The Good Neighbor Read online

  Copyright © 2018 Maxwell King

  Cover © 2018 Abrams

  Published in 2018 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017956802

  ISBN: 978-1-4197-2772-6

  eISBN: 978-1-68335-349-2

  Abrams books are available at special discounts when purchased in quantity for premiums and promotions as well as fundraising or educational use. Special editions can also be created to specification. For details, contact [email protected] or the address below.

  Abrams Press® is a registered trademark of Harry N. Abrams, Inc.

  ABRAMS The Art of Books

  195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007

  abramsbooks.com

  PHOTO CREDITS

  Insert 1: this page: reproduced with permission of the McFeeley-Rogers Foundation, with the exception of this page, top right: reproduced with permission of the McFeeley-Rogers Foundation and Joanne Rogers; this page: reproduced with permission of the Fred Rogers Company, with the exception of this page, bottom: © Lynn Johnson. Reproduced with permission of the Fred Rogers Company and Ohio University.

  Insert 2: this page: © Lynn Johnson. Reproduced with permission of the Fred Rogers Company and Ohio University; this page: top, © Jim Judkis, bottom, © Walt Seng. Reproduced with permission of the Fred Rogers Company; this page: top, reproduced with permission of the Fred Rogers Company, bottom, © Walt Seng. Reproduced with permission of the Fred Rogers Company; this page: top, © Jim Judkis, bottom, reproduced with permission of the Fred Rogers Company; this page: © Lynn Johnson; this page: reproduced with permission of the Fred Rogers Company; this page: top, © Lynn Johnson, bottom, reproduced with permission of the Fred Rogers Company.

  For Margaret Ann King My Polestar

  There are three ways to ultimate success:

  The first way is to be kind.

  The second way is to be kind.

  The third way is to be kind.

  —FRED ROGERS

  CONTENTS

  Prologue: A Beautiful Day

  PART I

  1: Freddy

  2: Breathing Room

  3: College Days

  4: Love and Music

  PART II

  5: Basic Training

  6: The Children’s Corner

  7: On-Air Ministry

  8: Dr. Margaret McFarland

  9: Toronto and the CBC

  PART III

  10: The Birth of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

  11: The Pastore Hearing

  12: Language and Meaning

  13: Mister Rogers, Boss and Teacher

  14: Puppet World

  PART IV

  15: On Hiatus

  16: He’s Back!

  17: Behind the Scenes in the Neighborhood

  18: Fred Rogers, Musician

  19: Mister Rogers’s Family Values

  20: Fearless Authenticity

  21: Swimming

  PART V

  22: The Legacy

  23: The End of the Neighborhood

  24: America’s Favorite Neighbor

  25: Mister Rogers Lives On

  Epilogue: A Personal Note on the Importance of Fred Rogers

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index of Searchable Terms

  PROLOGUE: A BEAUTIFUL DAY

  Fred Rogers had given some very specific instructions to David Newell, who handled public relations for the PBS children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Rogers said he wanted no children—absolutely none—to be present when he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago. No children? How could that be? By the mid-1980s, Rogers was an icon of children’s television, known for communicating with his young viewers in the most fundamental and profound way. Why would he want to exclude them from a program showcasing his views on how they should be understood and taught?

  But Fred Rogers knew himself far better than even friends like Newell, who had worked with him for decades. He knew that if there were children in the studio audience, he wouldn’t focus on Winfrey’s questions, he wouldn’t pay heed to her legion of viewers, and he wouldn’t convey the great importance of his work. The children and their needs would come first. He couldn’t help it, never could help it. Decades before, Rogers had programmed himself to focus on the needs of little children, and by now he had reached a point at which he could not fail to respond to a child who asked something of him—anything at all.

  He asked David Newell (who also played Mr. McFeely, a central character on Rogers’s program) to be clear with Winfrey’s staff: If there are children in the audience, Fred knows he’ll do a poor job of helping Oprah to make the interview a success. But the message wasn’t received. When Rogers came before Winfrey’s studio audience on a brisk December day in 1985, he found the audience composed almost entirely of families, mainly very young children with their mothers.

  Winfrey’s staff had decided that after she interviewed Rogers, it would be fun to have him take questions from the audience, and maybe provide some guidance to mothers. And he certainly tried, telling them that to understand children, “I think the best that we can do is to think about what it was like for us.” But the plan didn’t succeed. As soon as the children started to ask him questions directly, he seemed to get lost in their world, slowing his responses to their pace, and even hunching in his chair as if to insinuate himself down to their level.

  This wasn’t good television—at least, good adult television. Everything was going into a kind of slow motion as Fred Rogers became Mister Rogers, connecting powerfully with the smallest children present. He seemed to forget the camera as he focused on them one by one. Winfrey began to look a little worried. Although she was still about a year away from the national syndication that would make her a superstar, her program was already a big hit. And here she was losing control of it to a bunch of kids, and what looked like a slightly befuddled grandfather.

