Chicago Tribune from Chicago, Illinois • 224

On the cover PBS get 200 letters a week. They're like love letters. If anyone sat down and read them, they'd think we wrote them ourselves," she says with a laugh. "People make no bones about it: "(They write) 'Thank you for this option. God bless you.

I'm learning 6 Continued from page 3 such as "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," "This Old House," "Masterpiece Theatre" and "Mystery!" But with a fraction of the million this year- -it cannot compete head-on with WTTW. "The easy way to have done this," says the silverhaired 56-year-old Parker, "would have been to pass along the excellent programs made available from PBS." Budget restraints have meant that programs with a high price tag- Report," "Frontline," "Nova" and "Sesame have had to be passed up. Parker, who came to WYIN after 17 years at Harrisonburg, public TV outlet, muses philosophically, "Sometimes what the community would like and what we can afford don't always match up. We've simply had to look to other places for our big bang." His intital strategy- -airing WTTW programming an hour earlier so "people could go to bed sooner," has been augmented with regional network programs on topics such as model railroads, classic car rebuilding and basket weaving, which have proven quite popular with Channel 56 viewers. The station also produces locally its two biggest blockbusters: college basketball and a one-hour news broadcast at 6 p.m.

"Localism is very much alive and well in television, and stations still can serve as the conscience of the community," Parker says. But it takes more than conscience to run a station, and limited dollars remain a challenge. For example, Parker says, "I'm going to spend $150,000 on news this year. I was told (one Chicago station's) news budget a couple of years ago was $25 million. Our two cameras are slightly better than what you would purchase off the shelf at Sears." Hence, besides his programming role, Parker spends much of his time fundraising, most recently with the Indiana General Assembly.

"I want to see television do things," he explains. "People probably don't think in the scheme of things that television is very important, but when you look at the impact of television on our society, you have to realize how important it is." Aleskow, citing the recession and Persian Gulf war, agrees that money is getting harder to find. "It's very frightening," she said. "PBS has just so much money. (Businessman Walter) Annenberg gave millions to do telecourses, and then he pulled out last year for whatever reasons.

This was traumatic because telecourses are not the priority (for funding sources) and we have to ask ourselves, 'Will the dollars be there?" But feeding an intellectual hunger is the raison d'etre for public television, especially, Aleskow believes, educational TV. "Our industry's fallen short. Other than a few network shows (like Law'), PBS really is the hope," she says. "I don't know how people don't get punchy otherwise. We have a deep respect for the minds and hearts of our viewers.

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