Perry Wolff

“You are finished at the Museum,” Sig Mickelson said. “We have a disaster on our hands with the Air Force. Be at my office at 8 tomorrow. Do you know Walter Cronkite?”

Mickelson had received orders from Bill Paley (his boss’s boss). I saw I was not to question him too closely.

Paley had been only an honorary colonel in World War II while Robert Sarnoff, the head of RCA-NBC, had been a full general. Two years earlier Sarnoff-NBC had done a twenty-six part series on the exploits of the United States Navy called Victory at Sea. It had been brilliantly produced and edited, with a score by Richard Rodgers. Paley-CBS called it Victory at NBC and in retaliation commissioned a series on the exploits of the United States Air Force called Air Power.

Air Power had not yet flown. A production staff of twelve, editing rooms, and tens of thousands of feet of stock footage were on 45^th Street, unused. After a desk was reserved for the Air Force officer who acted as liaison, the staff became eleven.

I later learned Ed Saxe had recommended my predecessor for the job. Saxe was the CBS Vice President who had helped set up the administrative structure of the CIA. My CIA-approved predecessor had developed a brain tumor and had to be replaced for health and financial reasons. Mr. Paley wanted Air Power to be broadcast as soon as possible and the correspondent had to be Walter Cronkite, who had just become the anchor of the CBS Evening News. I asked if I might have Charles Collingwood. He and I had worked well together for almost three years. Or, given the time pressure, Edward R. Murrow, the most distinguished war correspondent in the history of radio.

Cronkite, said Sig’s face.  I learned later that CBS News was trying to get rid of Murrow’s boys. They were radio and they were World War II. Airtime had changed. Portentousness was giving way to sincerity.

Walter invited me to visit his home. He showed me a volume of the stories he had filed as a correspondent in Europe. He didn’t ask about my war experiences. I didn’t like to talk about combat and he had seen almost none. Once, he had jumped in a ditch under fire and there had been other close calls, he told me. I nodded. “Scary.” I suppose had I shown more admiration, even servility, he might have become friendlier, but things would worsen between us for the rest of my professional life at CBS News.

There was the matter of the Cold War. I learned much later that one of my principal researchers was a government plant. George Vicas never admitted it to me, although we became good friends. He spoke perfect Russian and his research papers were balanced and thorough. (In the 1980s the CIA sent him to Russia to make films in Russian to teach proper jurisprudence procedures to ex-Soviet court officers.)

Air Power was the first documentary series to be sponsored fully by one advertiser. They sent no memos or suggestions. If they had problems with the more controversial programs, I did not hear about it. The problems were between the correspondent, the Pentagon, and me.

The first film, the pilot to the whole series, was titled Target Ploesti. Ploesti was a Rumanian oilfield essential to German rolling and flying stock.

On August 1, 1943, 177 Air Force bombers in a surprise raid took off from North Africa to destroy the oilfields from low altitude. The target was 2700 miles away. The lead navigator made a mistake and flew directly over the German Air Defense Command headquarters in Bucharest. All surprise was lost. Ploesti was the worst defeat ever suffered by the United State Air Force. The footage of the raid was breathtaking. The bombers came in at one hundred feet, and cameras recorded the fighting. One bomber broke up directly before a camera and plunged into an oil refinery tower. No one could have survived the explosion.

The word “oil” was the key to the whole film. When Cronkite read my script he pronounced it in two syllables.

“Oy-yul “

“Walter, one syllable. Oil”

“That’s what I said. Oy-yul.”

“Oil”

“Oy-yul. That’s the way I say it; that’s how I say it.”

The tone was fierce, the glance dismissive. For that matter he dismissed the whole production, and never once came to the editing rooms. He was not yet the most trusted man in America. When later I had serious troubles with the Pentagon, I sent several drafts to his office for comment, but they were never acknowledged or returned. Walter was never made available to me. I turned his voice-over recording sessions over to an associate. He read what I wrote, without changes.

Cronkite never tried to contact me. Instead, as if Air Power were a theatrical production, he sent his two agents, Jap Gude and Tom Stix, to see me and to plead that I give their client more attention. One of the agents was drunk. I asked why Walter wouldn’t come to the office and help me.

“Do you know who he is? Walter is the star of the show.”

“If your client is the start of the show, why won’t he help me with the Air Force brass? They hate what I’m doing.”

“Cronkite is the anchor on the evening news, and that keeps him in New York all day long.”