  Then it got worse. In the audience, Winfrey leaned down with her microphone to ask a little blond girl if she had a question for Mister Rogers. Instead of answering, the child broke away from her mother, pushed past Winfrey, and ran down to the stage to hug him. As the only adult present not stunned by this, apparently, Fred Rogers knelt to accept her embrace.

  Minutes later, he was kneeling again, this time to allay a small boy’s concerns about a miniature trolley installed on Winfrey’s stage to recall the famous one from his own show, the trolley that traveled to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. The boy was worried about the tracks, which seemed to be canted precariously at the edge of the stage. As the two conferred quietly, Winfrey stood in the audience looking more than a little lost. Seeing that the show was slipping away from her, she signaled her crew to break to an ad.

  For Fred Rogers, it was always this way when he was with children, in person or on his hugely influential program. Every weekday, this soft-spoken man talked directly into the camera to address his television “neighbors” in the audience as he changed from his street clothes into his iconic cardigan and sneakers. Children responded so powerfully, so completely, to Rogers that everything else in their world seemed to fall away as he sang, “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood.” Then his preschool-age fans knew that he was fully engaged as Mister Rogers, their adult friend who valued his viewers “just the way you are.”

  It was an offer of unconditional love—and millions took it. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood often reached 10 percent of American households, five to ten million children each day who
wanted to spend time with this quiet, slightly stooped, middle-aged man with a manner so gentle as to seem a little feminine.

  Over time, as new generations of parents—some of whom had grown up with the Neighborhood themselves—swelled the ranks of his admirers, Fred Rogers achieved something almost unheard of in television: He reached a huge nationwide audience with an educational program, a reach he sustained for almost four decades. Rogers became a national advocate for early education just at the time that psychologists, child-development experts, and researchers worldwide were finding that learning that takes place in the earliest years—social and emotional, as well as cognitive—is a crucial building block for successful and happy lives.

  Mister Rogers’s appeal was evident from the beginning of his career, as the managers of WGBH in Boston discovered one day in April 1967. At that point, his program aired on the Eastern Educational Network (a PBS precursor) and was called Misterogers’ Neighborhood. It had been shown regionally for only a year. Recognizing its popularity, the managers organized a meet-the-host event and broadcast an invitation for Rogers’s young viewers to come to the station with their parents. The staff was prepared for a crowd of five hundred people.

  Five thousand showed up. The line stretched down the street toward Soldiers Field, where the Harvard football team played, and created traffic slowdowns reminiscent of game days. The station quickly ran out of snacks for the children. As the line wound into the studio, Rogers insisted on kneeling to talk with each child, just as he would on Oprah Winfrey’s show nearly two decades later. The queue got longer and longer until it stretched past the stadium.

  To Fred Rogers, every child required special attention, because every child needed assurance that he or she was someone who mattered. This was far more than the informed opinion of an expert educator; it was a profound conviction, one that had motivated Rogers from his own childhood. When Mister Rogers sang, “Would you be mine . . . won’t you be my neighbor,” at the start of every episode of his show, he really meant it.

  Kindness and empathetic outreach had motivated Rogers since he was a sickly, chubby boy himself, whose classmates in industrial Latrobe, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh, called him “Fat Freddy” and chased him home from school. The lonely only child often spent school lunch breaks in his puppet theater in the attic of his parents’ mansion, entertaining a friendlier classmate who’d come home with him in a chauffeur-driven car. As Fred Rogers acknowledged later, the isolation of his childhood, though painful, was a key source of artistic invention that showed up in the sets, scripts, and songs on a program where he created an idealized version of his hometown.

  Back in the 1930s, when Fred Rogers was growing up, living in a neighborhood meant safety, security, comfort, and help. Despite his problems, in Latrobe young Rogers had a piece of geography, a piece of the town, that was his own. He had neighbors and relatives who understood him, who helped him when his parents didn’t understand, who took him into the library to find books he would care about, who rescued him when he was bullied on the street. Eventually, living in the neighborhood meant friends and classmates who valued him and wanted to share their experiences.

  It meant familiar and comforting sights and sounds: the clang of the trolley coming up the hill, the sound of trucks making deliveries to the shops, the smoke belching from industrial chimneys that said there are jobs here, his parents’ house and the big backyard behind it, his grandparents’ house, the school building where he went to learn each day. The fabric of that neighborhood gave the young boy in the 1930s a sense of place that was profoundly reassuring at a time when he felt acutely his own shyness and the pangs of loneliness. And it was this kind of “neighborhood” that he recreated for young viewers.

  Fred McFeely Rogers’s life, and the way it was incorporated into his hugely popular television show, is more complex than it may appear on the surface—as was the man himself. Those who aren’t aware of Rogers’s real work may see only the stereotype: the kindly, graying figure who was so understanding and helpful to children, but also peculiar in ways easy to satirize.

