Word: claster
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DIED. NANCY CLASTER, 82, peppy original hostess and co-creator of the quintessential kids' TV show for baby boomers, Romper Room; in Baltimore. A last-minute stand-in on the show's 1953 debut, Miss Nancy spent 11 years on air admonishing her moppet guests and tiny fans at home with the "Do Bees" and "Don't Bees" of good behavior...
Romper Room (Syndicated): Many advertisers nourish the impossible dream of an hour-long commercial. Few realize that it is already here in Romper Room. Action for Children's Television, a pressure group of Massachusetts parents, once complained to Bert Claster, the show's producer, about its treatment of children as consumers in training, programmed to buy only the Romper Room brands of toys. Replied Claster: "This is commercial television, isn't it?" Indeed...
...Claster has since trained more than 200 teachers. In the latest class were a girl from Chicago who was picked from 750 applicants and a girl from Japan who spent 14 hours a day trying to learn how to pronounce the name of the show: except in French Canada, where it is called La Jardiniere, Romper Room is the name of the show no matter what language the script may be translated into, and Japan's Midori Namiki couldn't seem to keep herself from saying Lomper Loom...
...Claster's mail-order method is an odd way to syndicate a show, but wherever it is seen it achieves a local flavor impossible on a network. In each Romper Room city, the teacher has half a dozen local five-year-olds on the air with her every day, replacing three each week. They learn the alphabet, balance baskets on their heads, shove sand around with toy bulldozers, flack for their own drawings, and learn key facts of nature, such as, say, a whale can get a sunburn and peel. It is a school, not vaudeville, to be sure...
...manners," says teacher to a Lilliputian loudmouth. "Use your inside voice." When the little Romper roommates sit down for their cookies and milk, they say, "God is great, God is good, let us thank him for our food." As for integration, it's a local matter, according to Claster, but he says that in Baltimore, at least, the Rompers have been integrated from the outset...