To a small, un-athletic, severely near-sighted, brutally bullied little boy growing up in a rough working class Oregon town, PBS was a lifeline. After each day’s ration of physical and verbal abuse at school, I’d come home and spend some time in a world where people were kind and gentle to one another, where learning new things was encouraged, and where there was hope that the world might actually be a better place than what it had shown me it was.