The Good Neighbor Page 5

  Before the evening was over, Fred and the intern went back to Billy’s house in West Roxbury to meet his parents. Fred came in and played the piano as people streamed in from around the neighborhood to listen. A few years later, when Fred learned that Billy was in the hospital dying, he called to talk with him and to say good-bye.12

  The second element in Fred’s young life that enabled his independent growth as a young man was the love and support he got from the McFeelys, Nancy Rogers’s parents. A constant presence in Fred’s life, they provided some of the warm encouragement Fred sometimes missed from his father. Most critically, they acted as a gentle, artful counterweight to the protectiveness of Fred’s parents, helping Fred move toward independence while never undermining his relationship with his mother and father.

  His maternal grandparents lived in and around Latrobe during most of Fred’s youth. Their love and support were truly transformative for him. Their importance came from their generosity of spirit, but it also came from their very close relationship with Fred’s mother.

  The namesake of his grandson, Fred McFeely took his role as mentor and grandfather very seriously. He welcomed Fred’s visits, listened carefully to his concerns, and stood up for the boy’s interests in the family. When he felt that Fred’s parents were being too restrictive, he urged more freedom for the young man, gently persuading them to loosen the reins. Nancy Rogers was a very smart and sophisticated young mother, particularly for small-town western Pennsylvania at that time, and she managed to relax the maternal bonds enough to give Fred the right signals about his independence.

  For his part, Fred McFeely always made sure his grandson knew, directly and sincerely, how much he enjoyed his company. “Freddy, you make my day very special,” McFeely frequently told the shy little boy, reminding him of his importance to the adults in his life.

  Fred’s sister, Laney, remembers that when she and Fred were children they would go with their parents to visit their grandfather every Sunday at McFeely’s farm not too far from Latrobe. The farm was called Buttermilk Falls for the big waterfall along the stream that ran through the middle of the property. It had cows and pigs and other animals, and both children loved to visit and play there. They called McFeely “Ding Dong” because, early on, he had taught them the words to the nursery rhyme, “Ding Dong Dell.”13

  Young Fred often played outside with his grandfather. One Sunday, Fred went off by himself and climbed up on some old stone walls and part of the stone foundation to an old building. Immediately, his mother intervened, calling out a warning to Fred that he could hurt himself playing on the stones and that he should get down right away.

  But his grandfather came to the rescue: “Let the kid climb on the wall. He has to learn to do things for himself,” Fred McFeely told his daughter.14 And McFeely explained—not for the first time—the importance of experimentation for a young child and the power of learning through experience, even when risks were involved.

  Fred Rogers was deeply grateful to his grandfather, and he never forgot that moment on the stone wall. “I loved my grandfather for giving me that,” he said later. “He seemed to know when to let go,” added Rogers. It was from Fred McFeely that young Fred felt he got the freedom to grow and develop his interests.15

  Fred’s grandmother, Nancy McFeely, also contributed to his growing independence in ways that were skillfully supportive of her daughter. Together, Nancy McFeely and Nancy Rogers noted Fred’s intense interest in music as a three- and four-year-old boy, and they made sure he could use the modest family piano, giving him the chance to play and to learn. Fred started playing the piano before he was five, and his family purchased a small pump organ for about twenty-five dollars to help him develop his musical talent.

  He could soon pick up tunes he’d heard, impressing his family with his ability to play by ear. This almost instinctive ability to connect with music, and to express his feelings through the piano and the organ, were seminal to the development of Fred’s talents. As a little boy so often shy and reticent, Fred Rogers found a place to express himself, banging out tunes that reflected his emotions.

  The pivotal moment in the evolution of Fred’s love of music occurred when he was almost ten years old. Fred had formed a strong attachment with his maternal grandmother, and he turned to her for support almost as often as he did to his grandfather. He confided to his grandmother how very much he wanted to own his own piano. “Nana” McFeely listened carefully to Fred, and they discussed why he wanted a piano and what it would mean to him. As a little boy, Fred was not very acquisitive or focused on what money could buy, a trait that stayed with him for the rest of his life. But this was clearly important to him, and he convinced Nana that the acquisition of a piano was not just a whim, but an important building block in his young life.

  Finally, thinking that a little piano for a little child couldn’t be that expensive, Nana McFeely offered to buy one for her grandson. When Fred was next visiting his grandmother at her residence in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh (Nancy and Fred McFeely kept residences in both Latrobe and in Pittsburgh), he told her he was going downtown to look at pianos. His grandmother said that could be a good idea, and she made sure Fred knew where to go and how to get there on his own.

  He took a trolley the four miles from Squirrel Hill to the Steinway & Sons store on Liberty Avenue (since moved to Penn Avenue) in downtown Pittsburgh.16 According to the staff there, Fred spent several hours playing every piano in the store, and then told the salesmen that he had picked his favorite: a secondhand 1920 Steinway Concert Grand Model D Ebonized piano that had been shipped recently to New York for a full “heirloom” restoration to restore the sixteen-year-old piano to perfect condition.17

  It was nine feet long, weighed about a thousand pounds, and, as a secondhand piano, was worth a little less than 3,000 dollars in 1936. It was, and still is, the gold standard when it comes to concert grand performance pianos. The same model piano, brand new, now sells for nearly 130,000 dollars, according to Steinway staff. The salesmen chuckled among themselves as the little boy headed to the trolley to ride back to Squirrel Hill to see his grandmother.

