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ion land," and the television said back to her, "Hello out there in television land." So as a three year old, I was just mesmerized and I thought, "Oh my God, television can see me." So then I would dress up for my favorite programs and hope that Hop-a-long Cassidy would think I was really cute. NELSON: Did you have cowboy gear and...? LAYBOURNE: I dressed up in party dresses with little flowers in my hand, and my mother claims that I asked her to spin me around and spin me as fast as she could and throw me into television land, so she thought early on I was determined to be in television. And the other thing about my childhood was my father was a businessman, and he was very supportive of his daughters, he had three daughters, and my older sister was beautiful and perfect, and my younger sister was brilliant and charismatic, and my dad looked at me and said, "You will be my business daughter." So he took me to work with him every Saturday and made me memorize all the stock symbols and had me run his office when I was 16. But both of those things -- my mother was a creative person out of radio, and my dad was a business person, and I think the combination pretty much left me with no choice. NELSON: But you went off to college, and you weren't doing anything involving TV. I mean you weren't taking the typical journalism and broadcasting kind of background. LAYBOURNE: No, I studied art history, and then I thought I would become an architect and I went to Philadelphia to work for an architect's firm, to just make sure that that's where I was going to go to graduate school, and I met my husband, who was working in the Philadelphia public schools as a media education guru, bringing videotape and animation to schools and working with inner city kids, who were terribly troubled. NELSON: Just to set... this is what year? So people know, in terms of doing this kind of media education. LAYBOURNE: This was 1970, there was no such thing at the time, he was a true pioneer. What he was doing was fascinating to me, so I basically followed him into this arena and got involved in -- I went to graduate school in education and got involved in media education myself. NELSON: So then you got out of graduate school where you were at...? LAYBOURNE: The University of Pennsylvania. More: http://cablecenter.org/barco-library-hauser-oral-history/item/laybourne-gerry.html