Rosalie Ungar

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Rosalie Linver Ungar

Growing up in Newark, Ohio, working in her father’s men’s wear store at eight years old, Rosalie Linver Ungar quickly learned she liked people and she wasn’t shy. She also realized she had a gift of salesmanship that people liked to listen to her. This encouraged an early interest in storytelling.

While in high school, she assisted her ballet instructor in teaching dance to children in smaller towns around Newark, which eventually led to an interest in theatre. After marriage and the births of two children, she traveled with her military husband all over the United States landing in Los Angeles in the mid-sixties. Television was a wide-open industry then and Rosalie had fallen 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), Rosalie’s experience in television provided 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.

She switched gears in 1970 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 increased she was promoted to director of The Fashion Institute branch in the San Fernando Valley.

In 1973, The Fashion Institute offered students a “for-academic-credit” trip to Europe to study fashion in Paris and Rome. Rosalie went as a chaperone, and it changed her life. She returned to L.A. knowing she would have to go back. And she did. Almost all of 1974 was spent in Europe on her own. She has since written a memoir about that amazing year abroad.

Both during the years in television and at The Fashion Institute, Rosalie performed in community theatre wherever she lived. She sang and danced as Louise (Gypsy) in Gypsy, Anita in West Side Story, and in smaller roles and choreographed Bells Are Ringing.

After she moved back to Ohio in 1977, she worked for GFA Brands as Midwest Sales Manager. This job entailed weekly travel to most major cities to manage food brokers for a line of margarines and cheeses. While giving a speech on heart healthy foods in Omaha, Nebraska, in 2000, Rosalie suffered a heart attack. She finished her speech to the food industry executives, under the entertainment credo, “the show must go on.”

Rosalie Linver Ungar retired in 2003. She has just finished a memoir of her1974 year in Europe, No Sex In St. Tropez. She lives in Columbus with husband Ed Ungar and is a member of Ohio Writers Guild. She was recently published in The Columbus Dispatch.