  They were stunned a little while later when Fred returned with a check—nearly 50,000 dollars in today’s currency—for the full price of the piano.18

  Nana McFeely had made a promise, and she was going to keep it. She kept her commitment to let Fred pick out his own piano, and it utterly changed his life.

  Although it might seem like an extraordinary extravagance for such a young child, it was a bold and principled move by Nancy McFeely. She knew she could afford it, and she was convinced by Fred himself that it would make an exceptional difference for him at a critical juncture in his life.

  Fred Rogers took the piano with him everywhere for the rest of his life—to New York, back to Pittsburgh, to Toronto, and back to Pittsburgh again—and composed most of his famous music on his concert grand. The music that he conceived and composed was the force that propelled his work, his career, and his artistic growth. Just as importantly, it gave him confidence in his abilities and his character and gave him a lifetime of solace and comfort. And it was this music that helped give Fred Rogers a place as one of the great innovators in the evolving fields of television and education.

  Nana McFeely’s investment paid off handsomely.

  As young Fred developed as a pianist, he would play show tunes and even opera arias on his piano, all from memory, after family trips to New York City. He could hear a tune once and give a rendition of it. His sister Laney recalls that the family would stay at the Seymour Hotel on Forty-Fifth Street near Times Square, Broadway, and the New York Theater District, going to musical-theater productions and Radio City Music Hall, immersing Fred in a rich musical environment. “Broadway musicals were very much in fashion in those days,” says Laney. “He [Fred] would have just memorized it, sitting there watching it. . . . And his friends would come. . . . He’d come in the door with three or four people trail
ing along after him. . . . Everything he ever heard, he could play.”19

  There were two other pivotal moments in Fred Rogers’s young life—one delivered by fate, and the other artfully managed by his always vigilant mother. Each of them helped Fred move toward independence. Fred was about fourteen years old, a couple of years before he asserted his independence by insisting on staying home to attend school while the rest of his family went off for their annual winter vacation in Florida. He had developed an infection in his groin, and the family doctor decided the young boy needed an operation.20

  His parents, realizing that their son still didn’t fit in as comfortably at school as he wished, thought Fred would be embarrassed to have to talk about such an operation with other children his age. They made up a cover story that he and they could use to explain his absence, and that would enable him to hide the fact that he had the operation.

  At first Fred was grateful. But a little while later he began to feel some resentment that a story had to be concocted. It almost seemed to Fred that his parents were ashamed of him, and that their protective gesture was somehow a negative commentary on him as a person. It deepened his commitment to going his own way and developing his own life.

  Years later, when Fred was putting together notes for a memoir (he never did write one), he emphasized the importance of this operation—and the impact it had on his maturing sensibility—as a further step in the evolution of the new, independent Fred Rogers.21

  Clearly, Jim and Nancy Rogers were simply trying to be helpful, and to be sensitive to the feelings of their young son. For Fred’s part, his resentment probably reflected, more than anything else, that he was already moving away from his family in ways that were completely natural.

  The other pivotal moment in Fred’s high school life was the opportunity that presented itself when Fred’s mother learned that a star athlete at Latrobe High School, Jim Stumbaugh, was hospitalized. Stumbaugh was also a very dedicated student, and he was anxious to keep up with his schoolwork. Stumbaugh’s mother, a widowed teacher who lost her husband when her son was only eight, was friends with the Rogers family.22

  Family accounts report that Nancy Rogers saw a chance for Fred to connect with one of the most popular boys in the school. Although Fred was doing well in school at this point, both as a student and with his extracurricular activities, he was still somewhat shy and withdrawn from classmates. And his mother—always eager to improve young Fred’s life—saw an artful way to help him make a connection that could help him socially.

  Stumbaugh was a campus hero in multiple sports, including football, basketball, and track. He had injured a kidney playing football and had to spend several days in the hospital for treatment. Nancy suggested to Fred that he could pick up some of Jim’s books at home and his assignments at school and take them over to the hospital, and perhaps even help Jim catch up on his schoolwork.

  Nancy’s idea worked brilliantly well, and Fred established a friendship with Stumbaugh that would last the rest of their lives.

  Fred is remembered by his classmate Anita Lavin Manoli as “head and shoulders above everybody else in terms of the fine arts, poetry, reading.” But, she says, he was never involved in athletics—it was the only thing at which he did not excel. And she remembers Fred in high school as someone who was “prominent, not because of who his family was, but because of his accomplishments.”23

  Another classmate, Richard “Puffy” Jim, recalls that when Fred started high school, he was viewed as a little bit nerdy and even sickly, but when he finished, Fred was accepted and thought of as a “regular guy.” Jim cites Fred’s relationship with Stumbaugh as transformative for the young Rogers.24 By the end of high school, Fred had a girlfriend, Doris Stewart, with whom he went to the prom. By some accounts, they even double-dated with Stumbaugh and his girlfriend.

