The Philadelphia Inquirer from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 459

FOR THE KIDS SUNDAY diver from Mission Viejo, a view of the Labyrinth fantasy, and a visit with 115 gospel singers called the Soul Children of Chicago. 12:00 Cap'n O.G. Raadmora Maata Dr. Jakyll and Mr. Hyda Cap'n O.G., the articulate cat, steps into the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson's story to save his friend Lickety Page, who has been kidnapped into the tale of Jekyll and Hyde.

12:30 Check It Outl Today's program focuses on four Philadelphia teenagers whose backgrounds are different but who, in many ways, share common ground. Dalmations and Lady and the Tramp. FRIDAY 8:00 Saturday Morning Previa Spaclal Alvin, of Alvin and the Chipmunks, returns to school and convinces everyone he is the new principal and changes the curriculum to let students have more fun. The special also previews NBC's new and returning Saturday morning series. SATURDAY 7:30 CD Young Unlveraa Segments include a story about a 15-year-old, top-ranked 7:00 Mr.

Boogady The tables are turned on the joke-playing Davises when they discover that their new home comes complete with a collection of ghosts and goblins. Richard Masur, Mimi Kennedy, John Astin and Howard Witt star. 8:00 OO Dlanay'a DTV Romancln' Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Ludwig Von. Drake, Jiminy Cricket and Chip 'n' Dale are hosts of this salute to romance. Originally titled Disney's DTV Valentine, the special features footage from such Disney classics as 101 COVER STORYWinfrey the age of 9 by a cousin who was 19 at the time," she said.

A year or two reporting on fires and other tragedies Winfrey found her true calling in 1978 as co-host of WJZ's People Are Talking. For a talk-show host, she discovered, "vulnerability is the key. People appreciate it when you can be honest. It lets them feel more comfortable about being themselves." Winfrey's move to Chicago came by chance. Her producer in Baltimore sent a "demo reel" a demonstration tape that serves as a portable audition to WLS, which noticed Winfrey and hired her in 1984.

She was placed in the anchor's chair on WLS's AM Chicago, a chronic last-place finisher in the local talk-show ratings. Within a few months, she propelled the show to No. 1. In 1985, AM Chicago was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show. Still produced at WLS, a major station owned by ABC, it is being syndicated by King World Enterprises, whose Wheel of Fortune is the most successful syndicated game show in TV history.

During a visit to Chicago, producer Quincy Jones saw Winfrey on her show and recommended her to director Steven Spielberg, who cast her as Sofia in The Color Purple, the 1985 film version of Alice Walker's novel. You can see Winfrey in theaters in October as the mother of Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Native Son, a film version of Richard Wright's noted 1940 novel. Winfrey doesn't believe that she is just another pretty face. "I never thought of myself as anything close to beautiful," she said. By way of categorizing herself, she divides all black women into three types: "vanilla creams, gingerbreads and fudge brownies." Vanilla creams, she explained, are "the gorgeous girls, like Jayne Kennedy, who get all the guys in school.

Gingerbreads are lean and lanky, like Diana Ross and Diahann Carroll. Fudge brownies, like me and Patti LaBelle, we're your basic girls who are thankin' Revlon for helpin' us out. "If you're a vanilla," she said, "you automatically get all the doctors. If you're a fudge, you better be bright and talented and work hard." Bright and talented and hard-working that's about as good a description of Oprah Winfrey as anyone could give. Continued from Page 4 But she can't sing that dirge anymore, not since Steadman Graham came into her life.

Graham is a former professional basketball player who is Winfrey's steady beau. Discussing him, she rhapsodized: "He's 6-feet-6 and has hazel eyes and shoulders that would make you weep or you'd like to weep on. He's smart and very supportive of me." Winfrey had been so bruised by men that she turned down Graham's first request for a date. "I've known him for a long time and ignored him because he's gorgeous," she said. Anybody that good-looking, she figured, had to be "a heel, a jerk or very, very shallow." After accepting his second call for a date, she almost canceled, thinking, "I'm not going to sit through some boring evening with a guy who thinks he's cute." Her relationship with Graham has turned out to be so delightful that Winfrey has drawn a moral from this story.

"What I'm learning every day," she said, "is not to be judgmental. To have been so judgmental in the case of Steadman, that taught me. That could have been a major, major mistake." As we dined during this interview in the Marker restaurant at the Adam's Mark Hotel, Winfrey was dressed for success in a gold-threaded linen sweater, silk blouse and silk skirt, all designed by Ellen Tracy, and a gold cobra-skin belt by Robert Christoph. Her size-10 feet were shod in white lizard-skin cowboy boots. She lunched lightly on vegetable soup, a skimpy salad and sole.

Oprah Winfrey was born on Jan. 29, 1954, in Kosciusko, the daughter of unmarried parents who soon separated. She was supposed to have a biblical name after Orpah, Ruth's sister-in-law in the Book of Ruth but her name was misspelled on her birth certificate and she has been Oprah ever since. For her first six years, Winfrey was reared on her g'andmother's farm near Kosciusko. For the next eight years, she lived with her mother, Ver-nita Lee, in Milwaukee.

Times were tough. Her mother worked as a housekeeper for $50 a week, and Winfrey kept cockroaches in a jar as pets, giving them names like Melinda and Sandy. "I was raped at later, she was raped again by a boyfriend of her mother's. "It just constantly kept happening," she said, "so I thought, 'This is something that I'm doing. It is absolutely something that I must be doing When I asked her how many times she had been sexually assaulted as a child, Winfrey said: "I stopped counting.

What I think is that sexual abuse of children is more common than uncommon in this country. You get five women in one room, and you can get three of them to admit it. "What I tell people," she said, again drawing a moral from her own experience, "is that sometimes life appears to victimize us. But you and you alone are responsible for yourself. I could have been bitter and angry against everyone who abused me.

But unless you release it and let it go and make a decision to go on, it will hamper you the rest of your life." After she ran away at age 13, Winfrey's mother threatened to send her to a juvenile home. Instead, Winfrey went to Nashville, to live with her father, Vernon Winfrey, a barber who is now a city councilman there. He straightened her out and set her feet on the course to fame. "I hated him and my stepmother, Zelma, as I was growing up because of all the restrictions they put on me," she said, "but I adore them today." At 17, Winfrey became the first black to win the Miss Fire Prevention contest in Nashville. "Prior to the year I won," she said, "you had to have red hair.

That was a way of saying 'no Winfrey went on to win other contests: Miss Black Nashville, Miss Black Tennessee. But it was Miss Fire Prevention that turned out to be her ticket into broadcasting, the career she has followed for 15 years. As a result of that contest, Winfrey was hired by WVOL, a black radio station in Nashville. After graduating from Tennessee State University in 1975 with a bachelor's degree in speech and performing arts, she broke into TV as a reporter and anchor with Nashville's WTVF. In 1976, she moved to Baltimore as a reporter and anchor at WJZ.

Too emotional to make a good anchor she was often moved to tears while SB 51 THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER TV WEEK, SEPTEMBER 7, 1986.