Good bye Miss Barbara.

With my thanks to the OHIO MEDIA WATCH FOR THIS ONE.
“MISS BARBARA” PASSES ON: If you grew up on Northeast Ohio television into the early 1970s, you need no further explanation.

Barbara Plummer, known as “Miss Barbara” on Scripps ABC affiliate WEWS/5’s local edition of “Romper Room”, has died.

From her online obituary (we have the text, but don’t have a link):

Most people would know her as Miss Barbara, the enthusiastic host of WEWS Channel 5’s Romper Room. From 1958 to 1972 children across Cleveland tuned in daily to learn their Do-Bees and their Don’t Bees, to have fun, and maybe – just maybe – have Miss Barbara see them through her Magic Mirror and say their names out loud on television.

Before, during and after her time as “Miss Barbara”, Plummer would enjoy a long, active life.

From the obituary:

She was a mother, a wife, an active supporter of charitable organizations and, for a time, she was a local television personality. And that is the order of importance she would have placed on the various roles she filled in her remarkable life.

And more on her TV career, as one of the pioneering women in local television:

It probably would have been a beautifully normal life if she had not heard, in April 1958, that WEWS was advertising for candidates to host their version of the syndicated television show, Romper Room. She loved to say that she went for an interview only because she was curious to see a television studio. Whatever her motivation was, she competed with 90 other women for the position and was selected. After asking her husband if it was OK – she began a television career that would eventually have middle-aged baby-boomers coming up to her in the grocery store to ask, “Are you Miss Barbara? I loved Romper Room, but how come you never said my name?”

Barbara Plummer died March 20th at the age of 80, after a struggle with pneumonia and cancer…