  During this time, Jim recalls, he saw an example of Fred’s emerging social confidence and toughness. He first met Fred in their freshman year in high school when Jim stopped into the school auditorium to listen to students practicing for an oratorical contest. He recalls that Fred’s voice was still a bit high and squeaky. While Fred was speaking, other children in the audience began giggling and even laughing out loud. But Fred stayed focused, undistracted, and moved forward to the end of his speech without hesitating. He just “plowed right through it,” according to Jim, who was impressed.25

  Fred Rogers’s own impression of his high school years is that they started out painful and frightening, and that his newfound relationship with Jim Stumbaugh helped him make a transition to social integration with his peers. In his oral history for The Television Academy Foundation’s Interviews, Fred said: “I was very, very shy when I was in grade school. And when I got to high school, I was scared to death to go to school. Every day, I was afraid I was going to fail.

  “When Jim was injured I went to the hospital—and years later he told me ‘I couldn’t imagine why Fred Rogers was bringing me my homework.’

  “At any rate, we started to talk. And I could see what substance there was in this, uh, jock. And, evidently, he could see what substance there was in this shy kid.

  “So when he got out of the hospital and went back to the school, he said to people, ‘You know, that Rogers kid’s okay.’ That made all the difference in the world for me.

  “It was after that that I started writing for the newspaper, got to be president of the student council. What a difference one person can make in the life of another. It’s almost as if he had said, ‘I like you just the way you are.’”26

  Jim Stumbaugh and Fred Rogers stayed in touch for the rest of their lives, even though Stumbaugh moved away from the region to North Carolina. Decades later, when Stumbaugh was sick with cancer, Rogers flew down to see him and talk, even though Rogers had injured his ankle and was on crutches at the time.

  And when Stumbaugh died, Rogers was there to speak at the funeral. “He was tenacious about those friendships,” said Maggie Kimmel, a University of Pittsburgh professor who worked with and wrote about Fred Rogers.27

  Fred Rogers finished high school almost as much of a star as Jim Stumbaugh: He was the recipient of many awards and honors and an accomplished scholar headed for Dartmouth, an Ivy League college. It was, of course, the love he received from his parents and grandparents that made the critical difference.

  It’s also likely that swimming helped the young Rogers evolve into a more confident young man in high school. Fred Rogers had learned to swim as a boy during his family’s many winter trips to Florida.

  But nothing made more difference than the thoughtfulness of his always attentive mother. Nancy Rogers devoted her life to her two children and to community service. In return, Fred and Laney adored their mother and remained devoted to her memory after she died. Though Nancy may have hoped for a career as a doctor—and she certainly had the intelligence, the focus, the social skills, and talents for a highly successful career—she found important work shaping the trajectories of her children’s lives and strengthening her community.

  Graduating from high school in 1946, just after the end of World War II, Fred felt a great sense of excitement about all the possibilities that lay ahead of him. And he had the strength of someone who had come through adversity. It was well that he did: He faced a challenge at Dartmouth, the college he had picked, as great as the one he’d faced in high school.

  3.

  COLLEGE DAYS

  Almost no one in Fred Rogers’s family can remember exactly why he picked Dartmouth College. Fred’s ambitions were ordered around his idealism, not any hopes for success in the sort of business world that might have prized an Ivy League degree. Fred himself said little about Dartmouth, except that he was miserable there, and that his attraction to Romance languages may have piqued his interest in the school, which had, and still has, a fine language program.1 He did tell some of his relatives that he thought developing his language skills might help prepare him for a career in the diplomatic corps, if h
e chose to go in that direction.

  A little bit of research might have tipped off the reserved, very serious, and very idealistic young Fred Rogers that Dartmouth, famous throughout the Ivy League in those days as a beer-soaked, jockstrap party school, might be a poor fit.

  So why did he pick Dartmouth? Fred’s statement about the college’s prowess in the language field isn’t terribly convincing, since Fred expressed what seemed like an even greater level of interest in religion, music, and children. He told his parents and his sister, Laney, that he intended to become a Presbyterian minister after he graduated from college, and that he was already focused on the nearby and very highly regarded Western Theological Seminary in the East End of Pittsburgh (later called Pittsburgh Theological Seminary). And music was the singular passion of Fred’s young life, though he had doubts that he could turn his love of music into a career, or even a principal field of study.

  Fred’s father still harbored hopes that his son would get some business training, as Jim Rogers had done, and come back to Latrobe. It is hard to find the thread that led to Dartmouth; there seems to be no legacy of Dartmouth grads in the family. Jim Rogers went to Penn State and got business training at the University of Pittsburgh. His parents were not college educated.2

  On Fred’s mother’s side, there also seems to be no indication of a connection to Dartmouth, all the way back to Fred’s great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. His mother, Nancy, went to the Ogontz School for Young Ladies in Philadelphia, and her mother attended Women’s College of Baltimore (now Goucher College).3