The Good Neighbor Page 4

  Fred’s parents took him and his sister with them on frequent trips to New York, where young Fred attended the opera and musicals with his parents and their friends. Nancy Rogers loved to shop in the New York department stores, and Jim would drive her there in a big black Cadillac limousine, with Fred riding beside him in the front of the car, listening to jazz on the car radio—talking on the way there and the way back about the musical performances they got to see in the big city. The Rogers family was partial to Cadillacs; Fred’s mother even had a baby-blue Cadillac convertible.

  Sometimes Jim stayed home to manage the businesses that comprised Rogers Enterprises, Inc., so Nancy Rogers would drive there with her mother, Nancy McFeely. Very frequently, Fred would accompany his various family members. Nancy Rogers often traveled to New York to do some of her Christmas shopping, which was an epic enterprise. She bought dozens of presents for every member of her family, and for friends, neighbors, Jim’s business associates, members of her church group, all the people who worked for the Rogers family, and many of the less fortunate families in Latrobe with whom she came in contact. She shopped for Fred’s school teachers and sometimes for the teachers of his friends. One year, she bought presents—scarfs, handkerchiefs, gloves—for every one of Laney’s teachers at the Oldfields School in northern Maryland, where she had recently been enrolled. She bought about fifteen hundred Christmas presents each year, sometimes more.

  The wealthy families that managed Latrobe’s big industrial companies created a year-round social whirl that revolved around festive parties at the Latrobe Country Club, as well as at the Rogers house and the homes of other families. According to Fred’s aunt Alberta Vance Rogers, “We’d all get together and end up at the country club. One time, my husband [Fred’s uncle Pete] got sorry for the horses and brought them into the clubroom. It was lots of fun for those who were drunk.”32

  The course superintendent and golf pro at the country club then was Milfred (Deacon) Palmer, the father of legendary golfer Arnold Palmer, who was just a year behind Fred Rogers in school. Arnold Palmer recalled that his father wasn’t a club member, and so he wasn’t allowed into the club for social functions. Palmer later bought the club, played golf there regularly, and often held court over lunch in the main dining room.33

  Fred Rogers was not a sports enthusiast. Once, Arnold Palmer and his father were in Florida and visited the Rogers family at their hotel. The elder Palmer gave Fred a golf lesson, which Arnold (Arnie) later described—smiling indulgently as he did so—as a bit of a struggle to find the athleticism in Fred.

  Palmer also remembered the very central and important role of the Rogers family in the community. He and his parents turned out each year to celebrate the holidays at the Rogerses’ big Christmas party. But he remembered Fred as “very individual . . . a loner.”34

  “He was a very meticulous student. He didn’t run with the guys like I did, and he didn’t drink beer. I did. We all did. . . . His interests were music and religion and history and that sort of thing. But a nice guy. We liked each other.”

  One of the most traumatic events for this young “loner” came one day in his early years at Latrobe Elementary School. For some reason, classes were dismissed early that day. When school let out, Grant Ross was not there to pick up Fred, so the young man set out to walk the approximately ten blocks to his house by himself. “It wasn’t long before I sensed I was being followed—by a whole group of boys,” Fred recalled years later. It was a story he told publicly only decades after the incident.35

  “As I walked faster, I looked around. They called my name and came closer and closer and got louder and louder.” Soon they were chasing him, shouting, “Freddy, hey fat Freddy. We’re going to get you, Freddy.”

  It was terrifying, but Fred managed to run to the house of a family friend, who let him in and called the Rogers residence to have someone come and pick him up. It was a stark example of the vulnerability of this very sensitive child. His elders advised him to meet bullying with indifference: “The advice I got from the grown-ups was, ‘Just let on you don’t care, then nobody will bother you.’”36

  But he did care; more than anything in the world, Fred Rogers cared. It was caring that defined the character of his mother, and it was caring that increasingly influenced the evolving character of this shy but resolute young boy. Fred never accepted the advice that pretending not to care would alleviate his loneliness and pain.