  But Fred Rogers was much more than his gentle, avuncular persona in the Neighborhood. He was the genius behind the most powerful, beneficial programming ever created for very young children; he was a technological innovator and entrepreneur decades before such work was popularly recognized; he was a relentless crusader for higher standards in broadcasting; he was an artist whose deep creative impulse was expressed in the music of his show; and he was a Presbyterian minister, bearing witness to the values he saw as essential in a world that often seemed to lack any ethical compass. He was a husband and father, and a loyal friend. He was also, in many ways, a driven man.

  Fred Rogers can seem too good to be true. Readers of his life story might ask, “Who’s behind the man in the sweater: Was he a real man or a saintly character? Is there something we don’t know? What’s the story?”

  There is indeed a story: a difficult childhood; a quest to escape feelings of isolation engendered by his parents’ protectiveness, and by their great wealth; a struggle to remake himself in a mold of his own choosing; and after he found his vocation, a lifelong drive to meet the highest standards he could discover. Mister Rogers wasn’t a saint; he had a temper, he made bad decisions, and on occasion he was accused of bad faith. He had difficult times with his own sons when they were young. Despite his deep empathy with the tiniest children, he could, at times, be tone-deaf in relating to adults. The man who conveyed a Zen-like calm on television saw a psychiatrist for decades.

  But his powerful connection to America’s parents and children has persisted, even years after he stopped making television. In 2012, almost ten years after his death, hundreds of thousands of Americans turned to Fred Rogers for comfort in the wake of the elementary-school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. Four months after Newtown, when deadly bombers struck the Boston Marathon, once again Americans across the nation looked for solace in the words of Fred Rogers.

  Sadly, they did so yet again after the May 22, 2017, bombing at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England, in which twenty-two people lost their lives, including young children.

  After each unspeakable tragedy, Rogers’s words, sought out on the internet, were forwarded everywhere: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news,” Rogers had told his young viewers, “my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers—so many caring people in this world.”

  Few indeed are the TV personalities whose capacity to console survives them in this way.

  Along with his skills as an educator, Rogers possessed a unique and powerful ability to give reassurance and comfort to others, including many whose childhoods were far in the past. He helped generations of young children understand their evolving world, and their own potential in it. Through his program, his many television interviews and family-special productions, and his dozens of books and articles, he helped parents grasp the critical importance of early childhood learning, and to understand their own role in making their children’s lives more joyful and rewarding.

  He also influenced subsequent generations of producers of children’s television. Rogers’s work is still distributed by PBS and the Fred Rogers Company, though it is no longer broadcast regularly. Its impact resonates in ongoing programs, such as Blue’s Clues and Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, that speak to small children gently and understandingly, as Mister Rogers did.

  As journalist Mary Elizabeth Williams put it on Salon.com in 2012, on what would have been Fred Rogers’s eighty-fourth birthday: “One of the most radical figures of contemporary history never ran a country or led a battle. . . . He became a legend by wearing a cardigan and taking off his shoes. . . . Rogers was a genius of empathy . . . fearless enough to be kind.”

  Rogers’s forme
r colleague Elizabeth Seamans adds: “Fred was quite daring. People think of him as conservative, in the little fifties house with the cardigan sweater, but he was completely fearless in his use of the medium and as a teacher . . . I think he was brilliant—a genius.”

  Musician, bandleader, educator, and guest on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Wynton Marsalis observes: “Fred Rogers was one of a kind—an American original, like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Johnny Cash. There was no one like him.

  “Every original and innovator doesn’t have to have psychedelic hair. There’s a cliché version of who’s an original. It’s always somebody making a lot of noise, and being disruptive of some status quo. His originality spoke for itself. He was so creative. He spoke very clearly, and he showed a lot of respect [for his audience]. And he also integrated a lot of material.”

  Marsalis adds: “Fred Rogers tackled difficult issues, like disabilities. He expanded kids’ horizons of understanding and aspiration. He raised the bar.”

  There is no better illustration of Fred Rogers’s true daring in the medium of television than the seminal 1981 episode featuring Jeff Erlanger, a quadriplegic, highly intelligent ten-year-old who’d been in a wheelchair since age four. The camera zooms in on Mister Rogers asking Jeff about the mechanics of his wheelchair in a tone no different from one he might have used when asking the young man about his favorite flavor of ice cream.

  “This is how I became handicapped,” says the sweet-faced boy with a self-awareness that would put most adults to shame. As Jeff details his medical condition in a calm, measured way, Mister Rogers listens intently and praises Jeff’s ability to discuss it in a way that might help other people: “Your parents must be very proud of you.”

  Together Jeff and Mister Rogers sing “It’s You I Like”: “It’s not the things you wear / It’s not the way you do your hair / But it’s you I like / The way you are right now / The way down deep inside you / Not the things that hide you.”