James Day, who died April 24 at 89, was co-founder of San Francisco public television station KQED and went on to serve as president of WNET during the early 1970s, when the station was producing and broadcasting such shows as “The Great American Dream Machine,” “An American Family,” and “The Forsyte Saga.”

Day was also credited with developing the on-air fund-raiser, which began in 1955 as a broadcast auction when money ran low just a year after the station’s founding. The auction persisted over the years with such quirky items as harpsichords and unwashed sheets slept on by the Beatles and donated by a local hotel. But soon after the auction began, it was supplemented with a pledge membership drive, and it is this tradition that has engulfed public broadcasting nationwide in “festival” weeks.

As station manager at KQED for 16 years, Day became as comfortable in front of the camera as behind it as host of “Kaleidoscope,” a half-hour interview program featuring celebrities including Eleanor Roosevelt, Buster Keaton, and Bing Crosby. His multipart interviews with the philosopher Eric Hoffer and historian Arnold Toynbee were broadcast on public stations across the nation.

In the long-running debate over whether public television should serve an elite or mass audience, Day stood unapologetically with the elitists. “We’re trying to replace ‘I Love Lucy’ with ‘I Love Lucidity,'” he told the Chicago Tribune in 1956.

KQED became known for ambitious public affairs programming and for being among the first stations in the nation to team with a university to broadcast for-credit classes. But programming occasionally took a more populist turn, as when he broadcast the East-West National Basketball Association All-Star Game in 1963, after local commercial stations failed to clear time for the game.

Also, he instituted “comfort breaks” during ponderously long educational programming after hearing from “several hundred mothers.”

KQED developed a reputation for flamboyant cultural programming, and Day made sure that KQED’s cameras were on hand to document student protests at the University of California at Berkeley at a time when commercial stations were less interested.

In 1969, he was elected president of National Educational Television, the network predecessor to PBS that used Ford Foundation funding to bring new programming to public stations. “He had the kind of energy and innovation and voice of youth and revolution,” a former co-worker of Day’s who went on to become head of cultural programming at WNET, Jac Venza, said. “All those things had no voice in broadcast before that.”

NET merged with New York’s WNDT, Channel 13, in 1970. Day became president of the renamed station, WNET. He became a familiar face to viewers with his afterwords to “The Forsyte Saga” in which he interviewed cast members.

NET was disbanded, and in 1973 Day resigned as president of WNET. The following year, he founded a production company, Publivision, and hosted a nightly interview program, “Day At Night.” He was appointed professor of radio and television at Brooklyn College in 1976 and retired as professor emeritus in 1988. He helped develop the City University cable television channel, CUNY-TV.

In 1996, Day published a memoir, “The Vanishing Vision: The Inside Story of Public Television.” Pulling no punches, he decried the stodginess of public broadcasting. He described the system as a “Byzantine bureaucracy kept on a leash by an untrusting Congress, with a fragmented leadership that lacks a clearly defined mission in today’s multimedia environment.”

Born December 22, 1918, in Alameda, Calif., Day was the son of a supervisor for the Southern Pacific Railroad. He graduated in 1941 from Berkeley and served in the U.S. Army in World War II. He worked as a civilian radio specialist with the Allied Occupation of Japan. He later was director of public affairs for an NBC affiliate in San Francisco.

He lived in New York City and died of respiratory failure at Mount Sinai Hospital. He is survived by his sons, Ross, Douglas, and Alan, and his companion, Jeanne Alexander.