MISS FRANCES MADE KIDS FEEL SEEN
Before ‘Mister Rogers,’ ‘Ding Dong School’ shaped young minds
Frances Horwich was an obscure academic when her husband left Chicago to work for the military during the Korean War. When he returned, she was the icon of a paparazzi following — albeit a pintsize one.
Reunited, Horwich and her husband, Harvey, boarded a plane for a romantic getaway and were treated to repeat choruses of a song Horwich knew well:
I’m your school bell: Ding, dong, ding! Boys and girls all hear me ring! Every time I ding, dong, ding! Come with me to play and sing! Ding. Dong. Ding. Dong. Ding!
More than a dozen small children were on the plane, and upon seeing Horwich, they sang round after round of “Come with Me,” the theme song from her hit TV show “Ding Dong School.” To them, she was Miss Frances, a nursery school teacher who not only spoke to them but also appeared to listen patiently.
At the start of the show, Miss Frances would ring an old-time teacher’s bell and address her young audience with questions like: “How are you this morning?” Then she would go silent for a beat, while sometimes nodding, as if she were hearing her viewers’ replies.
The medium of television was new, but the raison d’être of the show wasn’t. In the depths of the Great Depression, the federal government backed early childhood education. In his recent speech to Congress, President Joe Biden echoed Miss Frances’ philosophy while announcing his plan for free preschool.
“How children develop depends on what happens in their early years,” Horwich proclaimed in words and deeds. “If they are cheated in their first six years, they never catch up.”
When she and her husband changed airplanes in Miami during their trip, it looked as if they’d get a timeout from her fame. But when the couple got to their destination and entered the dining room of a hotel in the Bahamas, a band broke into a version of “Come with Me.”
When the Peabody Award-winning show began in 1952, television’s template for children was “Howdy Doody”: Children would stare at their TVs to see a marionette yuk it up and his human friend squirt a seltzer bottle. “Ding Dong School” was interactive, as the distinguished critic John Crosby noted:
“Miss Frances shows the kids how to mold clay, how to use crayons, how to make simple things — a cradle out of a cardboard box, for instance,” he observed in 1953.
“It isn’t easy to amuse, instruct or mold the characters of ... youngsters as anyone who possesses them will be only too glad to testify,” Crosby wrote in praising Horwich.
Horwich didn’t know what to make of the invitation when executives asked her to host an educational program for TV. It was to be a one-woman show, save for an occasional appearance by a puppet or some goldfish, and she lacked television experience.
Yet her resume reads as if she’d long prepared to be Miss Frances. She taught religious classes at a Chicago synagogue, and she headed a progressive private school in New York state.
She also supervised the Works Progress Administration’s nursery schools in Chicago, a 1930s government program that jump-started children’s education while giving teachers jobs and enabling parents to work.
When Horwich began work on “Ding Dong School,” she was a Roosevelt University education professor, and the stagehands were dubious.
“I knew lip reading,” she told an entertainment reporter. “Some of the remarks were pretty rough.”
They looked down on her for talking slowly and using simple words; in other words, for speaking in a way a child could understand. But when the show took off, crew members began asking her for advice.
The show’s pilot aired in early October 1952, and within a week, WMAQ-Ch. 5 had received 5,000 letters of praise from parents, the Tribune wrote. Less than two months later, NBC decided to broadcast the half-hour show nationwide.
“Miss Frances has sold out the modeling clay and finger paints in every community in the nation within reach of TV,” a Tribune columnist wrote on Jan. 1, 1953. Horwich’s viewer ratings were higher than those of Arthur Godfrey, a celebrated TV host.
Children shouted to her on the street. A blind child recognized her by the sound of her voice. A father found his son trying to take the back off their television set because he wanted to let his teacher out.
“Dr. Frances Horwich, by treating her kindergarten audience as incipient adults and not as future Milton Berle addicts, enhanced the cause of TV education tremendously,” a Tribune critic wrote, referencing a popular slapstick comedian.
As an academic, Horwich was fascinated with the link between learning and a child’s emotional needs.
“Little children sometimes feel left out of things,” she said. “Our little school gives them a sense of belonging.”
Her approach to connecting with children would later be adopted by “Sesame Street” and “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Fred Rogers spoke slowly just like Miss Frances did.
Horwich was conscious of the power she possessed over “Ding Dong School” and the advertisements that aired during the program. She insisted that toys be safe and food nutritious.
She intervened when technicians wanted to apply red paint to strawberries for an episode broadcast in color. The enhancement was a common practice, but she was not going to allow it on her show.
“That is what I mean by integrity,” Horwich said.
She turned down NBC’s proposal to expand the show’s airtime. Thirty minutes are the limit of a young child’s attention span, she explained.
That must not have sit well with her bosses; a 60-minute show generates more advertising revenue.
But given her millions of viewers, the network’s executives had to accept her judgment. She had the wherewithal to chuck the job. Her series of children’s books sold 5 million copies in less than two years. She believed that traditional fairy tales were unsuitable for young minds and that some were as scary as horror comics.
“Mother Goose doesn’t contribute to a child’s development,” Horwich told a Tribune columnist. “It is a negative approach.”
To reward her for her commitment, NBC made her corporate supervisor of its children’s programs. Production of “Ding Dong School” moved to New York, and Horwich and her husband followed.
But after she refused to accept an ad from a maker of BB guns, NBC canceled her show in 1956.
The network announced that Horwich would embark on a study of children’s programming in Europe. Horwich considered that assignment the same as exile and resigned, the Tribune reported.
She received 100,000 letters asking Miss Frances to return. WGN-TV answered those prayers. Because Horwich owned the rights to the show, the station started broadcasting it — locally, then in syndication — and ever more children were transfixed by the ringing of a bell she bought for 50 cents in a secondhand store on Chicago’s Wabash Avenue.
The death of Horwich’s husband in 1974 left her at loose ends until she remembered one of her lessons: “I’ve always told children you must not just take from a community, you must put back into it.”
She volunteered and worked with children with learning challenges in Arizona, where she and her husband had moved in retirement. She did some work at a public TV station but was saddened by what commercial broadcasters were offering kids.
“Children are learning things now they’ll have to unlearn later,” she said.
When Horwich died in 2001, her obituaries noted she had no children. Although when an interviewer asked her about it some 50 years earlier, she said, “Yes, I do. I have 6 ½ million children.”