  As he grew older, Rogers struggled to work out a set of responses to the challenges of life that could turn his caring, his belief in love, and his great sensitivity into a life course based not on fragility, but on a quiet strength. He found a way to be true to himself that enabled him to build a uniquely thoughtful set of defenses that relied on empathy and sympathy. Ultimately, he developed a powerful authenticity that propelled him to popularity in Latrobe. The solitary boy playing in his puppet theater found a way to become one of the most famous and respected residents of a hometown that hadn’t always embraced him.

  Peggy Moberg McFeaters, who conceded in an interview that many of Fred’s schoolmates once thought of him as “a bit of a sissy,” said she and others all eventually learned, “He was really a great guy, not too different from the rest of us.”37 Young “Freddy” became a focused young man, and then an adult who drew on the very sensitivity that had once seemed a weakness.

  2.

  BREATHING ROOM

  From his very arrival in the world, and well into his childhood, Fred Rogers worried his mother, Nancy.

  Fred’s birth was so difficult that Nancy and her husband, Jim, decided not to have another child, until they adopted Fred’s sister, Laney, eleven years later. Though young Fred had to adjust to sharing his place in the family, Laney’s main memories of her older brother are that “he was so kind and so sweet. He would carry me around. He would walk with me, hand in hand. He would follow me around the yard, so I didn’t trip and fall. But I’m sure that there were times when he just wished this little thing hadn’t come to live in the house with him.”

  Laney recalls her mother telling her, much later, that Fred had suffered terribly from colic as a baby, and Nancy had struggled to find ways to help him find relief. She felt the pain of her little baby as if it was her own.1

  Jim Rogers was overjoyed to have a son, despite young Fred’s difficult arrival. Later, when Fred outgrew his colic, he developed serious childhood asthma. It all contributed to making Nancy and Jim Rogers very protective parents. They took great pains to safeguard their sickly little boy, sometimes keeping him home from school for protracted periods of time.

  Sometimes Fred’s parents also kept him at home during the long, hot days of summer when the western Pennsylvania air pollution was at its worst, and they tried numerous other strategies to help him. At one point, Fred’s mother and a family friend, Alcy Clemons (she was his babysitter; years later, he played the piano at her wedding), even took young Fred to Banff, Canada, and Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, hoping the cleaner air there would help the boy’s breathing.2

  The trip did help, but then mother and child had to come back home to the heavily industrialized Pittsburgh region. Like most cities in western Pennsylvania in the first half of the twentieth century, Latrobe had some of the most polluted air in America, with soot and particulate matter that exacerbate asthma. It was a particularly difficult place for an asthmatic to grow up. Ironically, some of the Rogers/McFeely family businesses in the Latrobe area were among the polluters that contributed to the bad air that afflicted Fred and other young children.

  When he was about ten years old, Fred’s asthma was particularly bad. Nancy Rogers had an innovative idea. She had learned of another young boy in Latrobe who was also suffering badly from asthma that summer. She thought that if the Rogers family could buy a window air conditioner—a brand new phenomenon in western Pennsylvania back in the 1930s—and put it in this older boy’s bedroom, Fred and the boy could both get relief and could keep each other company during th
e hot summer months.3

  According to Jeanne Marie Laskas, a western-Pennsylvania-based writer and columnist for the Washington Post who frequently interviewed and wrote about Fred, Nancy worked with the other little boy’s family and the Rogers family physician to arrange for Fred to be cloistered in an air-conditioned room in the summer of 1938.

  Laskas quotes Fred telling the story of spending the whole summer, through long days and nights, in his new friend Paul’s room. His parents wanted to give Fred some company during this cloistered period: “Paul and I were cooped up with the air conditioner, the first one in Latrobe. The family doctor and my parents went together and bought it, put it in Paul’s room, and then I went to live there all summer. They thought that’s what you do with kids who have asthma. Put them in there and just get them through. Paul was probably sixteen. I was probably ten.

