The Good Neighbor Page 10

  Having a color-blind floor manager seemed almost impossible to some of those working on the crew with Fred. But it was early television—a time when the rules got made up as everyone went along—and the crew made it possible for Fred, color blindness and all, to fit in. Interestingly, it never became an important issue later in his career.

  At one point, desperate to solve a problem that threatened to ruin one of the broadcasts he was working on, Fred Rogers turned to his wife, Joanne, for help. Because she was already accustomed to public performance as a pianist, Fred went to her when the lead singer for one of the NBC music shows balked at going onstage: “Something happened at the dress rehearsal. The lead said, ‘I’m not going to do it.’

  “It was scheduled to be broadcast that night, live. My wife took the lead to our apartment and gave her a cup of tea and talked. Joanne is a wonderful person. Somehow, magically, she brought her back to the studio and they went on with the program. Maybe the lead singer just wanted attention. . . . That might be one of the best things to remember: that the best things of life are way offstage.”38

  During the 1950s, the Rogerses and the Brownings vacationed together on Nantucket, and in 1959 Kirk Browning found a wonderful, quaint old house way out on the western end of the island that rented for just 300 dollars for the whole summer. “An old farmhouse called the Coffin Farm had eight hundred feet of beachfront on the bay and then the ocean on the other side,” remembered Browning years later. “It was the most romantic, beautiful spot in the world.”

  When the Brownings were there, they invited Fred and Joanne to join them. At the end of the summer, Browning learned that the house was for sale. It was a bargain price, but still beyond Kirk’s means, since his family’s fortune had been diminished by the Great Depression.39

  Browning knew Fred’s family’s wealth had not suffered a similar fate, and he suggested to Fred that he look at the house as a possible purchase. Browning also remembered that Fred’s parents had visited Nantucket, and he wondered if Jim and Nancy Rogers might not buy the house for Fred and Joanne.

  “At some point, I told Fred, ‘The house is now on the market for nine thousand dollars. I don’t have the money, but I know you love this house.’

  “Fred went to his family, who helped him buy the house. I think he paid eleven thousand dollars. I can’t tell you what the house is worth today. Then over the years, he bought all the land around the house, and it became part of a larger complex of the family.”40

  Fred and Joanne got “The Crooked House” (which earned its name from the fact that the whole place leaned over slightly but comfortably with age) in 1959 and spent many happy summers on the water in the little village of Madaket.

  The adjacent land became the site for the homes of Fred’s sister, Laney (and her husband, Dan Crozier), and the Okonak family, Fred’s cousins on his father’s side. The Crooked House is still in the Rogers family.

  6.

  THE CHILDREN’S CORNER

  Fred Rogers might have stayed at NBC his whole career. Many of his friends at the station told him that his skills would inevitably lead to great success as a producer and director of commercial television. Or he might have gone on, as Browning did, to a career in public television in New York. But once again his father intervened. Always on the lookout for ways to help Fred, especially ways to help bring his son back to his roots in western Pennsylvania, Jim Rogers contacted Fred in 1953 to let him know that there was an interesting new television opportunity developing in Pittsburgh.1

  Jim Rogers conveyed the news that a group in Pittsburgh was working to start the first community-based public television station in the United States. And an old friend of the Rogers family, Leland Hazard of the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company, a global supplier of paints, fiberglass, chemicals, and other specialty materials, was leading the effort. Hazard had been talking to Jim Rogers about the potential of public television, and the two had speculated about the possible intersection of Fred’s fledgling career in television and the new Pittsburgh station, WQED, which eventually became part of the Eastern Educational Network, a group of regional public television stations that exchanged programming. The plan was for the station to go on the air in 1954.

  Educational television originated in Boston, where the New England textile baron John Lowell Jr. provided a series of free lectures for people in the city in an 1836 bequest. This early public improvement project later produced the Lowell Institute, which included the Cooperative Broadcasting Council, made up of local cultural institutions and universities. WGBH got its license in 1951 and went on the air not as a stand-alone entity, but as part of the Council, with a concert by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The first person to show up for work was the crafty innovator Hartford N. Gunn Jr., who filled the new schedule with more music, science, and other educational programming.

