The Good Neighbor Page 7

  “I really liked him a lot,” recalls Joanne. “But . . . we didn’t date singly very much, except for dances. And I would always invite him to the sorority dance . . . the two years I was there with him.”13

  Although Joanne was impressed with Fred’s musical abilities, she also thought he might wind up running an orphanage. He talked about children and their education all the time, and he often went to visit nursery school classes and children’s centers to observe the children and their teachers, and to develop his own thoughts on education. She remembers that she had never encountered quite such a focused young man, and that his focus seemed to center around children as well as music.

  A big part of their burgeoning relationship was based on humor: Each had a strong, sometimes arch, sense of humor. Their sense of fun matched up; they had a very similar, jocular view of life, and they always enjoyed the same jokes.

  Fred was aware of his family’s wealth, and he was sensitive to people seeing him in the context of that wealth. Joanne, who came from a very different background, made a constant joke of the one luxury item she owned, a small diamond ring she got from her mother, and what she portrayed as Fred’s attraction to it: “It was a little-finger ring that had diamonds all around it, and inside. It was nothing but diamonds, kind of a triangular shape, very, very charming. So I said, ‘I know you like me for my diamonds.’”14

  She teased him relentlessly: “You know, there are lots of people here at Rollins who have money—a lot,” she told him. “And a lot who have a lot more than you do.”

  While visiting a classmate from the nearby town of Sanford, Florida, Joanne and Fred had an encounter that sparked their mutual sense of humor. “His father owned an upholstery company,” says Joanne of their friend, “a car upholstery company. . . . [And] the, sort of, village character drove the cab in that town. A woman . . . very kind of boisterous. And so she came to [our friend’s father] and said, ‘Larry, my cab is a mess and I need new seats. Look—here—the springs are coming through.’”

  When the cab driver came back later to pick up her taxi with its new upholstery, she was delighted with the comfort of the new seats and thanked the upholsterer profusely.

  “Larry, this makes my sweet ass smile,” she said with feeling.15

  Fred and Joanne loved the story. For the rest of their lives, when they were traveling anywhere and were tired and finally got to sit down and rest, one would turn to the other with a mischievous grin and say, “Oh, this makes my sweet ass smile.”

  Joanne always felt that their shared sense of humor, as well as her pragmatic nature, were keys to the success of their relationship: “I think, throughout our life, maybe I brought a little more of the light side of life to him. I think I’m a practical person. And I guess I was less frightening to him than some of the other girls might have been. I think he liked it that I was not extravagant. And I liked it that I was not extravagant.”16

  Their jokes, and their shared sense of life as an adventure that is made more exciting if you don’t take yourself too seriously all forged the bonds of their relationship. Fred and Joanne shared the same traits with the tight-knit group of students in the Conservatory that formed their almost exclusive social network at Rollins.

  One of those friends, Jeannine Morrison, remembers Fred as something of a “cutup,” a class clown who loved pranks. One of the things Morrison recalls is that Fred altered the language of a plaque on campus to make it a joke: “Outside of our sorority house was a lovely marble plaque, etched, that said, ‘Life Is for Service.’ Fred was always covering up the ‘ser’ so that it read, ‘Life Is for vice.’ I have photographs of that, where he blanked it out one time. So, just a lot of laughs. That’s how he and Joanne, I think, really got to know one another a little better. . . . He just always thought she was so amusing and so funny and so upbeat; which she is, of course.”17

  Jeannine Morrison also remembers that as soon as Fred learned that her father had insured her hands to protect the value of a future career as a pianist, he would pretend to try to close her hands in the car door to collect the insurance.

  But Fred could have a deadly serious side as well, and at one point, he even became something of a campus activist. When the revered and beloved leader of Rollins College, Hamilton Holt, retired after twenty-four years as president, a new president was brought in from the University of Chicago and almost immediately became controversial within the faculty and the student body.

  According to Joanne’s recollections, the new president set out to make changes quickly at the college and often did so without consulting others: “He didn’t make himself popular right away. . . . We were used to having a president who got the whole college together and said, ‘Now, we’re thinking about doing this or that or the other thing. And we want the Rollins family to know about it, and what do you think?’”18

  Before long, there was an active movement on the campus to have the new president removed, and somewhat uncharacteristically, Fred Rogers became a leader. A strong collaboration between students and faculty finally led to the replacement of the new president with one who took the more traditional Rollins approach of collaboration.

  One of the interesting aspects of Fred’s role on campus in this period—Joanne called him a “rabble-rouser”—is that he never repeated it later in life. Fred eschewed politics, and even much public discussion of political issues, for most of his career. A registered Republican, his family knew him as a holder of very progressive and inclusive views on social issues; but for the most part he kept these views in the family and avoided engagement in almost any kind of politics, local, national, or organizational. The only exception was his support for his good friend H. John Heinz III when Heinz ran for the US House and, later, the Senate from Pennsylvania—but even that endorsement was staged in the background rather than in a highly public way.

  Unlike high school and Dartmouth, where Fred was a bit of a loner, he had a lot of friends at Rollins; as Joanne recalls, he was one of the most popular students on campus.