“Tell him it’s his name on the front credits and get out of here.”

Target Ploesti became a shouting match when I presented it for comment to the public relations head of the Air Force. Robert L. Scott was an Air Force ace who had made many kills in World War II. He was a Flying Tiger, an authentic hero and a general who had written God is My Co-Pilot, later made into a movie.

I explained the architecture of the series. “The Air Force rises from defeat to victory, sir. You lose at Ploesti, you lose at Schweinfurt, and we lose at Pearl Harbor. We rise and win the war. Honesty is good dramatic construction.”

General Scott would not look at me. The projection room had a half dozen commissioned officers seated in it.

“Why would CBS put a foot slogging enlisted infantryman in charge of this series? What ever happened to the other producer? I flew him for a weekend in Mexico City. I thought we put somebody helpful in that office.”

God did not fly in the pilot’s seat. Scott had the stick and rudder; God was in the right seat where He could only be the co-pilot.

The Air Force was to be the star of the show. They had an agent, too. I found our liaison Air Force colonel rifling my desk. He was looking for the proposed outlines for other chapters. I took his keys from him and told him to get out of my sight. He left me a script written by my predecessor. It was marked “approved script” and signed by an assistant to Colonel Scott. Its theme was that the United States Air Force made no mistakes at Ploesti. I took the revisions to the head of CBS News. No self- respecting journalist or documentarian could accept their propaganda. Either CBS controlled the final scripts or the Air Force did.

Our lawyers were called in. The contract did not specify who had the final word. The assumption was that the series would follow NBC’s prize winning Victory at Sea. Both the network and the military would work together in common purpose. However in Victory at Sea the United States Navy never suffered a defeat after Pearl Harbor. It did take losses now and then. Ploesti was a defeat, not a loss.

Sig Mickelson, then President of CBS News, read the Pentagon’s version of the raid. He asked for time to work it out. It was never worked out, merely compromised. Fifteen years later in a broadcast I supervised, The Selling of the Pentagon, this conflict became the basis of the argument of whether the First Amendment guaranteed television the same rights as the print press.

Ploesti was an example of the paradox of war: How many should be asked to die for a target? Normally a ground force calls off an attack when casualties reach five percent. Elite corps like the Marines or SS will go to fifteen percent. The USAF took thirty percent in long raids deep in German territory. One out of three planes was lost on this August 1943 mission. Over 800 airmen were killed, wounded or missing. It was estimated that to stop the flow of oil from this source, at least seven more missions would have to be launched.

There were fifteen drafts of Target Ploesti. It was screened five times at the Pentagon and rejected each time. After the last screening Colonel Pitchford, the new liaison officer, was comforting.

“Look, here’s the deal,” he said. “The Air Force will transfer Scott off the project. The series is more important than he is. You’ll have another session. Make a change or two and wait.”

I compromised. I wrote a summary page explaining that the loss of oil helped us defeat Germany. Pitchford’s counsel was right. “The last page is Pentagonese and unintelligible.”

Cronkite read what was written and showed up late for the small banquet in the Pentagon.

Sometime later I went to see my brother, Leon Wolff, 2d Lieutenant United States Air Force, retired.

After my broadcast, Leon wrote a book on Ploesti, Low Level Mission. It was not a success but it was a far more detailed account than mine. But the record couldn’t be straight for either of us. For the next thirty years the Army hid the documents we should have seen. We both got it wrong. There is still the suspicion that the Germans had been tipped off by their intelligence agents in Libya.

The military reckoned that the value of the target was worth the number of the deaths. That’s a reckoning they never make in public.

The Air Force had put at my disposal an old twin-engine bomber with a crew on a standby basis. Colonel Pitchford was more given to wine and women than spying or propaganda. He was in the midst of divorcing a wife and on his way to a retirement and the real estate business. He came with an enlisted woman who was his aide.

The A-20 had a bomb bay that extended into the fuselage and was covered at the top. A mattress could be placed on the top of the bomb bay. I never used it, but the Colonel did and his Air Force lady did.

This twin engine plane had a second mattress in the plastic nose. While the pilot flew at low altitudes I could lie on it and watch America go by, a few hundred feet beneath me. I buzzed the nation, coast to coast.

It took two and a half days in those propeller-driven times. That low-level mission changed my professional life. It made me skeptical about unity and the co-axial cable, and satellite America.