  “Now that I think about it, I think how he must have hated that. He was an only child, I was an only child, and here’s this kid invading his space. When we’d go to an ice-cream parlor, he would order something and then I would order the same thing, of course; being that much older, he was a real hero. And then he would whisper to the person who was making the things to change the order—so that when his came, mine would be different, and I would be disappointed. But I see now that I was the sibling that he never had to take things out on before. We rarely left that room. We had our meals there. After that, we got an air conditioner at our house.”4

  Typically, Nancy Rogers was both wonderfully thoughtful about Fred and somehow insensitive to the effects of such a radical seclusion. She spared no expense. After the Rogers family air-conditioned Paul’s room, they bought conditioners for their summer retreat on the slope of Chestnut Ridge just outside Latrobe. They also paid to air-condition the entire enormous brick house on Weldon Street.5 Though this certainly contributed to everyone’s comfort, Nancy undertook the project first and foremost to protect her little boy.

  This pattern in the relationship of Nancy Rogers and her young son was repeated frequently as he grew up: Fred struggling with sickliness (which he outgrew eventually), shyness, and loneliness, and his mother trying desperately hard to ride to his rescue. Though deeply appreciative of his mother’s love and her caring nature, Fred had to work hard to find ways to establish his independence as a youngster and a teenager.

  This was less true with his father, who could be very serious and sometimes a bit aloof from young Fred. But their relationship was still very important.

  Fred’s sister, Laney, remembers her father as having an engaging sense of humor, but she also remembers him as something of a tough guy. The Rogers household was run on a strict schedule. Laney recalls that the family sat down to dinner together every night, in assigned seats, at exactly 6:30 P.M. for a meal prepared by the family cook. Laney and Fred were both chubby as children. Laney observes: “Mother was very geared to food. Later in life, when our friends were leaving—you know, if they had been to the house for dinner, [she would say], ‘Oh, take leftovers with you. Eat! Eat!’ She just always wanted to feed people.”

  Conversation at the Rogerses’ dinner table was never overly serious. Jim Rogers presided over the table, more relaxed than in his role as corporate chieftain. Laney notes that “Dad was two different people. If you saw him out on the street, he was called Mr. Latrobe. He was always in a three-piece suit, and a hat. And he was always polite, and always friendly, shook hands, and had a chat with anybody.

  “He was serious. But just at home, he could relax and enjoy his family. And I think that in the family that close little group of relatives knew a different Jim Rogers than people saw.”

  She also recalls some raucous times in the family dynamic: “Dad had a cupboard that had a lot of musical instruments in it. We had cymbals; we had an old violin; we had recorders. And Dad was a kind of a frustrated musician, and he would have liked to have been able to play. . . . From time to time, we’d get these things out, and we would have a parade throughout the house. We went up and down the stairs, just everybody banging away and having a grand time.”

  Jim Rogers was also able to relax on family vacations in New England and in Florida, where he and Fred often played tennis together.

  Though he loved and admired his father, Fred never wanted to develop into the young businessman that Jim Rogers hoped for. Later, his wife, Joanne Rogers, reported that Fred often felt he got quite conflicting signals from his mother—who was open and caring to the point of being emotional—and his father, whom Joanne described as more reserved, even to the point of reflecting Victorian-era values in his background and upbringing. Fred told Joanne that he never felt he could satisfy the conflicting demands of his mother and his father, who was usually serious and sometimes distant, always hoping Fred would toughen up and become his father’s business partner.6

  The family money gave Fred freedom and resources but also left him feeling constrained and even trapped. Laney remembers that when her parents gave Fred a car in high school—an exceptional luxury for a teenager in western Pennsylvania in the 1940s—he would drive it to school, but he wanted to hide it from his friends so they wouldn’t know he had been given such a privilege. Fred would park the car a couple of blocks down the street from the high school, get out, and walk the rest of the way to his classes.7

  In pictures from the 1930s, when Fred was a very young child, he often appears guarded, withdrawn, and unsure of himself. But by the time he got to high school, Fred Rogers looks like a strong, confident, smiling young man as he gazes directly into the camera and shows signs of the exceptional intelligence, sensitivity, and focus that made him so successful as an adult.

