Magic City Kids' Shows | ROMPER ROOM: Miss Carol

"At the time I went on Romper Room I was with the University of Alabama Medical Center Library. It was some sort of grant they had by which we were doing revisions on the catalog system, and I was actually perfectly happy with that job. Then I ran into a friend from Auburn at a meeting one night, and she turned to me and said, 'Carol, there's the perfect job for you, I saw it in the paper today.' And it was the Romper Room teacher position that Miss Jane was leaving. So I called the next day, and they had a representative of Claster Productions already in town at WAPI conducting interviews. He said if I could come tomorrow they would see me. The next thing I knew it was 'Can you come back the next day to the audition?'

"I thought it was a great experience just to get to audition for a real, live television production! I was just out of college maybe two years, I was already married but didn't have a family yet, so I was not all that familiar with the program. I didn't know Mr. Do Bee and the whole routine, so I sort of went into that audition a little bit at a disadvantage that I didn't know all the jargon and names and terminology."

There was more to winning an audition for Romper Room than just knowing how to look pretty (although goodness knows, the RR teachers were all experts at that -- probably disappointing millions of kids who found out their real-life teachers weren't going to be nearly as cute and friendly). Miss Carol's unfamiliarity with the show could have doomed her from the start, but she mustered her courage and went on with it:

"One thing we had to do was to sing a song, and since I didn't know any of the Do Bee songs, I sang a Girl Scout song. We had to give a Mr. Do Bee message, which was just ad-libbed. The other thing we had to do involved ad-libbing a commercial with the hot chocolate mug that the Britling cafeterias were giving away. That was the most awesome part of it. I managed to get through the song, I managed to fake my way through the Mr. Do Bee message, and then I got to the commercial. I was in there just smiling at the camera, and had just about made it through, and was actually still breathing and still alive, when I set the mug down right on the edge of the desk. As I was smiling into the camera, the mug crashed on the floor, and I thought, 'Well, that's the end of this job opportunity for me.' But the funny thing about it later was that they said, 'When you recovered from that mug, never flinched, lost control, or missed a beat, we knew you could handle the kids!'

"It all happened so quickly. It was audition one day, and then a phone call asking if I could go to Baltimore in one week. I did hesitate because I didn't realize it was going to be so soon! Next Friday! I don't know how far ahead of time Miss Jane had notified them that she was leaving; there may have been a scheduling problem, because they had to get one of the Claster people down while all of this was going on. I also think I was one of the very last people to be interviewed, because I was in on a Thursday afternoon very late, and the auditions were on Friday."

While Miss Carol had to watch Miss Jane do her final broadcasts in order to get a feel for them, the two ladies did not have as much interaction as one might suppose. One special event occurred on the annual "anniversary show" in April 1970, when Miss Jane came back to make a guest appearance, marking the only time the two teachers appeared on the air together. Like Miss Jane, though, Miss Carol was expected to make personal appearances for the show's sponsors; these tended to point out one of the primary physical differences between the pair:

"One thing that was interesting is that on TV, next to the little children, I appeared quite tall. I'm really barely 5'2". So sometimes when I would be out in public someone would come up and say, 'Do you know you look just like Miss Carol?' Another thing that contributed to that was my ever-changing hair. I don't know what was going on in those days, I was either trying to find myself or find my hair, but I was always changing my hair style. Sometimes I even wore a wig.

"The Romper Room teachers were expected to show up for personal appearances for sponsors, and we were certainly encouraged to appear wherever we could at different non-profit events. What we could NOT do, though, which was probably different from other children's TV personalities, was go to a child's birthday party and charge an appearance fee. We couldn't do that sort of thing: it had to be community, charity, or for a sponsor.

"I had a call from a little boy's mother wanting to know if I could come to his birthday party, and I explained to her that we were not allowed to do that. She said, 'Well, I was hoping you could because he met you when you visited Children's Hospital.' She went on to tell me that he had leukemia, and this was his fifth birthday, and she thought it would just be really special. And at that point I said, 'WHEN is the party? WHERE is the party?' I stayed in touch with that family for several years."

