The Good Neighbor Page 6

  It seems likely that Fred Rogers was simply unsure of himself in his first year at Dartmouth, and unsure of the best direction to secure the right kind of education to launch a career. And clearly, he was conflicted about which career to select. Though he was passionate about music and children and education, he may have thought that a more traditional approach to education and career—something like the diplomatic corps or teaching French in high school or college—would be a safer bet on the future. Many a young man has been led by such insecurities away from his passions toward something seemingly more secure. And Dartmouth, with its strong reputation, must have seemed like a safe course of action: something that would please his upper-class, and fairly traditional, parents.

  But it was a disaster. Fred’s sister, Laney, remembers that his roommates were “footballers,” that there were frat parties all the time, and that the completely unathletic and teetotaling Fred Rogers was very uncomfortable there. This was predictable, given Dartmouth’s reputation as a sports-oriented and very macho school (it was still all male, and didn’t go coed until more than twenty years after Fred left) and Fred Rogers’s more sensitive and thoughtful nature.4

  Almost from the time he arrived in Hanover, New Hampshire, the gangly, somewhat nerdy, and idealistic young Fred Rogers felt out of place. By the time the bitter New Hampshire winter set in—lots of mornings below zero—he was miserable.

  Fred and Dartmouth were a mismatch from the first. Despite its very real academic excellence, the college’s reputation in popular culture—movies, television, and books—has frequently revolved around Dartmouth’s penchant for wild parties and out-of-control drinking.

  Chris Miller, who graduated from Dartmouth about a dozen years after Fred Rogers was there, wrote the script for the famed movie Animal House. Miller is said to have based the movie on his own Dartmouth fraternity, Alpha Delta Phi.5

  Fred soon moved out of his dorm room and moved in with his French teacher, who gave him a more civilized living environment and helped him develop his considerable skills with language. At the same time, his passion for music began to reassert itself. Nevertheless, by all accounts, Fred was lonely and a bit homesick.

  Ensconced in the deep freeze of a New Hampshire winter, not exactly friendless but still somewhat lonely and feeling out of place, Fred thought of home, and of music. And he did what he had done in high school: He found a way to turn adversity to a focus on what he wanted to study and where he wanted his life to go in the future.

  This was a pivotal theme of Rogers’s life: From his earliest years, he took his fears, his loneliness and isolation, and his insecurities and turned them to his advantage. Somehow, he was almost always able to take his feelings into a place of deep introspection and emerge with a fresh, and often brilliant, new direction. He did this as a child, as a high school student, and throughout his life as a writer, an educator, and a television producer.

  Rogers’s favorite quotation, which he often cited and which he kept framed near his desk in his office, came from The Little Prince, by the French author, airplane pilot, and war hero Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.” In English translation, the full passage reads: “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”6

  Fred Rogers took profound stock of his feelings to find meaning, often spiritual meaning, that he could turn into understanding, and eventually into the sort of serious focus that could yield power. It was based on a profound conviction that what’s on the surface—the everyday pain and frustration and small joys of life—is not what is essential. The essential is to be found in depth and introspection, in searching for meaning, and then finding the truth that comes from that meaning. For Fred Rogers and for Saint-Exupéry, truth always came from the heart, not from an overintellectualization of life.

  Saint-Exupéry died on a flight from North Africa over the Mediterranean Sea near the end of World War II, just as Rogers was excelling in high school back in western Pennsylvania. Saint-Exupéry inspired Fred Rogers to think, to seek, to understand, and to accept. As a seeker who could go deep below the surface and help children—and their grown-ups, for that matter—find the essential, Fred Rogers imparted what he’d gone through himself as he shaped his life, not in spite of his fears and insecurities, but because he could turn them into an education.

  At Dartmouth, he didn’t cry and complain, or drop out of college and wander around the country trying to find himself. He went back to the essential in his life—to music. In it, he found the answer that helped him move ahead.