America is a continent, not just a country. Television and mass marketing have forced us into a sense that we are small. It is so easy to switch pictures from coast-to-coast and border-to-border that in our collective mind the size of our continent is forgotten. We think of ourselves in terms that make us Lilliputian. We are not quintuple England or eight times France: all one has to do is fly low and slow from one coast to another. The United States is vast and varied and unpredictable.

I was astounded, and I still am.

In these jet days, when the flight attendant asks us to draw the shades so we can see a movie, I rebel. I keep the shade open and look down at our history; the land is our story. In the east, the patterns of agriculture curl and twist in the same manner as old Europe. In Indiana and Ohio come the squares of farming, subdivided land grants; the work of Thomas Jefferson. Each land grant tied to an educational institution. The squares are less subdivided in the Midwest. They stretch on and dissolve into the rivers and mountains that recall Lewis and Clarke. The deadly deserts of the Hopis and Navajos. The Rockies and then the Pacific. And as vast and diverse as the geography are the people. We are not one. We are a diverse multitude. In unity there may be strength, but in diversity there is survival.

 

Image

Air Power DVD, Amazon.com

 

One of the most ambitious series-within-a- series was a four-part summary entitled, The History of Life on Earth. The guide was George Gaylord Simpson, one of the world’s leading paleontologists and the author of The Meaning of Evolution.

Dr. Simpson began with fossil invertebrates seen under an electron microscope. With the aid of other curators we traced the tree of life to the arrival of man. We spent two hours explaining a half billion years.

Dr. Simpson was a man of sharp wit—when there were almost no letters of protest to his presentation of the theory of evolution he noted, “They don’t teach evolution the way they used to.”

The department of paleontology mounted the dinosaurs in the American Museum’s most visited hall. The joints of Tyrannosaurus Rex showed great deposits of calcium. We got a nice close-up of an arthritic bone that was 175 million years old. Undoubtedly the species suffered from the aching disease. The Kings of the Jurassic may have hobbled, rather than leapt.

Adventure never attracted a major audience, but some members of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton watched the program.  Dr. Albert Einstein told one of our contacts that he found Dr. Simpson stimulating. The suggestion was made that the German scientist would be willing to exchange views with Dr. Simpson on our program. The leading historian of time and space would meet a leading historian of the history of life.

America had a problem with the most famous physicist of the 20^th Century. The FBI had a file of some 1500 pages alleging that he was not only a Communist, but had raised money for Communist organizations. Einstein was a certified and dangerous Red. Some of the FBI sources were prostitutes the scientist had allegedly used.

CBS itself was under attack from government committees, sponsors and affiliated stations, and had drawn up a blacklist, but it was inconceivable that Albert Einstein would be prohibited from appearing. I went to my boss and the decision was that if Einstein wanted to talk politics, the moderator would be Edward Murrow; but if he wanted to speak about science the program’s host, Charles Collingwood, would be the anchor.

I thought it only fair to inform the American Museum that the great scientist was a possible guest.  The Chairman of the Board was Alexander White, of White, Weld & Co, a leading Wall Street financial house.

Mr. White told me that he would not have that card carrying communist on a program coming from his Museum of Natural History.

I asked for his refusal in writing on the Einstein matter. He never sent it.

I heard later that Dr. Simpson attended two lunches with Albert Einstein.

 

Images

George Gaylord Simpson, undated photo, http://palaeoblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/born-this-day-george-gaylord-simpson.html

Albert Einstein, undated photo, http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/2015/03/17/scientists-celebrate-albert-einsteins-birthday/

 

 

When television was young—before the computer, the microchip, and editing cuts lasting less than a wink—CBS News did 136 broadcasts of Adventure, a documentary television series beginning in 1953. It was produced in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History and hosted by Charles Collingwood.

Some programs had no commercials. The salesmen called Sunday afternoon the “cultural ghetto.” Since public broadcasting had not yet begun, the burden of cultural respectability had to be carried by the networks. It was expected that a station’s license to make money would entail broadcasting programs in the “public’s interest, convenience and necessity.” It was assumed that culture was an American necessity. I don’t think commercial television was ever virginal, but it was prudent before it was prurient.

Later, when public broadcasting began, the commercial broadcasters were relieved. PBS would take over the responsibility of distributing the fine arts and sciences. CBS underwrote the building of the educational station in New York. It donated a complete New York studio with full equipment, and at the cost of millions, shepherded through a license for one more station in New York. It was a gracious gesture, but now not only could culture could be handed off to PBS, but the local CBS station had one less competing commercial channel in New York.