One story that seems to run through all Romper Room productions in all the cities where the show was seen involves the unique relationship between the jaded and cynical floor crew and the ever-perky and cute teachers. The crew delighted in trying to throw Miss Carol off balance during the show, while at the same time they would have brained the first outside jerk who tried to bother her:

"They would tease me and give me a hard time sometimes. We would have these cue cards that would just say PUNCH-A-BALL, or ROMPER STOMPERS, or PLEDGE. Or they might have the names for the kids I was to see in the Magic Mirror that day because they had sent mail in. But every now and then this crew would hold up one that said YOUR SLIP IS SHOWING, and I'm here trying to explain National Dental Health Week, and why we want everyone to brush their teeth, and the floor manager is back there with a sign saying my slip is showing! Once, during National Fire Prevention Week, the story for the day was THE FIRE HOUSE CAT, about a cat who lived at the fire station with the firemen. It was a cute little story. Well, they thought it would be funny to change the cue card to THE CAT HOUSE FIRE ... so I was getting ready, and the children were having their cookies and milk, and I glanced out of the corner of my eye to see my card: 'And now, our story for today is THE CAT HOUSE FIRE.' I didn't even know I'd said it! I just kind of glanced at that cue card and went on. That was one of my real blunders.

"Sometimes you wonder if anyone is watching, but then when you do something really stupid you find out lots of people ARE watching. I said on the air one day that turkeys have four legs. I couldn't believe I had said that, because I certainly knew better than that. We were making this turkey for Thanksgiving out of an apple, toothpicks, a marshmallow, raisin eyes, and to get that turkey to stand with that apple body being so heavy and using toothpicks for legs, we had to put four legs on it! But I was also making this a lesson as I went along, and mentioning the big spread of the turkey's tail and talking about the red wattles... it was an animal lesson but also a craft lesson, and then I got to the part about the four legs. We got a lot of mail on that!"

Miss Jane had started doing the show live each day, but toward the end of her tenure WAPI had begun taping each program ahead of time. Miss Carol inherited this format, although due to the crude nature of early videotape, editing was discouraged:

"The message was very clear that if things were bad enough, they would stop me. I remember one day I was quite under the weather, cold and flu symptoms, and I felt like I just couldn't do it, but I thought it was only 30 minutes and surely I could pull myself together and try to look and sound good for that. I managed to get into the studio, but as I was standing in front of the big Hasbro toy board about halfway through the show, apparently I started really swaying and my eyes were rolling back and I was just about to faint, and they literally rushed up and said, 'YOU sit down!' But most of the time, they expected us to make it through a 30-minute show. It had to be pretty bad to stop the tape; there were times people spilled milk, or an animal from the zoo would decide to hear the call of nature, but we just kept going."

Another thing Miss Jane and Miss Carol had in common, as evidenced by their publicity photos, was the unmistakable fashion appearance of the late 1960s. Miss Carol has some thoughts on that, too:

"Everyone had the big hair in those days. Of course, those were the days of the miniskirt, and I look back at the pictures now and can't believe what I was wearing. Bert Claster had a sister who lived here in Birmingham at the time and worked over at the Adorable Dress Shop in Mountain Brook. I would hear from her periodically, and she would call me saying, 'I have some cute clothes in now, Carol, you might want to have a look at them.' But I also felt that little added pressure: when I would meet the Romper Room teachers from other cities, I would always astound them with, 'Bert Claster's sister lives in Birmingham!' I knew if I was smart I would nurture that relationship and be nice to her. We got along fine."

In 1970, Romper Room put on its Romper Stompers and staggered over to WBMG, Channel 42. It made its WBMG debut on June 1, 1970, the same day the station became a CBS affiliate. Despite this new prestige for Channel 42, the physical conditions were a bit primitive, as well as demanding:

"At WAPI we only taped one show per day, and there would be occasional times when we had to do two in a day to cover for the Christmas program or whatever. Now, when we moved to WBMG, we did -- and I still look back on this and don't know how we pulled it off -- three shows one day and two the next day! We did the taping for an entire week in two days!! And, at least at the time I was there, WBMG's studio was new and not air-conditioned yet, and that summer was terrible. We would be perspiring because the studio lights were so hot anyway, and you add the Alabama summer heat and no air conditioning ... once they looked at the thermometer, and it was 104 degrees in the studio! They felt that it was just easier to put up the set for two days and get it over with, then that freed up the studio for other things."

