The Great Faldini was one of those guys who was right in time if not the most gifted. He happened to work in a local TV station in Syracuse, NY in the late 50s when they added daytime programming to their sparse schedule. Faldini, whose actual name was Rollie Sherman, made set adjustments to the news and weather layout for WLIK -TV, featuring Ted Helms and John Dolente everyday at 4:00 PM. Rollie's job was to do whatever producer Nina Prescott told him to do. The thing he had going for him quite simply was he was givien a magic set when he was a kid and although he never got past the beginner's level tricks, he learned the patter that let him now speak to a TV camera as if he's that 10 year old practicing in front of a mirror in his bedroom. His break came when he saw the memo telling Nina to submit ideas for adding 2 hours of programming in the afternoon and he went to her wearing a turban made from an old kitchen curtain from his rag bag and did this Great Faldini shtick off the top of his head. Nina loved it and started the process resulting in a Great Faldini live show at 3:30 PM which was hit from the first few months it was on. Rollie thought about getting Dolente's kid who had some hand puppets that he made added to the show but he went instead with the idea to bring his neighbor, Laura Campbell, in as his assistant. She looked like a cross between Jean Simmons and Carroll Baker and her attraction was she seemed always on the verge of laughing every second she was on camera with Rollie. It worked. Kids watched, parents watched - everybody, it seems, watched The Great Faldini in Syracuse, NY. But on March 18, 1958 the moment worth understanding happened. Faldini was doing an updated version of making something large disappear (meaning off-camera switcheroo) and he decided Assistant Laura would be the object. He ran through his hocus-pocus abbra-cadabra and pulled away the curtain and, dah-dah, gone. Except what happened was, she REALLY did disappear. It made national headlines and Chet Huntley made it his lead story on March 20th. She was never found - alive, dead or otherwise. No evidence of hanky-panky or funny business was ever uncovered. Her disappearance was the subject of Ray Peterson's 1960 hit "Tell Laura I Love Her". Sherman ended his show in 1961 and sold cemetery plots until his death in 1982. Nina Prescott later was the poster girl on the ad for Mondo Cane.