At the time the ratings came out just once a week. They were printed in what was called a Nielsen pocket piece. It measured only shows with commercials.

One day Sig Mickelson, the head of CBS News, came by my secretary’s desk and saw the Nielsen ratings piece. He was sharp with her.

“Perry is never to see the ratings. He and you are not hired to count the house. We do Adventure for other reasons.”

That is one of my fondest memories of the many fine men under whom I served.

Adventure was the precursor of the nature programs that have become staples of television broadcasting.

There were a lot of personal boundaries for me to erase.

I had always lived in big cities. Until the war I had seen the sky mostly as a backdrop behind buildings. So far as I knew, the sky could be square. As for the out-of-doors, I remember a vow of a soldier with whom I had shared a foxhole for a week. “When the war is over the only time I’m going outside is when I go from one building to another.” I agreed.

I recognized my incompetence quickly, and I cast my staff with a knowledgeable aide, Robert (Shad) Northshield.  In basic training Shad had taught me how to throw grenades properly. (Don’t bend the elbow, Wolff! Hurl it, don’t pitch it!) A print journalist, he had studied natural history. He was also the photography and zoo editor of The Chicago Sun Times.

Sometimes he appeared on screen, most notably on a live sequence devoted to friendly otters. While on the air the otter shat on Shad and bit him at the same time, and Northshield lost his commissioned officer composure.

Another wise choice was Jac Venza who became famous years later as the executive producer of Great Performances and the cultural czar of the Public Broadcasting Service.

The two men were at different poles.

Shad came to Jac and me one day. “We got to do a show on kidneys.”

“Why kidneys?”

“Because fish don’t piss.”

“Why don’t they piss, Shad?”

“Because the water flows through their gills and flushes the crap away. Until the fish got kidneys they had to stay in the water, so there couldn’t be animals living on land. We’d still be pissing in the ocean if the kidney hadn’t developed in the first fish that crawled on land, lungfish. The kidneys are an elaborate set of filters that screen out the poisons.”

Jac interrupted. “Elaborate filters?”

“Yes, Jac.”

“Perry, it has to be a Mondrian set. Mondrian’s paintings are filters. “

We found the kidney expert at the ichthyology department of the American Museum, and he explained the subject on the broadcast. Jac lost. The set was fishy.

I wrote most of the segments, and at the beginning directed the live cameras. Later I hired help for both jobs.

There were practical boundaries between television and science. On the very first program an archeologist showed some of the Museum’s richest treasures—the Chibaya beaten gold pieces, so precious they were kept in a vault and were never on public view. The archeologist, Junius Bird, brought them by station wagon, carefully wrapped.

The union stagehand saw Dr. Bird bringing the artifacts into the studio. He was suspicious and confronted me.

“What is he carrying?”

“Beaten gold objects.”

“He’s carrying the props into the studio.”

“They can fall apart so easily!”

“He’s carrying the props into the studio. That’s a violation of the contract. Stagehands pick up the sets and the props. We deliver them. You’re in violation. Want to be written up?”

Dr. Bird got the masks into the studio, and the argument flared up again after the show.

Even today the beaten gold artifacts remain unseen and locked in the Museum’s vaults.

The next week my production manager called for delivery of sets and props. The stagehands were to go to Minnie in the basement room B2 of the American Museum. Minnie was told to let the union men handle all artifacts.

The live artifacts were rattlesnakes.

I had scheduled a sequence on herpetology. After some swearing the argument was settled amicably. The small scientist handled the props.

That same opening show contained the first of many disasters.

The most popular exhibit in the Museum was the Planetarium. The scientists in specialties less popular than astronomy called the Planetarium “our big theater,” but they tolerated it because it brought people into the building and provided some income.

We scheduled a visit to the site for the opening sequence. The segment was terrible.

The vastness of the heavens had to be reduced to the prevailing TV monitor size in 1953. The Universe was compacted to 18 inches, black and white.

As background music we played Gustav Holst’s The Planets but nothing was cosmic.

Years before I had been fascinated by the sciences, particularly astronomy. In the 1930s when the Depression made it seem that capitalism was a failure, my brother had persuaded me that Marxism was a scientific solution. Economics was a science, and an elite group of scientists could rule the world of finance. Science was pure, capitalism was base greed.  And the purest science was mathematics (I almost failed algebra my first semester, to Leon’s horror). Almost as pure was the movement of the universe. So I registered for an astronomy course at Northwestern, and sat at the end of the telescope, open to the cold winds of Lake Michigan. I froze.

