The American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) has launched a new collection of documentaries and interviews produced for Seattle public television station KCTS by the award-winning documentarian and producer Jean Walkinshaw. The Jean Walkinshaw Collection includes 44 documentaries, short programs, personal profiles that find the extraordinary in the ordinary, and raw interviews. The collection covers much of Walkinshaw’s lengthy career, spanning the years 1972-2008.
Explore the Jean Walkinshaw Collection online at https://americanarchive.org/special_collections/jean-walkinshaw.
Starting in the 1960s, Walkinshaw has been instrumental in documenting the people, places, and cultures of the Pacific Northwest. In 1970, Walkinshaw moved to KCTS, where she produced documentaries for local, national, and international audiences. These documentaries mainly focused on notable artists, writers, and cultural themes of the Pacific Northwest region. Other documentaries include In the Spirit of Cooperation, about Japanese volunteers working in Ghana; Children of the Homeless, winner of the John F. Kennedy Award for Journalism; In the Shadow of the Mountains, a profile of Northwest mountain climber Jim Wickwire, the first American to conquer K2; The River, following the Columbia River and its inhabitants; Young Storytellers in Russia, one of the first American cultural documentaries taped in the former USSR, about 27 youngsters as they meet their Soviet counterparts; and To Write and Keep Kind, on short story author and poet Raymond Carver.
The Jean Walkinshaw Collection also includes more than 30 interviews about Carver with family members, friends, and fellow writers; the documentary Tom Robbins: A Writer in the Rain, along with related interviews; programs and accompanying interviews with authors Charles Johnson and Tony Hillerman; and a profile of Chinese-American organizer and publisher Assunta Ng, with accompanying interviews. Walkinshaw is also credited with providing the impetus to begin high-definition programming on KCTS with her centennial documentary Rainier: The Mountain about Mt. Rainier National Park.
Walkinshaw was the first female producer inducted into the Northwest Chapter of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Silver Circle, and has won eight Northwest Regional Emmy Awards, the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Award, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Award, and the New York Festivals International Television Programming Award, among others. In 2019, Seattle Colleges Cable Television (SCCtv) began digitizing materials produced by Walkinshaw, which were submitted to the AAPB in 2020, thanks to the contributions by SCCtv and KCTS.
Special thanks goes to Jean Walkinshaw for her dedication to ensuring the preservation of her historic collection in the AAPB.
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