1963

Something did seem familiar about the tall, slim figure in tweed jacket and slacks who was mounting the stage at a media awards presentation in New York a year ago. And there was a clue alone among the award recipients, he was wearing hiking boots. If our paths had crossed before, it had probably been on the Hanover Plain.

The man in the hiking boots was JohnMerrow, and he was picking up the Odyssey House award for the outstanding radio program dealing with issues related to children for his Options in Education on National Public "Radio.

On learning that he had won the same award again this year, as well as about eight other national awards over the past four years, I decided to call him up in Washington and find out just exactly what it is that he is doing right.

I reached John at his office late on a Sunday night, and it quickly became apparent that it was correct to refer to Options as John's show. He is the producer of the half-hour show that's aired twice a week, the co-host, and the principal reporter. And in explaining why he was working at night on a weekend, he said, "I also have to do the sweeping up."

Besides sweeping floors and gathering awards, John has also been drawing listeners - about a million a week at present - making his show second only to All Things Considered on NPR. (Most of the network's some 220 stations carry the show.) What's more, the listeners care; John gets 75 to 100 letters a day from people who have been delighted, enraged, or otherwise provoked by the program's toughminded approach to subjects that have included, according to an article written about the show in an education magazine, "homosexuality and sexism, violence and discipline, school consolidations, school food, the future of junior high schools, curriculum, education financing, . . . and a five-part series on the American adolescent that ranged from the sexual revolution to high teen-age unemployment."

In the past year John was arrested for causing a disturbance after confronting a liquor store owner in Connecticut with the fact that he had just sold liquor to a 15-year-old. (The charge was thrown out and John was released, but he wonders if anything is really being done to curb the sale of liquor to young children. "It was amazing," he says, "they would sell to anyone who could see over the counter.")

The charge, though, did have some merit. Neither Options nor John shrinks from causing a disturbance when warranted. John was thrown out of the office of the assistant superintendent of schools in Detroit last year when he went in to ask why schooling wasn't being provided, as required by law, for five severely handicapped children that were, in John's words, "just sitting all day in their own shit and vomit." Within two days after John aired his show on the situation (it included the soundtrack of his expulsion, on which the official could be heard screaming, "I don't have to talk to you"), the children were receiving instruction.

John became the creator of Options after following a somewhat circuitous route. After graduation he taught high school English for two years, then went to Indiana University for his master's, after which he taught English at Virginia State College by day, and at the Federal Reformatory in Petersburg, Va., by night. He particularly enjoyed teaching at the prison. "I had a captive audience," he quips, but adds, "They were terrific students." He still corresponds with some of the former inmates, and was best man at the wedding of one of the men who had been in his prison classes.

Next came a sojourn at Harvard, where he enrolled in a new, and short-lived, program offering a doctorate in "education and social policy." So far as he knows, he is the only student who graduated from the program, which was eliminated a year or so after he left. "The other people in the program weren't really into graduating," he says. "They just wanted to soak up Harvard Yard" ambiance.

But for John, it was a great program, offering the opportunity to hone his perceptions in dialogues with people like Christopher Jenks and Daniel Moynihan, while leaving sufficient leisure for John, together with his wife and other members of his family, to build a house on Nantucket, where he still vacations each summer.

Having gotten his doctorate, as John told an interviewer in 1978, "reluctantly I reached the decision I had to go to work for a living." George Washington University's Institute for Educational Leadership hired him to come up with a way of communicating with the public about education, and the result was Options.

John, who recently signed a new one-year contract to stay as the principal progenitor of the program, and his wife Elise have three children and live in Washington, where the show is based.

His work requires a lot of traveling, but John avoids long separations from his family by taking them along with him. Son Josh, now 12, will be going with him to an Indian reservation in the Southwest this spring when John goes there to report a show on Indian schools.

One of the reasons it's hard to recognize him is that John is probably one of very few members of the class who actually look better now than they did back in college. A regular running regimen has John down to a weight about 20 pounds under his college level, and a salting of grey hairs just adds the adjective "distinguished" to descriptions. His appearance and demeanor make it clearer than the citations and awards that things have gone well for him.

In other developments, word reached your secretary that Richard Heimovics has been granted tenure at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, where he teaches in the school of administration. His second daughter Sarah is now one-and-a-half. Ronald Garren reported that he is "alive and well and living in Carmel, Calif.," which is certainly a nice place to be alive and well in. And Steve Jacobstein wrote from Rochester, N.Y., that his fourth child is expected this spring and that he has been named a partner in his law firm. Steve and his family recently sponsored a Vietnamese family and had five members of the family living with them in their house for several months.

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