no collections of costumes and set designs.”

Unlike in an art museum, this museum’s collection is not one of a kind. “It changes the idea of what art is in popular culture,” Simon asserts. “Because of the VCR and DVD, people have these programs in their own collections,” though maybe not in the pristine condition of the museum’s copies. Nor is the museum’s collection at just one site. There is a branch in Los Angeles.

As a curator Simon helps to present and interpret the collection in a creative way, in hopes that it will “engage the public to discuss it.” Exhibits he has helped to create range from “Worlds Without End: The Art and History of the Soap Opera” to “Witness to History,” a thematic investigation of how electronic media have brought a shared experience of the world and history within reach. As the 25-year-old museum focuses its gaze more internationally, Simon has become more involved in cross-cultural projects. Recently he traveled to Rome to discuss gaining access to the Vatican’s collection.

Simon also helps to present the museum’s annual two-week Television Documentary Festival as well as seminars and other special events, such as a tribute to Walter Cronkite. One enjoyable task involves sleuthing. He not only found an unaired 1965 TV performance by the Rat Pack—Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin—that the museum then showed as a special event, but he found the lost episodes of The Honeymooners. He found the latter tapes in CBS’s vaults after he heard there were more than the customarily thought 39 episodes of the TV series starring Jackie Gleason.

A recent search had a Dickinson connection. When Doug Stuart, professor of political science and international studies and director of The Clarke Center, invited Simon to campus, Simon decided to unearth scenes from Stuart’s earlier career—as a child TV personality. During the 1950s, Stuart was one of the panelists on the quiz show, Juvenile Jury. Simon checked institutional collections, finally locating footage owned by a private collector in Chicago. “There are not all that many episodes out there,” says Simon. What he found was a “film recording of a live broadcast. It’s part of live TV history.”

The audience at Simon’s talk enjoyed seeing little Doug, precociously answering questions. Simon relished seeing the grown-up Doug’s pleased reaction. “I just couldn’t come to Dickinson without finding an episode,” he says. •