  And Fred Rogers had some good luck: The teacher to whom he went for guidance, the cellist Arnold Kvam, turned out to be a great friend.7 Professor Kvam, who served for many years as the director of the Handel Society at Dartmouth, had recently transferred from Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida. Part of his mission in New Hampshire was to build a strong music program for Dartmouth. But that was going to take years. Kvam told Rogers he couldn’t offer a music major at Dartmouth until he had evolved a strong enough department to support one.

  After judging Fred Rogers’s musical skills and his dedication, Professor Kvam promptly directed him south to Rollins: “Fred, we won’t have this department ready for you in the four years that you’ll be here. Why don’t you look at the place that I just came from?”8

  Later, Fred Rogers recalled that through his conversations with Kvam, he moved toward switching his major from Romance languages to music, and he was willing to leave Dartmouth if needed. At Kvam’s suggestion, Rogers considered a trip down to Florida to look at Rollins, with its strong program in music that he could major in right away.

  Fred took part of his Easter break to fly down to northern Florida.9 He knew Rollins would be a bit of a comedown academically from Dartmouth; although Rollins today enjoys a reputation as one of the best colleges in the United States, it was not operating at that level back in 1948. Fred’s parents probably suffered a pang when he told them he was thinking of leaving the vaunted Ivy League for a smaller school in the South.

  Professor Kvam had told a group of students in the Conservatory of Music at Rollins College about the young man from Dartmouth with real talent as a pianist. On the spur of the moment, they decided to jump in a car and drive out to the airport to meet him.10

  One of the young music majors in the car was Joanne Byrd from Jacksonville, Florida, a highly talented pianist who was among the leaders in the music department and one of the most popular girls in school. Pictures of Joanne from around that time show a bright, smiling, broad-faced girl, very pretty, with a turned-up nose and a mischievous look on her face. Joanne was a very accomplished student, but she was also a great lover of fun, with a puckish sense of humor and a powerful exuberance. Joanne was one of the instigators of the spontaneous group trip to the airport.

  With no other plan than to ride out to the airport to meet the young musician from Dartmouth and take stock of him—would they welcome him aboard, or decide he wasn’t the right fit?—Joanne and her chums sang songs, gossiped, and traded speculations about Fred as they cruised through the warm Florida sunshine to meet his plane.

  Years later, Joanne remembered: “We piled into the antique Franklin that had lots of room. We were hanging out the windows of the car when he came out. We grabbed him, and took him right with us, and made him one of us.

  “He blended in so well. We took him first to the music department, and to the practice rooms. He sat right down and started playing some pop stuff. And we were so impressed, because none of us could do that. We couldn’t just sit down and play jazz. And he could. He could do it all.”11

  Joanne added that the twenty or so music majors, many of whom came to greet Fred, were all part of a “very tight” group of friends who shared the same interests and almost always socialized together. But just as nothing had clicked into place for Fred up north at Dartmouth, everything seemed to click a
t Rollins, and the school accepted his transfer application immediately.12

  “Rollins was just the opposite of Dartmouth, I felt,” said Fred later. “Dartmouth was very cold, and Rollins was very warm. I just felt so much at home there. And so the next year I went to Rollins. I had had two years at Dartmouth, and I got a one-year credit (for his Dartmouth studies) at Rollins. And there, [I] declared a music major, in composition.”13

  Fred had made a transition to a new world: relaxed, warm and friendly and open, defined by good humor and a sense of fun, as opposed to macho intensity. And it was a world completely characterized by a love of music, at least at the Conservatory. It was perfect, and it was to be a very happy time for Fred.

  One of his new friends there, the pianist Jeannine Morrison (who later became a performance partner with Joanne, playing and recording piano duets) recalls, “He was all smiles and happy to be there. He said, ‘Oh, this is like . . . heaven after Dartmouth.’”14

  4.

