Ding Dong School Alum

You’re probably too young to remember Miss Frances and her show, Ding Dong School, in the days of black and white television. Let’s just say that for me it was as riveting as Captain Kangaroo, Mr. Rogers, and Sesame Street were for later generations.

More important, Ding Dong School carried the endorsement of Mrs. Peller, Mom’s Viennese psychoanalyst. Mom saw Mrs. Peller not daily or even weekly but strictly on an as needed basis. They seemed to have an arrangement whereby Mom could call Mrs. Peller for coaching, especially when the challenges of child rearing seemed more than she could manage.

When Mom went for the black rotary dial phone, the discussion usually focused on how best to discipline a disobedient child. When I was subsequently sent to my room with instructions not to come out until a specific time, I knew it was on the say-so of Mrs. Peller.

There I entertained myself with dolls, enjoying pretending that they were sick, and also with a mass produced metal doll house that was a replica of a suburban home with a breeze way, something pleasingly exotic for a child living in a small apartment in Jackson Heights in the 1950’s.

Probably on the advice of Mrs. Peller, Mom tried her best not to yell at my siblings and me, though she was not immune from the classic “wait until your father gets home.” She claimed yelling was “very unrefined,” and took a dim view of the wife of one of Dad’s colleagues who could be seen yelling at her kids whenever we visited.

Years later I married a psychiatrist following my senior year of college. He told me that Lili Peller, a Viennese refugee who came to the states to escape the Holocaust, was a big deal in psychoanalytic circles, and that he and his colleagues in training at the psychoanalytic institute were reading some of her papers.

I met her just once or twice. She lived and worked in a brownstone in Yorkville, not far from a wonderful Hungarian bakery named Mrs. Herbst’s. Part of the experience was getting a delicious pastry called a pogach that I would eat as Mom and I walked from the subway stop to the office.

The first time, when I was around three or four, Mrs. Peller gave me a bell to take home, and since it looked identical to the one Miss Frances used on Ding Dong School, I thought I’d done pretty well.

The next time I saw Mrs. Peller was at age ten or eleven. I think we discussed my love of Nancy Drew books. She seemed mildly disapproving of the series, but her rationale seems to escape me. I left with a book but that wasn’t worth remembering.

I suspect Mom had very little self-confidence in herself as a parent and hung on Mrs. Peller’s every word. Follow the dots books were acceptable, but only when we were ill. Though I once wheedled a Lennon Sisters coloring book out of Mom, coloring books were frowned upon. Packages of manilla paper, boxes of crayolas, and paint sets were the rule.

Mrs. Peller firmly believed coloring books stifled a child’s imagination and creativity, and maybe they did. What she never factored in was that none of the kids in my family had any artistic talent, at least as far as the visual arts were concerned.

When I reached my adult years, I asked why I’d been taken to see Mrs. Peller at such a tender age. Mom said she had concerns that I was “manipulative with language,” using words to get what I wanted. I’m not sure either of them could have predicted that I would love majoring in English, and some day support my family as a public relations professional.

The fact that I left New York and moved to Boston nearly forty years ago may have something to do with Ding Dong School. I remember the morning Miss Frances presented a choo choo train. Among other places, she said it might be going to Boston. “Boston” had such a beautiful ring to it and sounded far away from Mrs. Peller.