I retreated from Marx. I am no longer awed by outer space.

Inner space, inexact science, life science as taught by the American Museum brings awe more slowly. It took time for me to appreciate the less exact disciplines. For example, I heard for the first time the word “ecology.” Over a film clip of plant and animal life in a garden the curator warned that the sun was the center of our environment and ecology was the study of the interrelationships between the species, and there might be trouble ahead.

I didn’t get it. I wasn’t yet worried about pollution, and so I cut the ecologist to ten minutes.

There were some scientific fakes in the Museum’s library films. They had a print of a snake film from a recommended Disney nature documentary. Snakes, writhing in an upright position in tempo with sinuous music. Shad was suspicious and called in a herpetologist. The elegant twisting of upright snakes was dismissed in a moment by the scientist.

“The snake is writhing because the sand he’s in has been heated almost to the boiling point. He’ll be dead in a few minutes.”

And then the perpetual questions that persists today: “How did the cameraman get the picture?” “Is he really inside the tree trunk looking at the bird’s eggs, or did they build a fake tree in the studio?” Once the audience asks itself this simple question, the fakery is often apparent.

Faking film, and the ethics of editing should be a required course.

Both institutions were good to us. The museum housed the CBS team and we ate “dinosaur stew” with the scientific staff at lunch in the common cafeteria.

At the beginning many of the scientists did not own or watch television. They patronized us. We were better tolerated after the scientists were astonished when strangers who had recognized them on-screen would thank and compliment them.

I knew when we were tacitly admitted when the most distinguished head of Mammalian Studies said, “ABC has a better test pattern at sign-off than CBS.” That meant he had stayed awake watching his screen until 2AM…and explained his red eyes the next morning.

As we moved into the second year the guards had a direction for strangers: “CBS used to be below the reptiles, but now they’re between the apes and man.”

We made an arrangement with museum-sanctioned expeditions. CBS split the cost of the film stock and processing, as well as half the tuition of short film course for the photographer-scientist. The Museum would give us access to their remarkable archives of past expeditions, but we would have to clear the rights with the owners.

CBS gave me a staff, and $17,000 per week to produce the hour.

Some ten weeks in the season I went to the head of programming for CBS News and told him I had saved over $17,000.

“Wolff”, he said, “You have deprived the American audience of over $17,000 of production. You aren’t expected to make money.”

But he had trouble with a voucher we submitted entitled, Costs for Ants.

“Ants? Ants? You could have come to my kitchen in New Jersey and gotten as many as you wanted, free.”

We made a deal with the head of the Animal Behavior department who was studying the flow of army ants. At times tens of thousands of ants are dormant. At other times the insects move like a hungry river, a chain, devouring everything in its path. The group flows through the jungles of Central America.

I had approved the payment of the air ticket to a scientist, and I explained this to my financial superior.

I begged on the basis of the march of science. “The behavioral question is what triggers the flow of ants? Shall the river of ants be considered the basic biologic unit, or should the behavior of a single warrior ant be studied? I mean what about human behavior? Are we herds or are we individuals? It really was a hell of a segment, Lou.”

Mr. Stone was not impressed.

“Look. Suppose we change the voucher to “Ant Act” and the accountants will think of an insert on The Ed Sullivan Show. You know, two girls with antennae – feelers – coming out of their heads. Leading Sullivan on stage, with that goofy grin on his face. Cheap act at that price.”

The scientist who most impressed me was Dr. Harry Shapiro, Chairman of the Department of Anthropology. Tall, near-sighted, well dressed, he carried that green felt book bag that marked his generation of Harvard scholars. His speech was enthusiastic and simple. I nestled as closely as I could.

The American Museum came together when the scholars of 19^th Century recognized the force of Darwin’s theory of evolution. The whole institution was based on the history of life on earth. The phylogenetic tree traced the many-million-year rise from single-celled creatures to that of our species, Homo sapiens. It was understood, if not said, that man was the culmination of evolution.

“The proper study of mankind is man,” said Alexander Pope.

(However an ichthyologist noted, “If a fish could draw the tree of life, there’d be a fish on top.”)

