Obituary
Robin Breed Ashley, 74
Robin Breed Ashley, a former PBS programmer and onetime executive producer of The Dick Cavett Show, died Jan. 17, 2009, in Cambridge, Mass., of complications of pulmonary disease. She was 74.
At PBS she supervised or acquired pledge programming successes including the 1988 Peter, Paul & Mary holiday concert and specials starring Roy Orbison and Luciano Pavarotti.
“She had a lovely light touch” with the specials, says Rebecca Eaton, e.p. of Masterpiece, who worked with her on a pledge event for the program’s 15th anniversary. “The way most people would remember her was for her unique sense of fun,” which was delightful, Eaton says.
In one of Ms. Ashley’s earliest dealings with PBS, she helped bring Upstairs Downstairs to American viewers. She was working as U.S. rep of Richard Price Associates, distributor of the landmark British series, while raising four children as a single parent in New York.
She held several posts, including e.p., at Daphne Productions, which produced Cavett’s talk show, then airing on PBS. In her work with Cavett and acquiring programs for public TV, Eaton speculates, “she probably met most people of note in the late 20th century.
However, “she never had the view, ‘I’m a high-powered television executive’—she was completely centered,” says Steven Ashley, who met and married her when both were programmers at PBS in the 1980s. “She was infectious with her idealism and her good spirit,” he says.
Ms. Ashley worked as director of acquisitions and fundraising programs for the network. After she retired from PBS in 1990, the couple moved to Boston, where he works as senior producer of Masterpiece.
She is survived by her husband; four children, Richard Hallowell of Winchester, Mass.; Lee Hunter Hallowell Jr. of Lake Placid, N.Y.; Andrew Hallowell of Lincoln, Mass.; and Tifany Babcock of North Ferrisburgh, Vt.; two brothers, John H. Welch of Jamaica Plain, Mass., and Francis W. Welch III of Tucson, Ariz.; her sister, Marriott Mozska of Sandwich, Mass.; and 12 grandchildren.
A memorial service was held Jan. 31 in Bedford, N.Y., and an additional remembrance will be held in May [2009] in Vermont, where the couple lived part-time.
Web page posted Feb. 16, 2008
Copyright 2009 by Current LLC