  Now Pittsburgh was ready to join the experiment in public edification in this new medium. Leland Hazard and Jim Rogers wondered whether Fred might not have an interest in being in on the ground floor. Fred quickly did his own research. He even flew out to the University of Iowa to see what educational programming might look like (the school had been experimenting with it since the 1930s).

  And he decided that it just might be the right thing for him: “When I heard that educational television—which is now called public television—was going to be starting in Pittsburgh, only forty miles from where I grew up, I told some of my friends at NBC that I thought I’d put my name in and apply for the station. They said, ‘You are nuts, that place isn’t even on the air yet, and you’re in line to be a producer or a director or anything you want to be here.’ And I said, ‘No, I have the feeling that educational television might be, at least for me, the way of the future.’”2

  When Fred Rogers moved back to Pittsburgh in 1953 to help start WQED, there were lots of positive aspects for his family. His parents were thrilled to have him close to Latrobe. Jim Rogers kept hoping that Fred would eventually play a role in some of the family businesses.

  Married to Fred just a little more than a year, Joanne Rogers saw family-oriented Pittsburgh as a place to raise children when she and Fred were ready to start a family. Fred and Joanne went shopping for houses, and they eventually bought a 1920s two-story, red-brick house on Northumberland Street in Pittsburgh’s East End, near the Pittsburgh Golf Club, with its outstanding recreational facilities that might appeal to children.

  But none of these factors were at the core of Fred’s decision to move back to the Pittsburgh area. His careful calculation was that WQED—brand-new, unformed, and chaotic—would give him the creative freedom to involve himself in writing and performing and directing, as well as managing the station. Though his mentor Kirk Browning had warned Fred that by leaving New York he might be sacrificing the chance for a brilliant network-television career, Fred Rogers understood that life as an executive would disappoint him.

  In ways that no one else, except possibly his wife, Joanne, understood, Fred Rogers was driven by the need to find outlets for his powerful creativity. NBC was already a large, bureaucratic institution. Not even David Sarnoff or Pat Weaver got the chance to express their creativity, except through the work of others.

  Rogers felt strongly that eventually he would find the network atmosphere stultifying. And he recognized, almost instinctively and very astutely, that the ad hoc, madcap chaos of WQED might be just the right stew for him. As one of the first employees at the new public television station, he could experiment in an environment where the staff was desperately trying to cook up some local programming: music from a local university music department, poetry discussions with “Miss Emily,” a local woman with a passion for reading and writing poetry.

  “I was just at the right place at the very right time,” Rogers later recalled. “I knew that the decision to leave New York and to come to Pittsburgh and launch in this place nobody had ever heard of was the correct one for me. It gave me a chance to use all the talents that I had ever been
given. You know, I loved children, I loved drama, I loved music, I loved whimsy, I loved puppetry.”3

  Fred Rogers joined WQED in 1954 as program manager, under the leadership of general manager Dorothy Daniel. He and Daniel and a handful of others worked furiously in the fall of 1953 and the spring of 1954 to get ready to go live with The Children’s Corner, a new show in black and white. The éminence grise of the station, the mastermind working in the background, was Leland Hazard, the Pittsburgh Plate Glass Company executive and friend of Jim Rogers.

  Hazard was a big believer in Fred Rogers’s potential. According to Sam Silberman, an early director at WQED, Hazard put his considerable influence behind Fred at key moments in the early years of the station: “Leland Hazard was a very strong, powerful man who would speak very softly and communicate strength just in his behavior. He and Fred were very close. . . . Leland and his wife, Mary, never had children, so I think to a great degree they adopted Fred as their child and supported him in all of his efforts.”4

  Hazard was a leading businessman in the city, but he was also a veteran civic leader, with a passion for educational television. Once WQED was set up, he became its president while continuing his work at Pittsburgh Plate Glass. As a longtime friend of the Rogers family, he knew enough about Fred to know that he was passionate about the potential for educational television to help children. And Hazard shared Rogers’s commitment to gentle, thoughtful programming for young children at a time when a lot of television programming was wild, slapstick, thoughtless, and inappropriate for children.