  LOVE AND MUSIC

  Joanne Byrd grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, in the 1930s, before ubiquitous air-conditioning made the deep South’s heat and humidity more bearable. But the heat didn’t bother the energetic and cheerful little girl, who spent most of her days biking around the neighborhood and playing outside with other children. When she came inside to play the piano, Joanne would sometimes have to wipe the damp keys with a cloth or a handkerchief.1

  Like her future husband, Fred Rogers, Joanne grew up as an only child, doted on by a mother and father who each tried to convey the best of their own lives to their bright and promising daughter. Her father gave her a lifelong appreciation of books, reading, and language, and her mother bequeathed a passion for music.

  Wyatt Adolphus Byrd, known to all his friends as “Admiral” (a joking reference to the famed polar explorer and aviator Admiral Richard E. Byrd), was a literary man who always had a book underway, read to his daughter, gently corrected her grammar, and took her on frequent visits to the local library.2 He grew up in Alabama, dreaming of becoming a school teacher. And he was, for a while.

  “I think he taught in a little, one-room schoolhouse in Alabama,” says Joanne. “He loved it. But he didn’t get paid anything much. Because of the Depression, he went into sales, selling coffee. He was traveling a lot when he met my mother, and it was her brother-in-law who introduced her to him. The brother-in-law had hired him to do the coffee selling.”3

  Byrd became a traveling salesman, working his way across the South selling wholesale to retailers from Texas to Florida. The highlight of that part of his career was the time he slept soundly through the night in a hotel room in Key West and woke up the next morning to discover that half the hotel had been removed by a hurricane.4

  For Byrd, work as a salesman lost its appeal during the Depression. He finally managed to nail down a better-paying, secure job with the US Postal Service in Jacksonville. It was there that he spent so much time nurturing his young daughter’s appetite for books and learning, in effect, keeping his teaching career going.

  Wyatt Byrd sometimes rode on trains in the mail car, dropping off mail bags of letters in small towns in the South. And he would often take his little daughter to see the mail car when the Byrd family traveled.

  “He was on the train a lot, sorting the mail,” recalls Joanne. “He threw it out to the cow catcher or whatever they called it.”5 In fact, only the most adroit Postal Service employees worked the mail cars; they had to be able to kick a full mail bag out the door of a speeding train into a “catcher arm” at local stations where the trains didn’t stop. Joanne was beamingly proud of her father’s skills.

  Joanne’s intrepid nature as a little girl stayed with her for the rest of her life and helped advance her successful career as a performing musician. But one time the little girl became truly terrified.

  “A teenage neighbor who taught Sunday school classes at church told us about the lesson of the second coming of Christ. She said, ‘He’s going—he will come again, and we will never know when, or where it will happen. Why . . . it could happen tomorrow.’ All of a sudden, I could feel my whole body flush. I absolutely panicked.

  “I must have been around six or seven. I ran out of the [neighbor’s] house over to my mother, crying as if my heart would break. She said to me, ‘What is the matter? Are you hurt?’

  “And I said, ‘No, no, no . . . but Mary Maud said that Jesus is coming tomorrow, and I don’t want him to come.’

  “I still feel that way. I’m not ready. But Fred was. Fred was ready for him to come.”6

  The family of Joanne’s mother, Ebra Edwards Byrd, was much more religious and devoted to churchgoing in the Southern Baptist tradition than Wyatt Byrd’s family. Ebra Byrd’s father owned a large tenant-farming operation in the southern part of the state of Georgia. But Joanne never became as dedicated a churchgoer as Fred Rogers. Though Joanne remained a Christian her whole life, she had a more skeptical nature that caused her to question everything she learned and heard, including religion.

  According to Joanne’s recollections, “My father was a very spiritual person, but not interested in organized religion. My mother had grown up in a very religious atmosphere as a Southern Baptist. In fact, every summer, there was a family reunion held at the little church out in the country. My grandparents’ church service always involved foot washing as part of the ceremony. I believe it was more important to them than Communion.”7

  But Joanne’s mother’s most important contribution to her daughter’s life wasn’t the church; it was music. Ebra loved the piano, the radio, and the phonograph. Over time, she learned how to play some of her favorite tunes, mostly ragtime, by ear. She talked to Joanne about the music she loved and gave her a feeling for melody and rhythm at the earliest age.

