For Educator, It’s ‘Cut’ After 40 Years

When Harry Ratner graduated from San Francisco State with a bachelor’s degree in radio and television in 1957, the 22-year-old San Francisco native dreamed of becoming a director in the then-adolescent medium of television.

Ratner’s dream never included becoming an educator.

But that’s a role he’s assumed during an Emmy Award-winning career that includes stints as a producer and director at KCET-TV in Los Angeles, the Broadcast Service Center at Cal State L.A., KOCE-TV in Huntington Beach and Coastline Community College, for which he has produced and directed nearly two dozen telecourse series over three decades.

This month, Ratner retired from the Coast Community College District after 40 years in television--a career highlighted by a Los Angeles Area Emmy for a KOCE special on young musicians (“Debut”) and five other local Emmys for Coastline telecourses ranging from personal finance (“Dollars & Sense”) to astronomy (“Universe: The Infinite Frontier”).

Along the way, the Fountain Valley resident directed the first program produced at KCET (the 1964 documentary “The Radical Right Wing in Southern California”) and had memorable professional encounters with poet Maya Angelou and former President Carter.

Ratner’s retirement at 65, however, doesn’t mean the veteran director is calling a wrap on his TV career.

He’ll finish his work as post-production supervisor on the Coastline telecourse “Psychology: The Human Experience” in mid-February and continue working part time as a television production consultant for Coastline and for the Los Angeles and Orange County offices of education.

“Psychology: The Human Experience”--a series of 26 half-hour instructional documentaries--illustrates how far televised college-credit courses have come since 1953, when USC and KNXT (Channel 2 in Los Angeles) teamed up to produce the L.A. area’s first telecourse, “Shakespeare on TV,” on Saturday mornings.

Hosted by revered USC English professor Frank Baxter, “Shakespeare on TV” consisted of the veteran academician standing at a lectern in a classroom set where he had to rely solely on Shakespearean props and his own flamboyant teaching style to illustrate his lectures.

Today, telecourse producers use all the latest bells and whistles at their disposal: computer graphics, split screens and other special effects, professional narration and original music.

“The basic change is that the instruction has focused on what television can do best,” Ratner said. “So the imagery is the essential element, and rather than an idea being presented by a speaker, the idea is now presented by pictures.”

Although his TV career has encompassed directing a variety of live and taped programs ranging from political talk shows to jazz performances, Ratner has been producing and directing college-credit and instructional telecourses since his first year in television, at the Broadcast Service Center, in 1961.

And although he doesn’t teach students directly, Ratner said, he has always considered himself an educator as well as a director. “I work with teachers, who are the advisors on our programs, and I help shape their concepts and their teaching ideas into a medium that reaches large numbers of students.”

Large indeed. A typical Coastline telecourse, which includes textbooks, study guide and computer components, can easily reach 10,000 for-credit students nationally, and tens of thousands more will watch it simply for personal enrichment.

The telecourses also are distributed internationally to learning institutions and for general education television.

Coastline Community College is one of the nation’s top three producers of telecourses, along with Dallas Telelearning, a division of the Dallas County Community College District; and Intelecom, a Pasadena-based nonprofit consortium of Southern California community colleges.

Ratner’s Coastline colleagues, who threw him a retirement party Friday, are happy the veteran director will continue working with them as a consultant.

“He’s been particularly important because he knows the institutional history and has been in so many different kinds of situations that he’s a big help to any new employees that come on board with a new project,” said Leslie Purdy, president of Coastline Community College, which has more than 7,000 students a semester enrolled in its telecourses and other courses offered online and via CD-ROM.

“Harry is one of the dearest, sweetest, kindest people I have had the pleasure of working with,” said Laurie Melby, Coastline’s director of production, who has worked with Ratner since 1989 and has done freelance work with him on instructional programs for the Los Angeles County Office of Education.

Although they have worked together “under some pretty stressful and dire” deadline situations, Melby said, “he’s always happy. Everyone should have the opportunity to know someone like Harry.”

Ratner was a teenager when the first television antennas began sprouting from rooftops in the late ‘40s. But while others began buying TVs, Ratner’s parents remained holdouts. They had reason to resist; they owned a small movie theater. “Television represented a threat to the motion picture business,” said Ratner, who began operating the projector and working the concession stand when he was 15.

Ratner said he was originally interested in theater, “but somewhere in college I met people and got interested first in radio and then in television work.” TV appealed to him not only because it was exciting and new, he said, but also because it combined the elements of theater, the audio of radio and the visual.

After graduating, Ratner moved to Los Angeles, where he spent three months trying to land a job in television. He ended up in the mail room at KABC-TV in Hollywood. “In those days the only beginning work was the page staff--pages were ushers for the live programs--or the mail room,” said Ratner, who wasn’t in the mail room long enough to move up the ladder. Within nine months he was drafted.

When he left the Army in 1960, he decided to return to school and get a teaching credential at Cal State L.A. By then, he said, he was married to Rose, his wife of 43 years, and had “responsibilities” that, in time, included three children. “As much as I wanted to work in television, I knew the field was difficult to break into, so I wanted a backup.”

As it turned out, Cal State L.A. had just opened its Broadcast Service Center to assist instructors and produce telecourses, and people with television expertise were needed, Ratner recalled. A part-time job producing telecourses, which were broadcast live from KCOP-TV (Channel 13) and other Los Angeles TV stations, turned into a full-time job a year later.

During his two years at KCET in the early ‘60s, Ratner directed classroom-instruction courses for kindergarten through 12th grade in addition to his other studio directing chores. He left KCET to return to the Broadcast Service Center in 1966, where he stayed until he was hired by KOCE in 1971. At KOCE, he began his longtime association with Coastline Community College.

A high-quality, 26-segment telecourse series, which can cost up to $1.3 million, takes 18 months to two years to complete. Ratner said telecourses have a shelf life of seven to 10 years and, in the case of the Ratner-directed “Humanities Through the Arts,” more than 25 years.

That award-winning, 30-part telecourse, produced by KOCE in conjunction with Coastline in 1974, is hosted by Angelou and still airs nationally.

Ratner remembers Angelou for “the spectrum of talent that she possessed and her knowledge in so many fields in the humanities.” Although the course material was scripted, he said, Angelou was able to interject her personal life and stories into the segments. She also read her own poetry and even sang a portion of an aria.

Ratner’s encounter with Carter came in the early ‘80s when the former president appeared on KOCE’s “On Books,” a taped program co-hosted by TV newsman Bill Stout and actress Susan Strasberg.

The camera had just started rolling when Ratner looked at the monitor and noticed that a single strand of Carter’s thin, silvery hair was sticking up.

Ratner called, “Cut.”

“Mr. President,” he said, “you have a strand of hair sticking up.”

“I do?” Carter said, reaching up and patting down his hair. “Did I get it?”

“No sir, it’s still there,” Ratner said.

Carter patted down his hair again, but the offending strand stubbornly stood its ground.

“I can’t get it,” Carter said. “You’ll have to do it for me.”

So Ratner got up and walked over to the president.

“At that point,” Ratner recalls, “two of the largest men I’d seen in my life--the Secret Service--got up, and I quickly sat back down and said, ‘It’ll be OK.’ ”