The Good Neighbor Read online

  The Rogers family had one of the first televisions in Latrobe, a small, ten-inch set on four spindly legs in the “music room,” or parlor, of their house. Fred Rogers first encountered the television during Easter Break, and he chose to tune into children’s programs because of his strong interest in young children and education.

  Fred Rogers thought what he saw was awful.

  “I went home my senior year for a vacation in Latrobe, and I saw this new thing called television,” said Fred years later. “And I saw people dressed in some kind of costumes, literally throwing pies in each other’s faces. I was astounded at that.”35

  Television appalled and attracted him at the same time. Fred instinctively understood the extraordinary power of the medium, even as others saw it merely as a diversion or a minor entertainment. And he also understood its potential for education, perhaps more fully than anyone else at the time.

  But even though Fred Rogers had the foresight to see the potential of the new medium, he was also sickened by the crass, low-grade humor of the television he saw.

  “And I thought: This could be a wonderful tool for education, why is it being used this way? And so I said to my parents, ‘You know, I don’t think I’ll go to seminary right away; I think maybe I’ll go into television. . . . Let’s see what we can do with this.”36

  Jeannine Morrison reports that when Fred got back to college after the Easter break, he confided to friends that he’d like to do something for children, something educational but “lighthearted”: “He just thought it was so sad that children didn’t have anything of substance to relate to. He was very much engrossed in the idea that it should be constant, that the person doing the show should always be the same. He started thinking seriously that he would like to do something really worthwhile for children.”37

  Given Fred’s changing plans, there were some tense moments between him and his father—who had accepted the seminary but now was disappointed yet again by Fred’s new idea. His mother, who had been pleased at the idea of Fred as a Presbyterian minister, now had to conceive of her son in television. But they accommodated Fred’s new direction with their characteristic grace.

  “The way our family was, I didn’t hear a lot about it,” Laney said later. “I know that that summer there was tension and I think disappointment, but Fred went off to New York.

  “I don’t think there was any idea of, ‘Well, you go out on your own if you’re going to do that.’ Mother and Dad were not like that at all. They were, in fact, very supportive of whatever we wanted to do. They just wanted the best for everybody. They actually sent his piano to New York City. Took it up, took the window out, and shipped this thing through the window.”38

  Although Fred’s decision might seem like a spur-of-the-moment reaction on the part of a college senior trying to figure out what to do with his life, in fact it was something much more deliberate. Fred Rogers was interested in lots of things: in religion, in becoming a minister, in music composition, in playing the piano, in children and education—and, now, in television production. Because of his well-developed ability to focus and to think his way over the hurdles he encountered in life, he could envision what television might offer to children and to himself.

  He understood that the right kind of programming, grounded in a good knowledge of child development, could become a highly inventive and creative way to help young viewers. And he understood that television could give him a unique opportunity to marry his skills in music and entertainment with his interest in children’s education. Fred saw that there could be a career opportunity that would blend his aspirations in the more structured field of education with his powerful, more free-form creative instincts. He saw the chance to be both an educator and an artist, and he knew right away that he wanted it.

  In a July 22, 2000, interview, just a few years before his death, Rogers articulated this early vision. Right away, he could see what he’d like to offer on a television program: “I’d love to have guests and present a whole smorgasbord of ways for the children to choose. Some child might choose painting, some child might choose playing the cello. There are so many ways of saying who we are, and how we feel. Ways that don’t hurt anybody. And it seems to me that this is a great gift.”39

  It was a perfect solution for this complex young man—so sensitive and yet so very deliberate in understanding and advancing his own life.

  Joanne came back to Rollins in 1951 for Fred’s graduation. A lot of her other friends were graduating in Fred’s class, too, but she especially wanted to see Fred and be present for the awarding of his bachelor’s degree.

  “I did not get back to hear his senior recital,” recalls Joanne, “but I did come back for his graduation. . . . I knew it would be important. . . . And I thought he would be pleased if I did so.”40

  Joanne found that she and Fred could pick up their close relationship almost without a pause: “Well, it was just like, take up again where we had been. And there wasn’t any awkwardness, or—although, I was probably a little more cautious, because I knew that he had dated other girls that year.”41

  Joanne could sense Fred’s excitement about his bold, new idea of going into television production, and she knew he was making a very big, strategic decision for his future. Intuitively, she understood the importance of something that could bring together music, creativity, children, education, and theater, all in one career for Fred Rogers.