  Remarkably, by the time Fred Rogers was a teenager, he was very different from the ten-year-old who had spent the summer in Paul’s air-conditioned bedroom. In his high school years, Rogers became extraordinarily effective.

  Before he graduated and headed off to an Ivy League college, he had developed into the star of the Latrobe school system: student council president, editor of the Latrobean, finalist in the Rotary Oratorical Contest, actor in high school theatrical productions. He was a serious, accomplished scholar who was inducted into the National Honor Society.8

  And he was showing signs of the mental toughness that were hallmarks of his character as an adult. He wanted to concentrate on his studies and his school activities, and he was growing tired of the annual interruptions of his education posed by his family’s long trips to Florida in the winter. Finally, in his last few years of high school, he balked and insisted on staying home by himself so he wouldn’t miss school.

  When Jim and Nancy and Laney headed south for their six-week sojourn at the Belleview Biltmore Hotel in Belleair, Fred stayed home alone, dedicating himself to schoolwork and the piano. And by then his parents knew Fred could take care of himself (with a little help from relatives in Latrobe). He had a car to drive himself to school and was totally focused on his academic achievements.9

  How did young Fred Rogers transform himself from a shy, sickly kid into a confident high schooler, and then adult? Looking back over Fred’s long life through the lenses provided by his friends and associates, his family and his own writings, it’s clear that the support of his parents and grandparents was concentrated in three key areas that came together to help Fred find himself and develop his extraordinary artistic and creative persona: faith, independence, and music.

  The first important element was the pervasive influence of the church. Some of his earliest memories were of the comfort he drew from attending the Latrobe Presbyterian Church on Main Street with his mother and father and his mother’s parents, Fred and Nancy McFeely. As a very little boy, Fred would attend Sunday school at the church. But when he was still quite young—around five years old—his mother invited him to sit up with her in a pew during the regular church service. Fred always had a lot of questions, even during the sermon, but his mother never shushed him up. She would always answer, quietly and respectfully, treating the littl
e boy’s concerns as seriously as those of an adult.

  Although the Church could often be a severe place, particularly in families that subscribed to its most conservative and austere variants, this wasn’t the case in Fred’s childhood. His mother was deeply religious, but her life was more joyous. More than anything else, she communicated to her son the rewards of service to others, to the community, and to the church. She took care of the needs of so many poor families in Latrobe that eventually the school nurse at Latrobe Elementary School would just order shoes, coats, eyeglasses, and even furniture and have the bills sent directly to Nancy Rogers.10

  Many other children of Presbyterian families in western Pennsylvania had stricter and harsher childhoods than Fred. The actor Jimmy Stewart, for example, who grew up near Latrobe in Indiana, Pennsylvania, had a tough, demanding father who put great pressure on his son well into his adult life. Alexander Stewart’s sense of Presbyterian propriety led him to relentlessly pressure Jimmy to leave the profession of acting, which he did not consider a proper, Christian calling, to return to Indiana to run the family hardware business.11

  By contrast, Fred was almost never pushed by his father, even though Jim Rogers didn’t particularly value television, and like Alexander Stewart, he very much wanted his son to come home to join him in managing the family enterprises. Although he was a strong figure in the family, Jim Rogers was tolerant and always very careful not to bully Fred. He treated his son with respect and support, no matter their differences.

  Nancy Rogers almost never communicated the harsher side of Presbyterianism to her son. In her son, she imbued the delights of Christian service. Fred took great pleasure in everyday acts of thoughtfulness and kindliness; throughout his life, when he met a stranger who needed help or friendship, he would drop everything to offer his time and attention.

  A typical story about Fred’s giving nature comes from a woman who once worked as an intern on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. She recalled that when she accompanied Fred on a trip to Boston, they were scheduled to have dinner at the home of an influential executive at WGBH, the public television station in Boston. A limousine had been hired to take them to the executive’s home. When they got there, the limo driver asked Fred when he should pick them up after dinner. Instead, Fred invited him in, to the bewilderment of the hostess. After dinner, he sat up front in the limo with the driver, a man named Billy, to get to know him.