  Leland Hazard also shared Rogers’s abhorrence of commercials that interrupted children’s television. As Hazard wrote in the Atlantic magazine in 1955, “After three years of thought and action I am ready to set down a few certainties about educational television. To some it means surcease from the insistent voice of the advertiser. To some, usually parents, it means the hope of children’s programs in which no hoofs clatter, no pistols crack, and no one gets killed.”5

  With WQED about to go on the air in the spring of 1954, there were still few plans or resources for local programming. The station faced the prospect of starting up as nothing more than a transmitter of content from other stations and other sources. Station manager Dorothy Daniel decided that the highest priority should go to developing a program for local children. When she told Leland Hazard that two staff members had responded to the request for thoughts on a live children’s program on WQED, program manager Fred Rogers and secretary Josephine Vicari, he was pleased and excited.

  As Fred Rogers recalled years later: “When Daniel asked who wants to do a children’s program, Josie and I said, ‘We’ll do it for an hour a day.’

  “Can you imagine producing an hour a day? I combed the country for free films we could put in. All we had planned to do was have Josie sing some songs. I would play the organ for her to sing, and then she would introduce these films. We had things like how to grow grass in New Hampshire. No one had any idea how hard it would be to fill an hour of programming a day.”6

  Only later did Rogers and his crew marvel at how they had somehow managed to produce five one-hour, live television programs each week with hardly any budget. And much of the time Fred had to sandwich the duties of program manager into the rest of his day.

  Rogers later estimated that they had about 150 dollars a week for their show, but that amount was taken up by their salaries. In effect, they had virtually no money to buy or develop programming. All they had was their own imaginations.

  Josephine Vicari (she changed her name to Josie Carey at the suggestion of Dorothy Daniel) was shorter than Fred, with close-cropped, dark hair and a round face that always seemed to be creased with a broad smile. Most importantly, she had boundless energy, the sort of spontaneous creativity that enabled her to respond to the chaos of improvisation with the same kind of willing good humor that Fred employed to make all things seem possible.

  Josie Carey was born in Pittsburgh, just two years after Fred’s birth in Latrobe. She grew up in Butler, Pennsylvania, just north of Pittsburgh, working in the kitchens of a series of Italian restaurants her grandparents and parents owned and operated. She was happy with the chaos of the restaurants and talking with large numbers of customers, which helped make her sociable and spontaneous and comfortable with strangers.

  And she was a great reader. In her oral history for The Television Academy Foundation’s Interviews, Josie said: “In my childhood, my favorite place in the world was the library. I made up my own games and stories. I entertained myself, which provided me with a background that served me well later.”7

  Perhaps even more importantly, Josie was addicted to listening to the radio as a child, which began her lifelong infatuation with educating and entertaining young people. She loved soap operas and listened to so many that she could tell by voice inflections who was a villain and who was a heroine.

  Carey had harbored some hopes of studying theater at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Tech (now Carnegie Mellon University), which then and now has enjoyed a strong theater-arts program. But family resources were limited, and she had to make do with learning secretarial skills at Duff’s Business Institute in downtown Pittsburgh: “I figured I could always be a secretary until things worked out to end up where I was supposed to be.”8

  She got a job with an ad agency that created a weekly woman’s program on a local commercial television station. There she became an assistant producer, which meant doing anything and everything to get the show on the air. The program attracted the attention of Dorothy Daniel, who invited Carey to come to WQED. A large woman with a round face and big round glasses, her hair pulled back into a bun, Daniel told Carey she could imagine her getting to perform at WQED if she joined the effort.