  But she also understood that if Fred went to New York in the coming year while she was finishing her second year at Florida State, they would not be just 250 miles apart, as they had been during the past year—they would be 1,000 miles apart. What would happen to their relationship?

  PART II

  The real issue in life is not how many blessings we have, but what we do with our blessings. Some people have many blessings and hoard them. Some have few and give everything away.

  —FRED ROGERS

  5.

  BASIC TRAINING

  While Joanne Byrd was still working on her master’s degree in music at Florida State University in Tallahassee, Fred Rogers was ready to move to New York. Given the many excursions he’d made to the city growing up, he knew just where the best neighborhoods were. Fred got a one-bedroom apartment on the Upper East Side, at 9 East Seventy-Fifth Street, one of the loveliest and safest areas of Manhattan.1

  With a little help from his father, Fred got a job as an apprentice at the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), a division of the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), in which the Rogers family was a major stock holder.2 He started work on October 1, 1951, a few months after his graduation from Rollins. To advance his musical skills while he began work in television, Fred had his Steinway piano—the concert grand his grandmother had bought him fifteen years earlier—delivered to his new apartment.

  Down in Florida, in her second and last full year in graduate school, Joanne rented a room in the home of her piano professor, Ernst von Dohnányi, the Hungarian composer and conductor who had come to Florida State in 1949, after World War II. For the rest of her career, Joanne felt that her skills as a pianist had received remarkable development during the time at Florida State and she continued her studies with Dohnányi, on and off, until his death in 1960.

  And, during her time in Tallahassee, Joanne got the opportunity to meet her teacher’s grandson, Christoph von Dohnányi, who came from his home in Germany to study with his grandfather. Christoph felt insecure with the English language when he first arrived, so Joanne and her friends enjoyed adding to his vocabulary.3

  Joanne and Christoph became friends, a friendship that later included Fred. The three stayed in touch throughout their lives, and both Fred and Joanne took pleasure in the scope of Christoph’s successful career as a conductor, highlighted by nearly twenty years as music director of the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, one of the finest symphony orchestras in the world.

  During her first year at Florida State, when Fred was still at Rollins College, Joanne had heard
little from him, which surprised her. Now that Fred was in New York, once again Joanne had little correspondence with him. From friends, she heard that he was very busy with his new life. For the second time in as many years, Joanne was puzzled and unsure where their relationship might lead in the future.

  She got a letter from her good friend Jeannine Morrison, who was in New York studying music. Jeannine was seeing a lot of Fred, and as they had their last year at Rollins, they were dating in a casual and occasional fashion. Fred gave Jeannine a key to his apartment so she could practice on the Steinway. Jeannine and Fred later said that theirs was a friendship, not a romantic relationship.4

  In fact, both Fred and Joanne were a bit confused about where their relationship might be heading. They talked only once in while on the phone, exchanged a few letters, and each casually dated other people. But they knew they still cared a great deal about each other; more than anything else, it was the distance between them that was making it difficult to move forward with a romantic relationship.

  Then Joanne and Christophe von Dohnányi went together to attend a music conference in St. Petersburg, Florida. Joanne remembered Fred’s parents very fondly, and she remembered that now that Fred was gone from Winter Park, they were back to vacationing at the Belleview Biltmore Hotel in Belleair, on the Gulf of Mexico coast just north of St. Petersburg. Joanne still felt as if she was a good friend of Jim and Nancy Rogers, and she thought it would be nice for them to meet Christophe.

  When they stopped in at the large house that Jim and Nancy were renting on the grounds of the hotel, Joanne noticed that Fred’s parents were closely observing them, and that they took note of the fact that Joanne and Christophe were traveling together.5

  Joanne never found out whether Fred’s parents got in touch with him to mention that they had seen Joanne Byrd traveling with another young man, but she thinks they probably gave him a call. And she was amazed that, just a couple of weeks later, she got a letter from Fred proposing marriage. She hesitated just long enough to think over her choice, and then quickly decided. She went to a phone booth and called Fred’s number in New York.

  She was a little nervous while she waited for Fred to answer; as Joanne looked around, some graffiti on the inside wall of the booth caught her attention. When Fred picked up the line, Joanne said hello and then nervously blurted out, “Shit,” extemporaneously citing the graffiti.