  Fred was deeply wounded when one of those friends decided that it offended his sense of ethics to socialize with people who came from a background of privilege and wealth. He dropped Fred, which, to Joanne’s annoyance, further worried Fred about his family’s money.

  “Of course, that all passed over,” says Joanne. “But it hurt Fred so badly, because he really, really liked this young man. But he had another friend, who was a roommate that he liked very much. And they remained friends over the years. So, he had a lot of good friends in college.”19

  One of Fred and Joanne’s best friends at Rollins was the singer John Reardon, who went to New York after graduation. Reardon became famous as one of the leading baritones of his time, singing with the New York Metropolitan Opera from 1965 to 1977 and making many appearances on television, including on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

  Another lasting friendship Fred forged at Rollins was with his French teacher, Baroness von Boecop, known colloquially at the college as “The Baroness.” She had come to the United States as a refugee during World War II and taken a teaching position at Rollins, and she was also the director of a French center on campus, La Maison Provençale. Fred minored in French, and he and the Baroness would hold all their conversations in French.

  According to Joanne, “She had been married to a Dutch baron. She was a wonderful French teacher, because she wanted things exactly right. Fred was a wonderful student, and he did all sorts of things for her because she admired him.”20

  Most importantly, Baroness von Boecop pushed Fred in other ways than his language studies. She encouraged Rogers to pursue excellence, to set high standards for himself. And she urged Fred to get into the theater and gain experience as a performer.

  “She encouraged me to do stuff on the stage,” recalled Fred years later in an interview. “I had never done anything on the stage. But she forced me in . . . in these little French productions. . . . I don’t think I ever wanted to be on the
stage. . . . [I’d] much rather [be] doing things in the background.”21

  As Joanne got to know von Boecop better, she developed a more jaundiced opinion of “The Baroness” and viewed her as something of a social climber. Joanne suggested that von Boecop may have found the Rogers family’s wealth attractive: “She was one of the most snobbish people that I have ever known. . . . I never felt that she liked me, and I didn’t care for her much.” She particularly liked Fred’s company, Joanne said, “Because Fred came from an upper-middle-class, more elite family, so he appealed to the snobbish side.”22

  That appeal eventually led to a long trip to Europe that Fred made with The Baroness to hone his skills as a speaker and writer of French.

  According to Joanne’s recollection, von Boecop said, “I want to take you to Europe, and we’re not going to speak any English.”23 Joanne remembers it was the summer after Fred’s first year at Rollins that he and von Boecop took their trip together: “They visited friends of hers in Paris, in Brussels, and in Amsterdam, I believe—all over Europe.24

  “He had to listen to her friends, to speak to them and socialize,” says Joanne. “During that time, he really did become very fluent, and she was a taskmaster: The mouth must be a certain way and the sounds must be exact, to the point where he was very, very good. I give her credit for that; she was a wonderful teacher.”25

  One of the most unusual aspects of the trip to Europe was Fred’s “adoption” of a young French orphan. Von Boecop arranged a visit to a Catholic orphanage run by French priests. There Fred met Gilbert Bonin, a young boy who showed great intellectual promise, according to his teachers.26

  Fred and his family informally “adopted” Bonin, paying for and guiding his education. At one point, Fred’s mother wanted to bring Bonin to the United States, but von Boecop resisted, arguing that the boy would be better off remaining in his native land. The proof of this came years later, when Bonin forged a highly successful business career as one of the top executives at the French cheese company La Vache Qui Rit (The Laughing Cow). Fred stayed in touch with Bonin for the rest of his life, writing letters and visiting occasionally in Paris.

  Baroness von Boecop not only started Fred on the stage, she also gave him one of his earliest experiences shaping the education and development of a young child. Fred Rogers always held on to his friends and kept them close, and he stayed in touch with The Baroness until her death in 1983. Fred learned about her passing in a letter from Gilbert Bonin. When he heard of von Boecop’s death, he told his friend Jeannine Morrison that he was so glad he’d had a five-day visit with her in France just a year earlier.27

  Rogers was an outstanding student at Rollins, performing particularly well in his music and French classes, but he worried constantly about his grades and drove his friends crazy with anxious complaints about how poorly he was faring in his studies.

  Joanne recalls that Fred “was always fearful he was going to fail. And he would always say, ‘Oh, I know I flunked that. I just know it.’

  “And we’d all get so upset about it for him. And he always came out with an A. We finally said to him, ‘We’re not worrying about you anymore!’ Here we were all with bad—not bad grades, but worse than he had. [And] he had the most difficult teacher in the music department.”28

  Professor John Carter challenged Fred because he saw such great talent in his pupil. They also became great friends and stayed in touch after Fred and Joanne left college.

  Fred Rogers did so well in his studies that he graduated magna cum laude from Rollins in 1951, with a bachelor of music degree.

  One of the distractions Fred had to cope with at Rollins was the regular arrival of his whole family during the winter months. It had been the habit of the Rogers family—Jim, Nancy, their young daughter Laney, and often a coterie of friends—to travel each winter down to the Belleview Biltmore Hotel in Belleair, Florida, for a couple of months’ vacation away from the cold of western Pennsylvania. But once Fred enrolled in Rollins, the family changed their plans and came to Winter Park, the home of Rollins College, to be near Fred.