In its early days the museum considered some homo sapiens to be superior to other homo sapiens. A mild form of racism, but one that persisted too long. The anthropology departments particularly thought some ethnic groups were superior to others, and, while not scientifically provable, in practice rich New Englanders were at the top of the tree.

Harry Shapiro was professionally qualified to head the department in the 20^th century, but the name Shapiro helped erase the past sins of earlier department heads. A Jewish chairman of anthropology was an apology and an act of contrition on the part of the Museum.

His specialty was physical anthropology, particularly the measurement of human skulls. A human skull fits neatly in a shoebox. Dr. Shapiro had many behind his desk chair. Like a Florsheim salesman, he would reach behind his head, catch the box by the lid, flip the lid back and pull out a human skull. He was opening a number of boxes one day when he made a remark that showed he was Jewish.

“You know the proscription that we Jews have against marrying a Gentile? When I was digging up and measuring skulls in the Holy Land I discovered why the rabbis were against it. It was that I found so many Hebrews had married Philistines. The cranial measurements show intermarriage flourished.”

I watched the competition between the two schools of anthropology—physical and ethnic. If Dr. Shapiro’s expertise was the study of skulls and bones, Dr. Margaret Mead’s skills were in describing the customs of societies. Each anthropologist was knowledgeable about the other’s field, but each was a specialist.

At the time Harry Shapiro had an advantage: he decided how the department would be housed.  As I passed his office one day, I heard him say, “Margaret, there are other anthropologists in this department. They need room, too!”

It was the first time I heard this elegant man raise his voice.

The most difficult scientist I had to deal with was Dr. Mead, the most famous anthropologist of the time, and a goddess-to-be in the world of feminism.

Margaret Mead returned with a good deal of film footage from a second trip to the island of Manus in the Pacific. She was scheduled to make an appearance on Adventure. A previous husband had made a classic film of her visit to a tribe in Bali, Dance and Trance in Bali, but it was obvious she had not spent much time in the editing room. Her new footage was delivered to our editing room. Two editors and I screened rushes with her.

She was a small woman, older; imperious at one moment and friendly the next.

Her new Samoa material was edited by Jerry Bender who had never gone to college, had never heard of the most celebrated name at the American Museum, and went on to make a fortune in feature film sound editing. The dialog between the scientist and the editor grew tense. Film was a language she did not understand. Anthropology was a discipline new to Jerry.

I tried to act as a Rosetta Stone, but I couldn’t reach either.

“Mr. Bender you cannot put that picture there! I took it another day!” she said.

“Honey, I have to get from one moving shot to another. I need a still shot in between.”

“That man is not from this tribe!”

Jerry exploded “Dr. Mead, you take care of the fuckin’ anthropology, and I’ll take care of the fuckin fillum.”

I said, “Margaret, please give us an hour or two.”

When she came back we showed her the rough cut. It pleased her.

“Jerry, you’re right. You take care of the fillum, and I’ll take care of the anthropology.”

Previously, during the delivery of her daughter, the birth was filmed in close-up, but when she appeared on the set of Adventure she was concerned about her looks. I was directing, Charles Collingwood was the narrator, and Joe Papp was the floor director. Dr. Mead’s close-up was to be from a camera over the shoulder of the questioner. But on my screen she was in profile, not in full face. It took me a moment to understand why. She wasn’t looking at Collingwood; she was staring at her image on a floor monitor. She made eye contact only with herself.

“Papp,” I yelled, “Don’t let her see the monitors.”

There was scurrying and noise as the monitors were shifted. Finally the scientist had no choice but to look at the correspondent. Angrily, I thought.

She wasn’t angry the next time I saw her. In the months following she had received many compliments because of her first television appearance.

It was at a “dinosaur stew” lunch at the staff cafeteria. She thanked Jerry and me and brought me a fresh coffee when she went back for her own refill.

She said, “Harry Shapiro told me I looked young and wonderful on live TV. So did my daughter.”

 

Images

Center to Right: Perry Wolfe, Jac Venza and Mike Wallace, CBS Adventure Series, (photo: Landov), http://perrymilleradato.com/about/

CBS Studio Shoot, (photo: Landov), http://perrymilleradato.com/about/

Perry Wolff at CBS, Adventure Series, (photo: Landov), http://perrymilleradato.com/about/

Johanis Lokus (Loponiu), Margaret Mead, Petrus Pomat, Raphael Manuwai, John Kilipak with Manus children, 1953, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/mead/field-manus.html