As Miss Frances, she was the host of the children's television program Ding Dong School, seen weekday mornings on the NBC network in the 1950s and nationally syndicated between 1959 and 1965.

Her father taught his children how to relate to people by giving each of them a chance to work at the store counter when they were tall enough to see over it.

[5] Horwich earned her bachelor's degree at the University of Chicago in 1929; her first teaching assignment was a first grade class in Evanston, Illinois, from 1929 to 1932.

[1] She earned her master's degree in education at Columbia University in 1933 and directed junior kindergartens in Winnetka, Illinois, from 1935 to 1938.

[1] She then left the Chicago area for a time, becoming the head of the Hessian Hills School at Croton-on-Hudson, New York, and teaching for two years at the University of North Carolina.

[6][7] Horwich met her husband, Harvey, an attorney and Air Force historian, when both were religious school teachers at Chicago's KAM Temple.

[10] Ding Dong School was developed by the show's producer, Reinald Werrenrath Jr., and Judith Waller, director of public affairs programming for the NBC Central Division,[12] for station WNBQ-TV (now WMAQ-TV).

[17][18] Because it was felt that the show would be a terrible broadcasting mistake, it was decided to air it during the morning hours of October 2, 1952 with no publicity regarding it.

[16][19][17] No one was prepared for the 150 positive telephone calls the station received just after the show had aired or for the amount of viewer mail praising the program.

[16] Although the program had only been on the air a short period of time, Frances Horwich won the George Foster Peabody Award for 1952.

[16][27] The show quickly gained popularity among young children and was broadcast nationally on the NBC network, Monday through Friday, beginning in March 1953.

[16] On the network, the show quickly had 2,400,000 daily viewers and was beating Arthur Godfrey's morning television program in the ratings.

[28] By 1956, Horwich had written 25 children's books, made 11 Ding Dong School records and 30 manufacturers sold show-branded products.

On the second night of their stay in the hotel, the restaurant's calypso band began playing the Ding Dong School song as Horwich and her husband entered the dining room.

The couple's social life became restricted to Saturday evenings because of the early morning hours needed for the weekday program.

'To put it as mildly as possible, Dr. Horwich has gone a step too far in letting a commercial consideration jeopardize her responsibility to the young children whose faith and trust she solicits.

[28][20] She was asked to accept a sponsor whose product was BB guns; when Horwich refused, Ding Dong School was canceled.

[45] Since Horwich owned the rights to Ding Dong School, she was able to sign with Chicago's WGN-TV to broadcast the show beginning in August 1958; the program had been off the air since being canceled by NBC.

[51][52][53] In 1970, Horwich discovered she was two quarters of work short of qualifying for her American Federation of Television and Radio Artists pension.

[28] A month before her death, Horwich was inducted into the Silver Circle of the Chicago Chapter of the National Academy of the Television Arts and Sciences on June 2, 2001.

[57] In 2006, an Ohio Historical Marker commemorating her life was placed by the local Daughters of the American Revolution chapter in Ottawa.