  Captured by Daniel’s enthusiasm, Josie Carey came to the new station in the fall of 1953, at about the same time as Fred Rogers. For several months, she had been pitching in around the office, doing everything from secretarial work to going door-to-door raising money.

  “She had this incredible energy,” said WQED producer Rick Sebak. “I think it would be too easy to put her in the category of standard TV hostesses of that era. She was beyond that. It was just the energy and the curiosity and the sense of fun that comes across on those old TV shows.”9

  As soon as Josie arrived, she and Fred hit it off, and they began talking about their ideas for children’s programs. They discovered an exciting consistency in their thinking that helped them develop ideas together confidently.

  Fred had been planning his own program, to be called It’s a Small World, starring Fred’s puppets (including a ventriloquist’s dummy called Hisher Boop Truck, first called “Elmer” and then renamed by a little girl) and animated furniture that moved around and talked. Although he was excited about bringing his ideas to Dorothy Daniel, talking with Josie Carey convinced him that it would be easier to produce and sustain a one-hour children’s show, day after day, with a collaborator.

  Another early coworker remembered Carey’s easygoing, natural affinity for improvisational television with the talented Rogers: “She loved the camera and the camera loved her. She was very creative. In those days, no one had done it before, so you came up with your own ideas, and Josie was very capable of doing that. She created everything that she did, and that is a very special talent because you were never copying someone else.”10

  As Josie Carey later recalled: “We went to Mrs. Daniel and said, ‘We’re thinking alike and can help each other.’

  “She said, ‘Oh, yes.’ Mrs. Daniel let you do almost anything. She was wonderful. We had a staff meeting once a week on Mondays and the janitor was invited.”11

  Josie and Fred began to craft rough scripts for the program that they could take to Daniel to get her approval. For the most part, they knew they would just be making it all up each day as they went along.

  The night before the station was scheduled to go on the air on April Fool’s Day, 1954, Dorothy Daniel gave a dinner party for th
e staff, board members, and supporters. At each place at the table, there was a small gift for each staff member to express Daniel’s gratitude for their hard work. Although Daniel hadn’t seen Fred performing with his puppets, and didn’t know how much Josie and Fred would use puppets on The Children’s Corner, she knew Fred had an interest in puppetry. On a whim, she had purchased a small tiger puppet to put at Fred’s place.12

  Rogers took this gift as encouragement, and he and Josie incorporated the hand puppet into their first show. They had a model of an old grandfather clock that was to be a central part of the set, and the two of them had planned to find a stuffed bird that they would somehow engineer to pop out of the clock and speak to the children watching.

  But they hadn’t found a bird. Instead, the next day Fred put the tiger puppet Dorothy Daniel had given him on his hand, got behind the clock, and had the puppet pop out of the clock and say, “Its 5:02, and Columbus discovered America in 1492.” Daniel Striped Tiger, named by Josie and Fred in honor of Dorothy Daniel, was born. From then on, Daniel would pop out of the clock each day, say the time and share a historical fact with the children in the TV audience. The role of puppets in shaping The Children’s Corner, and Fred Rogers’s career, was beginning.13

  At first, Josie and Fred just planned to use the puppets occasionally, to fill in when they ran out of other things. They used a lot of free film from libraries and other stations. And, Josie explained, they invented activities: “We eventually had somebody from the Pittsburgh Symphony come once a week with his instrument, to talk about it and play it. We had a magician come in and teach the children magic. We had a man teach Morse code. We had a tap dancer. We had aerobics before aerobics was big. We showed them how to make pizza before anybody had ever heard of pizza.”14

  But invariably gaps occurred. A lot of the film Fred got on loan for the program was very old, and the WQED equipment was secondhand. With annoying frequency, the film would snap, and Josie and Fred would have to quickly ad-lib while someone—most likely assistant Margot Woodwell—fixed the film. At other times, a scheduled guest or performer didn’t show up.