  Although Fred appreciated his parents’ company, he was also a bit leery of what seemed to him to be their somewhat ostentatious living circumstances in Winter Park. The Rogers family would rent a large villa and arrive with cars and friends and servants. Fred did take Joanne and some of his other friends over to visit with his parents, but he worried anew about seeming too wealthy to the other Rollins students.

  According to the recollections of Jeannine Morrison, “I remember that one of the automobiles that they drove was a convertible, and Laney at the time was, I think, eleven years old, and she was taking swimming lessons at Rollins. She would leave, wrapped in a towel in her bathing suit, [and] sit in the back of this convertible while Grant, the chauffeur, drove her back to the house. She would sit propped up like Madame [de] Pompadour, and Fred would say, ‘Oh my goodness, look at Laney. Isn’t that disgusting.’”29

  Fred may have felt defensive about his family’s wealth, but for the most part, he adored Laney, who thought of him as an ideal older brother. He included her in activities with his friends, teaching her about music and books and many other things, and never got angry with her. They remained close friends all their adult lives.

  As to riding with the chauffeur, Grant Ross, Laney thought of Ross as a friend, not as a servant: “I always said Grant was my best friend,” said Laney years later in an interview. “Grant was a chauffeur, he was a butler, he served at the dinner table, he did everything; he worked in the garden, he just did everything. But Grant was my best friend.”30

  When Ross was in the hospital in Maryland near the Oldfields School, a girls’ boarding school north of Baltimore where the young Laney was enrolled, she rushed over to meet her parents at the hospital. When she threw her arms around his neck, another patient in the ward upbraided Nancy Rogers for letting her young daughter hug a black man.

  “She doesn’t know the difference,” said Nancy, explaining that Laney, like Fred, had been brought up to believe there’s no difference between people of different races.31

  Fred sometimes joined his parents’ social life during their visits to Winter Park. He would bring a few of his college friends over to spend the weekend at his family’s rented house, assigning rooms by writing up individual name cards and tacking them to bedroom doors, along with a saying on each card that reflected Fred’s appreciation of each person.

  “He did celebrate his twenty-first birthday while his parents were there,” recalls Morrison, “and they had a big celebration at the house that they had rented . . . the back of the house fronted on Lake Maitland. He had an inboard motor boat, his father did, and he used it, of course, and water skis, and we would go there and just have a grand time.”32

  But Fred was always careful to manage his own time in the most thoughtful and deliberate way, and he honed his unique ability to focus on what was important to him, undistracted by his family or his friends. He kept that focus on music, the original purpose that had brought him to Winter Park, Florida, in the first place.

  In effect, he began his career as a composer at Rollins, a career that would include the composition of about two hundred songs and fourteen operas. Fred Rogers was still a student at Rollins when he wrote the satirical lyrics to “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” that King Friday would regularly sing on the Neighborhood. And it was there that he began his first opera, Josephine the Short-Neck Giraffe. Morrison remembers that in the original version, written in French, Josephine gets a long neck by the end of the opera. But Fred changed it when the opera was performed on his program on PBS. With help from her friends, Josephine accepts who she is and is at peace with a short neck.

  At Rollins, Fred Rogers also composed a more formal piece of music entitled “Three-Voice Fugue, for cello, viola and violin.” And he wrote a libretto, entitled “Lyric Poems (by James Joyce),” and a piece composed for performance by Jeannine Morrison, “Variations on a Theme of Chopin.” Morriso
n kept her copy of the “Variations” and played it in concert several times, including once with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. When a musician friend of hers heard it performed, he wanted to take it to his publisher, but Fred demurred.33

  “He said, ‘No, those were written at Rollins College, and they were written for Jeannine, and I don’t want them played by anyone else.’ I thought that was very moving,” says Morrison. She elaborates: “Aside from that, he probably said to himself, ‘They’re not good enough to publish.’ Because that was always his thing, ‘not good enough’ or ‘not quite up to par’ or some such expression.”34

  During Fred’s last year at Rollins, Joanne—who was a year ahead of Fred because of the year he lost transferring from Dartmouth—had already gone on to graduate studies at Florida State University in Tallahassee, about 250 miles away. She and Fred corresponded, but she didn’t hear as much from him as she had expected. She did hear from some of her friends there that Fred was occasionally dating other girls. She still cared a great deal for Fred and wasn’t quite sure how she might fit into his future.

  Now Fred needed to figure out exactly what he would do after his own graduation. His father was still hoping Fred might join him in business back in Latrobe, but Fred told Jim Rogers he had been accepted at the Western Theological Seminary, and that he was thinking of pursuing a career as a Presbyterian minister.

  But then Fred took a trip home from college during Easter break of his senior year and ran smack into the new thing that was going to change the world, and the life of Fred Rogers.

  In 1951, very few American households even had television sets. A TV was a luxury and, in many quarters, a curiosity. Few could have predicted the drastic way it would transform popular and national culture.