What is it?
Lackmann, Ronald W. TV Superstars ‘82. Middletown, CT: Weekly Reader Books, 1982.
Why should M*A*S*H fans care?
Scholastic didn’t hold a monopoly on children’s books in the 1970s and 1980s, and Weekly Reader was another popular publisher of children’s media. This 1982 book includes several of M*A*S*H‘s stars: Wayne Rogers, Alan Alda, Mike Farrell, Loretta Swit, and Jamie Farr.
As a M*A*S*H fan, what part(s) should I read?
There are a lot of interesting biographies in this book, but the biographies of the M*A*S*H stars only occupy eleven pages. It’s a quick read!
TL;DR Review
I have written about a number of Scholastic books in 2026, but I found a book from Scholastic’s chief rival at the time: Weekly Reader. They were also an education market giant, and they also had classroom magazines and book clubs. In TV Superstars ‘82, they attempted to replicate what Peggy Herz did for Scholastic by writing about popular television stars. Author Ronald W. Lackmann collected biographies of popular TV stars and placed them in a single volume that was sold in the school book club market. There are several M*A*S*H actors featured, but the details for each actor run thin.
Full Review
So far in 2026, I have written about a collection of Scholastic books that featured the stars of M*A*S*H. Those books, by Peggy Herz, featured a dozen actors and included quotes from and information about popular TV actors. While I worked for Scholastic, I actually knew of Weekly Reader as a kid because we got the weekly magazines. Weekly Reader was the main competitor to Scholastic in the classroom magazine market, and so it should come as no surprise that they also published entertainment books for their own book clubs. So how does a Weekly Reader book compare to one from Scholastic?
Ronald W. Lackmann published a number of books for Weekly Reader in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and he published several books about the history of television and radio programs in the 1990s and 2000s. I tried to find whether, like Herz, he was also a reporter who worked in Los Angeles, but I couldn’t find anything that confirmed that. He definitely had an interest in the history of television and radio, and he gives a short introduction to the history of television in this book. Looking at the table of contents, one of the biggest contrasts to Scholastic’s offerings is immediately apparent. This book contains 64 biographies! By contrast, one of Herz’s books would only feature around a dozen. This means that each biography is very short at only two to three pages each. That’s still an ambitious undertaking for Lackmann, and he featured biographies of popular actors including Gavin MacLeod, Patrick Duffy, Catherine Bach, Henry Winkler, Erin Moran, Robin Williams, Melissa Gilbert, Ed Asner, Joan Van Ark, Erik Estrada, and many more. He would often group the actors together by show, so for example, all of the actors featured for Happy Days are in a row, as are the actors for M*A*S*H.
For M*A*S*H, Lackmann featured four of the main cast members in this book: Alan Alda, Mike Farrell, Loretta Swit, and Jamie Farr. There are a few other familiar faces in the book including Wayne Rogers, who was featured for House Calls, and M*A*S*H guest star Joan Van Ark, who is included for her role on Knots Landing. For each actor, you get some written history of their acting career, a photo, and their “vital statics.” That’s a nice way of saying that their date of birth, weight, height, hair color, and eye color are listed. As I read this, I realized that a lot of what is in this book for Alda, Farrell, Swit, and Farr looked familiar. In the Season 11 Press Kit I featured on the site, I highlighted how 20th Century Fox sent out biographies for each of the actors. These biographies included a written summary of their career, some personal details, and their “vital statistics.” As I read the biography of Jamie Farr, I recognized that most of the wording in each chapter came directly from 20th Century Fox’s press releases.
So, unlike Herz’s books which included original articles with interview quotes, Weekly Reader’s book pasted information from the production studio for each actor. While this is still interesting information that I am sure most kids would have been happy reading it in the early 1980s, it was disappointing to me since there was no original writing being done. For me, TV Superstars ‘82 is disappointing because it does largely reuse press material. While Scholastic’s books also largely relied on the articles previously written by Herz for their magazines to create their books, that was original written material. Lackmann’s collection of stories about popular actors do seem to have sold well because I still can find used copies for multiple years, but they definitely don’t seem to come up for sale as often as the Scholastic alternatives which leads me to believe that the Scholastic books likely sold in higher volumes. In an interesting twist to the end this post, in 2012, Scholastic acquired Weekly Reader. So, they are now under the same umbrella.
