In August of 1966, the youngest person who had ever appeared on the cover of Fortune Magazine was John Scutieri, then 3½ years old.
Plump-cheeked and dapper in a red collared shirt, Scutieri is pictured at a keyboard, “engrossed in learning how to read and write with the aid of Edison Responsive Environment’s Talking Typewriter.” He was one of 125 children in a special preschool program in Mount Vernon, New York, and the instrument, the magazine explained, was “in the vanguard of the technology that is knocking at the schoolhouse door.”
Scutieri—now 63, a father of four, and a grandfather of three—recalls being inside that contraption as a daunting experience. “What I recall is it was much like a telephone booth that you had to step up inside of it, and somebody closed the door,” he told me when I reached him by phone in December at his business, North Elm Home Furnishings, in Millerton, N.Y. “It was a little frightening.” A former mayor of Millerton, Scutieri admitted that much of his recollection of that preschool educational experience was a “blur,” but said that he did grow up with an “appreciation for technology.”
In that 1966 issue, Fortune writer Charles E. Silberman explained how government spending was creating rich incentives for corporations to produce educational technology—“a prime example of Lyndon Johnson’s ‘creative federalism’ at work.”