Perhaps these new get-it-over-with methods were an indication of how television was changing, and local children's programs were no longer high on the priority list. Romper Room was also reeling because public school kindergarten was on the rise during the late 1960s and early 1970s, and this sapped what was supposed to be its target audience of stay-at-home preschoolers:

"That was starting to impact the show even before I left, because we were having more and more kids going to nursery school or kindergarten on a regular basis. We would have these people on the waiting list, but when we called to tell them they were scheduled for April 1 through 14, they would say, 'Oh, Amy and Rick are in kindergarten and we really don't want them to miss for two weeks, so can you put them on in the summer?' We were starting to hear that more and more."

It was actually family commitments that caused Miss Carol to resign her teaching post, just as in Miss Jane's situation:

"My husband had been transferred to Lexington, Kentucky, by his job and had actually moved on ahead; I stayed here to sell the house and keep working, and I guess we had about two and half months to prepare for my leaving. I had time to get really sad about it. I finally left sometime in December 1970. The crew surprised me that last day. My last program ended with me crying, because I was about to do the wrapup with the final Magic Mirror thing, and my voice was already cracking, and they suddenly started walking forward and they had a little Romper Room charm bracelet for me and a cake for the final show, and I was just crying! I wasn't expecting that."

After this washed-in-tears event, the show still had nine months to go on its Channel 42 contract. For years, we knew that the TV listings indicated that a “Miss Rita” succeeded Carol as the final Romper Room teacher in Birmingham, but we were unable to find out who she was. Finally, in the summer of 2013, we received an email from Miss Rita herself, who had stumbled across this series of articles and finally found out we were looking for her!

It is not surprising that Rita Sparling was so difficult to locate, as she has lived in Wisconsin for years. In fact, she was a native of New York City and not Birmingham, so she had few connections here to keep up with her whereabouts. She tells us that she specifically remembers auditioning for the Claster representatives at WBMG on her birthday in September 1970. Here is how she describes the experience:

“I had a case of laryngitis. I could not believe they included me in the auditions, and the following week I volunteered to be the first one to audition out of the 20 women present at the 42 studios and was selected. Training with Sally Claster in Towson, Maryland began shortly thereafter and taping the shows began immediately when I returned. My previous experience in teaching and performing leads in musicals in High School and College prepared me for this role as Miss Rita.”

Rita kept up the same pace that WBMG had established for Carol, but handled it like a trouper. “The only thing I didn't enjoy,” she says, “was doing commercials for Golden Eagle Table Syrup. I just could not get the pronunciation of the word ‘syrup’ correct. Instead of saying sir-rup I would say see-rup--my handicap for being raised in NYC metropolitan area.”

WBMG’s one-year contract for Romper Room was coming to a close in early June 1971, and Rita realized that even if it had not been for that, she could not have continued with the show. This mainly because she was pregnant with her second child and had already had to curtail her lurching about the set on a pair of Romper Stompers. Even though her time as a Romper Room teacher was brief, she still has fond memories:

“In my short time in Birmingham I met and made some wonderful friends who showered me with that special ‘southern hospitality.’ I knew I had been accepted when the neighbors wanted to take me ‘frog gigging’ and to the University of Alabama football games. I skipped the frogs but loved the football games! Although my TV career ended, I continued teaching preschool while my children were very young and then entered the corporate world working in the communications field and in my spare time was involved in community theater productions.”

While Miss Rita is now in Wisconsin, Miss Carol remains in Lexington, where she is a highly regarded motivational speaker for various corporations. Like most of the hosts from our childhoods, Jean, Jane, Carol and Rita all look back on their TV experience with great fondness, and we likewise remember the lovely and talented Romper Room ladies as helping us with our first steps on the academic ladder.

Created 05/29/2005 - 702 PM EDT
Revised 08/30/2013 - 1128 PM EDT ... Tim tracked down "Miss Rita"!!