Around 1949, fresh out of college at Northwestern University, my mother moved to New York to take a job at NBC. She arrived at the dawn of U.S. television. NBC had entered the business just about a decade earlier. Rather than being assigned to a sitcom or a variety show, she ended up at the NBC Opera Theatre, one of the splashiest, most expensive ventures in the new lineup. The corporation had long sponsored its own radio orchestra under the leadership of the famed conductor Arturo Toscanini, who had fled Mussolini’s Italy in the 1930s for refuge in the United States. When television came along, executives assumed that one of its functions would be to make Toscanini-style high culture available to the American masses. That dream—that a major television orchestra and opera company would be both popular and profitable—lasted an astonishing 15 years, from 1949 to 1964, before NBC concluded that the future of television lay elsewhere.
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