Growing up in Newark, Ohio, and working in her father’s menswear store at eight years old, Rosalie Linver Ungar quickly learned she liked people and she wasn’t shy. She also realized that she had the gift of selling, and that people liked to listen to her, encouraging an early interest in storytelling.
While in high school, she assisted her ballet instructor in teaching dance to children in schools around Newark, which led to an interest in theatre. After marriage and the births of two children, she traveled with her military husband throughout the United States, landing in Los Angeles in the late sixties. Television was a wide-open industry and Rosalie fell into writing and performing at TV stations even before settling down in California.
Writing, directing, producing, and acting in El Paso, Texas, at KROD-TV (CBS affiliate) and KELP-TV (ABC affiliate); San Antonio, Texas, at KENS-TV (CBS affiliate); Orlando, Florida, at WFTV (ABC affiliate) and Los Angeles at KHJ-TV (independent), provided Rosalie with the opportunity to write a weekly newspaper TV column called Channel Chats. This was in addition to a regular job writing on-air promotion and advertising copy, scripts for TV shows, press releases, and anything else read by TV announcers and actors. She produced and hosted her own daytime talk show in El Paso and Orlando, and talked and sang to puppets on a weekly children’s show.
In 1970, Rosalie switched gears to work for The Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising in Los Angeles. As a recruiter, she regularly spoke to groups of high school and college students about careers in the growing Los Angeles fashion industry. As the student body grew, she was promoted to Director of The Fashion Institute branch in the San Fernando Valley.
In 1973, Fashion Institute students were offered a trip to Europe to study fashion in Paris and Rome. Rosalie, then single, went as a chaperone. The experience changed her life. She returned to LA knowing she would have to go back. And she did. Rosalie spent 1974 living on her own in Europe. She has since written a memoir about that amazing year.
During her years in television and at The Fashion Institute, Rosalie performed in community theatre wherever she lived. She sang and danced as Louise (Gypsy Rose Lee) in Gypsy, Anita in West Side Story, and smaller roles in Bells Are Ringing.
Rosalie Linver Ungar retired in 2003. She lives in Columbus, Ohio, with husband Ed Ungar, and she has completed a memoir, NO SEX IN ST. TROPEZ. She is a member of Ohio Writer’s Guild and National League of American Pen Women (NLAPW), as well as a former board trustee for CATCO, Central Ohio’s only professional theatre, and the Franklin Park Conservatory Women’s Board. Recently, her story, “A Halloween Visit,”was published in The Columbus Dispatch newspaper.