What I feel for Romper Stompers is the opposite of desire, the flip side of the usual aching for some object. This pining, this prayer not to get something, is of equal intensity to the wanting of a toy, the kind of fevered anticipation that sometimes comes with an actual fever. In Illinois, Jim had so desperately desired a windup, ice-skating circus clown called Clancy the Great that he nearly became ill with anticipation in the weeks leading up to Christmas. The commercial jingle that stoked his fever—“Clancy the Great! Look at him skate! Fun for a girl or boy!”—still resonates in our house, and will for decades to come.
When Jim finally tore open the package containing Clancy the Great on Christmas morning, his horny hands quivering, he couldn’t cope with the ensuing avalanche of emotion. His wildest dream finally fulfilled, he descended—as some lottery winners do—into a manic cycle of elation and despair, joy and rage. By nightfall, Clancy the Great (Look at him skate!) was upside down in a trash can at the curb, skate blades glinting under the streetlamp, dispatched there by my father, who had recognized the evil in the ice-skating clown.
It was hardly Jim’s fault. As birthdays or Christmas draw near, childhood desire becomes all-consuming. Even Easter is preceded by an agonizing interval of anticipation. Jim raced down the stairs one Easter morning, found a dyed, hard-boiled egg hidden behind the sofa, and bit into it like a hand fruit.
“Mmmmmm!” he said, smiling, as bits of eggshell fell from his face like plaster from a ceiling. Then he took another bite.
The Romper Room logo that features prominently on my box of Romper Stompers is a little pink house with an orange roof and a yellow chimney over which flies the Romper Room mascot, a cartoon bumblebee who teaches proper manners. Though Mom and I don’t know it—and nor, presumably, do the creators of Romper Room—that bumblebee’s name is also a “grass” reference. H.R. Pufnstuf, Puff the Magic Dragon, and the voracious Scooby Dooby Doo are part of the same grand tradition that has given us Do-Bee, the Romper Room mascot who produces a gentle buzz.
Romper Room was conceived in 1955, by a Baltimore teacher named Nancy Claster, as a televised kindergarten classroom. “Miss Nancy” broke the fourth wall by speaking directly to kids in “Televisionland,” sometimes through her Magic Mirror, in which she could uncannily spot children at home: “I see Tommy and Susie and Janie and Billy…” (If you are a Jamal or a Dingxiang, you are evidently invisible.)
The Magic Mirror comes as a terrifying revelation, confirming my suspicion that while I am watching the TV, the TV is also watching me. Nancy Claster and her producer husband, Bert, franchised Romper Room to local markets while still hosting the Baltimore show, and by 1960 more than ninety cities had signed on. The show would eventually air in one hundred fifty cities in the United States, Canada, England, Japan, Italy, and Australia.
Our Romper Room teacher on channel 9 in Minneapolis is a brunette (and occasionally blond) teacher named Miss Betty. Whenever Miss Betty picks up the Magic Mirror and says the magic phrase—“Romper, bomper, stomper, boo; tell me, tell me, tell me do…”—she becomes one more agent of espionage in my life. My world is full of these Orwellian figures. Santa and God are scarcely distinguishable, two white-bearded, supernatural supreme beings watching over me as I sleep. Santa: “He sees you when you’re sleeping. He knows when you’re awake.” God: “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep.” Throw in Mom and Dad, the bogeyman, my guardian angel, and Miss Betty, and there is an entire secret police conspiring to keep an eye on me—to catch me, literally, with my hand in the cookie jar.
Romper Stompers were inspired by Nancy Claster’s father, who wouldn’t let his daughter walk on stilts and thought tin cans tethered to strings served the same purpose just fine. In 1969, Nancy and Bert Claster sold Romper Room to the Hasbro toy company, resulting in the Romper Stompers that I can hear, through my bedroom door, now being enjoyed by my party guests.
They sound like a blast. They have quasi-mystical, almost divine powers. “Some time ago I received a letter from a woman in Pennsylvania who had a child who was in leg braces and also wore a waist brace because of a muscular deficiency,” Miss Nancy tells an interviewer in 1970. “The child was only out of the braces about twenty-five minutes a day. One day the youngster asked her mother for some Romper Stompers. The mother asked an orthopedic man who said, ‘By all means get them for her.’ Three weeks later, the child was able to stay out of braces for more than three hours a day. She saw other children using the Romper Stompers and had the desire and courage to try.”
And so I quickly grow to love my Romper Stompers, just as Mom and Dad grow privately fond of—or at least amused by—my initial objection to them. Frequently (and for the rest of their lives) they’ll repeat my line whenever bad news or an unwelcome social invitation arrives. Dad, plunger in hand, whenever a toilet backs up: “Just what I didn’t want.” Mom, hand cupped over the mouthpiece, whispering the words after a caller has invited her to another Tupperware party: “Just what I didn’t want.” Dad again, after a diagnosis of melanoma: “Just what I didn’t want.”
It turns out the Romper Stompers are just what I want. On them, I clomp around the kitchen’s linoleum floor like a colossus. “Teaches coordination and helps develop balance,” it says on the box, but I don’t care about that. Romper Stompers make me feel taller, and older, and more fearsome, in the way that smoking my birthday candles does. When I alight from the Stompers, I am short again, in the same way that I feel elfin and flat-footed after removing ice skates.
So inside, it’s Romper Stompers, and outside, we never take the skates off. There’s an outdoor rink within walking distance of every house in Bloomington, in the kind of outdoors that even Dad can endorse. The ice rink is nature tamed—water frozen and floodlit, painted with stripes and circles, fenced by dasher boards, and always overlooked by a “warming house,” a small, heated shelter full of happily shivering children. When we walk across the wooden floor on our skates, it sounds like rolling thunder.