From a profile in Orlando magazine, this feature pays a call on Miss Nancy. Our Miss Nancy.

In the dozen years before college a few hundred teachers will drift in and out of your life and, a dozen years after, you’ll look back and remember that only a handful really stood out.

For tens of thousands of baby boomers, Miss Nancy stood above them all.

Teaching with equal measures of patience, encouragement, learning, and love, Miss Nancy was Orlando’s favorite kindergarten teacher. Her classroom, the studio of WDBO’s Channel 6, opened its doors to every interested pre-schooler and kindergartener. To be sure, this wasn’t a program dependent on technicolor graphics and nanosecond cuts. It was something far greater. And the lessons, sincere and lasting, were the mirror image of Nancy Stillwell, the teacher of Romper Room School from 1960 to 1975.

A housewife in Orlando, she had left behind her first career as a teacher for grades 1-8 in a one-room schoolhouse in southeast Nebraska. In 1960, she was raising two children who were tuned into the pacing and classroom etiquette of Romper Room. When her friend and then teacher Miss Barbara decided to abdicate, Miss Nancy figured that her background as a teacher, singer, mother, and part-time viewer would make her a perfect fit. Then again, so did 149 other Orlando women who had designs on the vacancy. Although Miss Nancy may have been daunted by some of her high fashion competitors, her sincerity and inner beauty helped her level the playing field.

“There were some real beautiful model types at the audition,” recalls Miss Nancy, today a refined and youthful 76-year-old. “But at the time there was a man named Mark Barker at the station who had interviewed someone who said ‘If you really believe in something, it will come true.’ I met Mark in the hall and I said, ‘I’m going to get this job because I really believe it will come to pass,’ and sure enough it did.”

Before it did, however, a half-dozen candidates were called back for an audition.

“That’s what made it so easy for me,” says Miss Nancy. “When I went back with the others, we played through an actual show and since I had watched it with my children, I was playing just like I was playing with my kids. And that was it.”

Over the next fifteen years as the Class of 1960 graduated from Romper Room and prepared to graduate from college, Miss Nancy kept her classroom insulated from the turmoil of Vietnam and Watergate and assassinations by staying true to a curriculum that made an impression on her junior viewers. Each morning, live five days a week, a jack-in-the-box popped up as the class opened with a cheerful “It’s time for Romper Room School!” With that, Miss Nancy would call class into session with the pledge of allegiance and a variety of kindergarten games.

“It was just like a classroom. We’d sit down and I’d say, ‘Guess what we are going to do today?’ We had physical games and coloring games and did our numbers. We’d ride around on our stick horses, and if you didn’t have a stick horse at home, you could use a broomstick. We always tried to do something that the child at home could do with us. The romper stompers were just tin cans and string.”

Crafts and games paved the way for life lessons. Do-Bee and Don’t-Bee, the ying and yang of Romper Room, gave children sage advice such as ‘Do-bee generous. Don’t-bee selfish.’ To reinforce these lessons, Miss Nancy would sing ‘I always do what’s right, I never do anything wrong. I’m a Romper Room do-bee, a do-bee all day long.’”

Music was also part of the morning, and with a cue to Mr. Music (also known as future anchor Ben Aycrigg), Miss Nancy would have her students join her in activities and singalongs.

“We’d walk with baskets on our head and I’d say ‘All right, Mr. Music,’ and the music would start and I’d sing, ‘See me stand so straight and tall, I won’t let my basket fall... Eyes look up, don’t look down, keep that basket off the ground.’”

With the end of the schoolday approaching, Miss Nancy’s students (who had auditioned for their two-week engagements) would say a prayer and then their prayers would be answered when Miss Nancy brought out cookies and milk. With that, it was time for the grand finale...

Few things in life rival the anticipation of waiting for Miss Nancy to pick up her glittery Magic Mirror and actually see and  say hello to kids at home. And when that happened, well, then nearly everything afterwards seemed sort of anticlimactic.

“The Magic Mirror would start out silvery and as I’d say ‘Romper Bomper Stomper Boo. Tell me, tell me, tell me do... Magic Mirror, tell me today, did all my friends have fun at play?’ I’d look through the mirror and I’d be looking at the children and I’d say ‘I see Nancy, and Gary has such a big smile and John’s here, too.’ Sometimes mothers would write me to say their child was home sick and I’d see them in my Magic Mirror and I learned to say ‘There’s Bobby, and it looks like Bobby is feeling better today.’”

Bobby may have been feeling better, but by the mid-70s local children’s programs were in bad shape. In 1975, Miss Nancy learned that WDBO would close the doors of the Romper Room School. Miss Nancy left kindergarten for Valencia Community College and, later, AT&T where she created computer training manuals. Along the way, she’s taken a solemn pride in the contributions of the Kathy Stillwell Foundation. Named for her late daughter, a victim of multiple sclerosis, the foundation is a celebration of life that awards scholarships and helps fund various charities.

In the nearly 30 years since she left television, new residents have arrived and overshadowed the locals who grew up with Miss Nancy. But not everyone has forgotten the kindergarten icon. Not at all. Many who had the privilege of actually being on the show were rewarded with Romper Room diplomas that are now displayed beside bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees. Every so often, when Nancy and John, her husband and best friend of 54 years, visit theme parks and stores, she finds herself talking to 40- and 50-year old viewers who tell her how they once galloped across their living room on broomsticks.

“I lived it for 15 years and I loved it,” Miss Nancy reflects. “It was innocent, and I’m sorry that so much of that is gone. I loved being Miss Nancy, but being a mother is tops. I would tell parents to spend as much time with their children as possible.”

And before she completes this school day, Miss Nancy has a special message for each of her former students.

“Just tell them that I can still see them in my Magic Mirror...”