Danny Epstein (1925–2010) was the director of music operations for Sesame Street. He had been with the program from the first season in 1969. "At the beginning, I only came for two weeks," he said in 1986, "just to help devise a system and get it started. That was sixteen years ago." He was an associate of Joe Raposo's since 1964. "The music for Sesame Street is never childish," he says. "The way everyone looks at it is that we're dealing with a very short audience."