Beginning on radio in 1948, Our Miss Brooks was successfully transferred to television beginning in 1952 (it ran on both media, with largely the same cast, for several months in 1952). Between gentle wisecracks, Miss Brooks doted on nerdish student Walter Denton and frequently locked horns with crusty, cranky principal Mr. Conklin. Many of the program’s episodes revolved around Miss Brooks’s unrequited desire for Philip Boynton, the school’s biology teacher. In this way Miss Brooks was the beginning of a long list of female TV characters of a certain type, like Sally Rogers (Rose Marie) on The Dick Van Dyke Show and Jane Hathaway (Nancy Kulp) on The Beverly Hillbillies.

Our Miss Brooks enjoyed good ratings on radio and enlarged its audience when it moved to TV. While some professional educators criticized the series, others celebrated Miss Brooks and Arden’s work: she received teaching job offers, and fan letters from educators; she was made an honorary member of the National Education Association; in 1952 she was given an award from the Alumni Association of the Teachers College of Connecticut for “humanizing the American Teacher.” Said Arden of her on-screen alter ego: “I tried to play Miss Brooks as a loving person who cared about the kids and kept trying to keep them out of trouble, but kept getting herself in trouble.”

Obviously, Miss Brooks encountered enough trouble to sustain the series for more than 150 episodes, but unlike many other female comics on TV at that time, Miss Brooks’s forte was not the wild antics of Lucy or the lopsided logic of Gracie Allen. Instead, Miss Brooks’s humor was achieved by her own sharp, observing wit and by her centered presence in the midst of a group of eccentric supporting players, including dimwitted, squeaky-voiced student Walter and pompous Conklin. Miss Brooks was always the source of the jokes, not the butt of them.

In 1955 ratings for the program were beginning to wane, and the series was overhauled. Miss Brooks and Mr. Conklin were moved out of Madison High to Mrs. Nestor’s Private Elementary School. For a time, there was no Mr. Boynton for whom Miss Brooks would pine, but there was a muscle-bound teacher of physical education, Mr. Talbot, who longed for Miss Brooks. This was an important turn-about in the overall premise of the show: now Miss Brooks was the pursued rather than the pursuer. (Mr. Boynton did turn up again in early 1956, just as the series was about to be canceled; in a film version of the series released by Warner Brothers in 1956, Miss Brooks and Mr. Boynton finally did tie the knot and presumably lived happily ever after.)

Connie Brooks was one of TV’s noblest working women; she was the center of a highly successful show, toiling in a realistically portrayed and unglamorous career (Miss Brooks often made mention of how low her wages were), and rewarded and honored by real workers whom she represented. While she was not quite as “no nonsense,” nor as tough, as film’s prominent working women (such as the characters played by Rosalind Russell and Joan Crawford), Connie Brooks, with her tart tongue, brisk manner, sharply cut jackets, and slim skirts, was just about as savvy as women were allowed to be on TV in the 1950s. Despite Miss Brooks’s desire to become “Mrs.” Something—and despite the fact that she was never promoted to school principal—Our Miss Brooks’s legacy in television history is that it dared to depict a funny, attractive, wise, competent woman, beyond the realms of the home, marriage, and children.