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“Good night and good-bye” from Alistair Cooke
Depending on when you started watching television, the death this week of Alistair Cooke at the age of 95 made you think of Omnibus, Masterpiece Theatre, or even Sesame Street. If you listened to BBC radio broadcasts anytime since 1946 — via short-wave at first, later on NPR or the Internet — Cooke's death made you think of his “Letter from America.”
Cooke was the sharp-eyed but gentle-tongued journalist whose thousands of masterful “Letters” gave English and World Service listeners his observations on any aspect of American life that caught his fancy — sports, politics, or the chemistry of fall foliage. Each 13- or 14-minute segment unfolded into an elegant essay that was a pleasure to hear or read — for hundreds were published over the years in a series of collections. Cooke broadcast his final “Letter” last month.
Cooke was born near Manchester, England, in 1908 and became a U.S. citizen in 1941. He wrote for the Manchester Guardian for decades and was the author of more than a dozen books.
Yet most Americans think of Cooke as the host of the 1950s television program Omnibus or as the man who introduced the serialized tales of Masterpiece Theatre from 1971 until 1992. Little children may well think of Alistair Cookie, a character from Sesame Street. (He told an interviewer that long after Masterpiece Theatre had been forgotten, Alistair Cookie Monster would be remembered.)
Cooke began depositing his papers in 1965 at what is now BU's Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. The center's holdings feature his dispatches to the Manchester Guardian from the 1940s to the 1970s (including his eyewitness account of Robert Kennedy's assassination), scripts and recordings, and scrapbooks given to him by various television stations after his retirement from Masterpiece Theatre. He is shown above with Howard Gotlieb in 1985. Photo by Kerry Loughman, BU Photo Services
2 April 2004
Boston University
Office of University Relations