Best in the U.S.

The nation's "most outstanding educational television station," announced the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation last week, is San Francisco's KQED. For Program Director Jonathan Rice, the plush banquet at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria was tinged with sweet irony. To pick up the first such award in educational TV history, Rice had to pay his own way; KQED was too broke to send him. Back at the studio, a bleak barn of a building near San Francisco's Skid Row, General Manager Jim Day answered newsmen's questions: "Plans? My only plan right now is to issue the paychecks on Friday--if there's enough money in the bank."

But this week, prize-heavy KQED teetered on its financial tightrope with new confidence. From the University of California came big news: under a National Science Foundation grant of $109,980, biggest involving KQED to date, the university will help produce an eight-part series on viruses, promising money in the bank as well as prizes. The cast: Nobel Prizewinner Wendell M. Stanley, director of Berkeley's Virus Laboratory, his top aides, and as many life-and-death-affecting organisms as they can film through an electron microscope. These wonders will not be confined to loyal locals who keep KQED going 40 hours a week. KQED will sell the films to the National Educational Television and Radio Center to distribute to 43 ETV stations across the country.

Abundant Talent. From such sales, KQED gets one-third of its total income of about $350,000 yearly. The secret is San Francisco's abundant talent. From two dozen nearby colleges and universities have come famed performers: Nobel Prizewinning Chemists Glenn T. Seaborg and Linus Pauling, Nuclear Physicist Edward Teller, Chemist Joel Hildebrand, Semanticist S. I. Hayakawa, Zen Master Alan Watts. Started on a shoestring six years ago (TIME, June 16, 1956), KQED has been able to turn out 19 talent-laden series, which were promptly snapped up by its hungry sister stations.

Noted for its science shows, the station is just as active in other fields: Japanese art, political debates, classical concerts and live jazz. It has the only full local news-analysis program of any San Francisco TV station; last summer it trained a sharp-eyed camera on Visitor Nikita Khrushchev. For 5,500 subscribers, the price ($10 minimum) is cheap. On KQED, the viewer can learn anything from how to bid in bridge to foreign cultural habits. And in the works are new riches: a series on photography by Old Pro Ansel Adams, another on the roots of Communism in cooperation with the Hoover Institute on War, Revolution and Peace.

How to Keep Up? Manager Day, 40, is still not satisfied. To get more bite and controversy into programing, he is hard at work trying to put KQED's cameras inside school board meetings and even into city hall. But his brightest future may lie in the station's success with classroom TV, and demands for more. In 1958 it presented 14 hours of teleclasses a week to 140,000 students in 42 school districts (the teachers overwhelmingly endorsed it). The next step may be classroom TV for the University of California's eight campuses, plus the state's numerous junior and state colleges. KQED has the best facilities for the job in northern California, and the added income would help to expand its public programs. In the next decade, says Manager Day, "it won't be a question of how to stay ahead, but of how to keep up."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.