  While Wyatt would sit reading his books, Ebra and Joanne would listen to music on the radio and try to pick out tunes on the piano. Sometimes when Joanne was at the piano, just learning a few of the keys, her mother would sit nearby thumbing through a magazine and listening to the notes from her daughter’s playing, nodding approvingly.

  “She didn’t read music,” recalls Joanne. “As I learned to read music, she learned a little bit about reading music. And she would sit with me at the piano—because I started when I was five—and she would sit with me at the piano for all my practice time, and it was wonderful, because I wasn’t alone. I can’t say enough about that for young children and music, that if their parents can invest that time with them, it makes it a less solitary thing.”8

  Like Fred Rogers, Joanne enjoyed a rich and fully engaging childhood because of the direct involvement of parents who played with her, talked with her, and shared the most important things in their lives.

  Joanne’s music education took a powerful turn when she was just five years old. Her best friend, Myra Lee—sister to the teenage girl who so frightened Joanne with stories of the second coming of Christ—lived right across the street from the second-floor apartment the Byrds rented from an owner who lived on the first floor. Joanne would play in the street with Myra, and go over to the Lees’ house to play in the yard.

  Occasionally, Joanne would go into the neighbor’s house and play their piano. The teenage sister, Mary Maud, walked back to Joanne’s house with her after one such session and told Joanne’s parents, “I think she’s very talented, and I’d love her to meet my piano teacher.”9 Joanne’s mother was impressed that a teenager would make the effort to help a five-year-old; and when Mary Maud offered to go with Ebra and Joanne to meet the music teacher, Louise Norton, the three of them made the trip together.10

  That changed everything. Louise Norton didn’t take students so young as Joanne—preferring to wait until they were about seven—but she, too, was impressed with the little girl’s musical talent, and her upbeat, dedicated nature. She agreed to take Joanne on as a student if Ebra would help teach her the musical scales. Joanne Rogers’s music career was launched.

  Louise Norton stuck with Joa
nne Rogers for thirteen years of instruction, teaching her most of what she learned about music and playing the piano, instilling in her a great love for the power and beauty of music, and, eventually, pushing Joanne to pursue her studies further in college.11 With Norton’s encouragement, Joanne entered music competitions and won a National Guild of Piano Teachers scholarship that took her to Rollins College.12

  Were it not for the care and dedication of Louise Norton—and of course the thoughtfulness of Mary Maud Lee—Joanne’s life with music and with Fred Rogers might have turned out quite differently.

  Joanne got to Rollins a couple of years ahead of Fred, who was on his detour to Dartmouth the year Joanne entered the Conservatory of Music at Rollins College, which had a very strong reputation for the training of performance musicians. Joanne, who aspired to make a career as a pianist performing classical music, threw herself with dedication into her studies.

  She aspired to a “music performance degree,” a bachelor of music degree that establishes the credentials of the degree holder. Joanne’s social life revolved around the other students in the conservatory. Though she and her friends were lighthearted, constantly cracking jokes, their dedication to their studies precluded an expansive social life. The work of a student at the conservatory included the usual classwork and homework that students in all disciplines faced, plus endless sessions of practicing their instruments. It was grueling, and though Rollins enjoyed a reputation at that time as a college with a strong student social life, Joanne hardly had even a date or a night out until Fred Rogers showed up.

  When he did, the two of them fell immediately into a strong friendship that put them together much of the time, and eventually led to their being defined as a “couple” on campus. Though formal dates were rare, Fred and Joanne hung out together all the time. They were both shy, from religious backgrounds, and most of the time just holding hands was as physical as their connection became.