  But Fred was not rattled; he laughed, took it all in good-natured stride, and the conversation soon came back to his proposal. The next word Joanne blurted out was, “Yes,” and Fred and Joanne were engaged to be married.

  Before Fred’s letter came, Joanne had been wondering whether Fred and Jeannine might be the ones to tie the knot; and Fred had been worrying that Joanne might marry Christophe.6 Now Joanne Byrd was to become Joanne Rogers. The more she thought about Fred Rogers—so funny and so serious at the same time—she knew they would be the right match. Fred also felt absolutely sure, and he wanted a wedding as soon as possible. To cement the relationship, he soon flew down for Joanne’s graduation from Florida State with an engagement ring tucked safely into his pocket.

  In Tallahassee, Fred asked Joanne to take him to the Episcopal church very near the Florida State campus where she went to church, so he could visualize her there.7 Joanne and Fred sat together in a pew and looked up to where Joanne sang with the choir.

  Fred pulled the engagement ring out of his pocket, placed it on Joanne’s ring finger, and then sealed the engagement with what Joanne recalls as a “very romantic” kiss. Joanne remembers: “I had always called him Roge. I called him Roge from early times, because his grandmother called him that.”8

  Now they needed to make some wedding plans. After consulting with their respective parents, Fred and Joanne decided they would get married in early July 1952. Fred’s parents and his grandmother Nancy McFeely were reluctant to tackle the Florida heat and humidity in the summer. Both the Rogers and Byrd families agreed on New York, where Fred was living and where Joanne would join him.

  The wedding was not held in the New York Presbyterian Church that Fred usually attended; Joanne remembered later that the minister there had probably been out of town. They settled on the High Episcopal Church of the Resurrection on East Seventy-Fourth Street. The service was followed by a very elegant reception at the Carlyle, located at the corner of Seventy-Sixth Street and Madison Avenue, near Fred’s Upper East Side apartment.9 Designed in Art Deco style and named after the Scottish essayist Thomas Carlyle, the hotel has a long history as one of the most fashionable establishments in the city. Not long after the Rogerses’ wedding, John F. Kennedy leased a thirty-fourth-floor apartment there, which he kept during his presidency.

  Fred and Joanne went to Montreal on their way to Europe for their honeymoon. They traveled there by train and took a river cruise out along the Saint Lawrence River and back. Fred enjoyed the opportunity to polish his great skills with the French language; Joanne recalls that their taxi driver just assumed that Fred was French: “He said to me, ‘How is it that you, an American, are married to a Frenchman?’”10

  Then they headed right back to New York City, where Joanne moved into his one-bedroom apartment and Fred hurried back to his work at NBC. Fred later said that it was his music degree from Rollins that got him a job at NBC. No doubt, it helped: NBC’s programming then included a lot of shows that emphasized or featured music. But there was another factor: Fred’s loyal and considerate father, always on the alert for a chance to help a family member or a friend.

  Or even an acquaintance, for that matter: Jim Rogers once wrote a large check to a waitress at a restaurant after she told him she was putting all her tips toward her college tuition, and he set aside a large contribution from his own stocks and bonds to create what he called the “sinking fund” to meet the unanticipated needs of the Latrobe Presbyterian Church.11

  When Fred convinced his parents that he really wanted to go to New York to get into television, Jim Rogers went into action. Kirk Browning, who was directing the NBC Opera Theatre at that time, later recalled: “One day, Chotzi Chotzinoff, my producer, came to me and said, ‘Kirk, we’re obliged to do a favor for an executive of RCA. There’s a man named John Royal, who is vice president of RCA, and he has come to me and explained that a friend of his has a son with a musical background who is graduating and would like to come in and get familiar with TV in some way, as an apprentice.’ In those days, there was no union for production personnel.

  “I said, ‘Well, Chotzi, I don’t need an assistant because the staff we presently have are all I need.’ He said, ‘I can’t say no to John Royal. I have to take this young man. Find something for him to do.’

  “I remember a very soft-spoken, sort of deferential, very appealing young man with a wry sense of humor. I do remember that he was a much better pianist at this point than I was. I was always asking him to play some of the music that he studied. There was one Rachmaninoff prelude that I particularly enjoy. That was the piece of music I asked for over and over, because he played it beautifully.”12

  Fred Rogers could have had no greater good fortune than to be put under the tutelage of Kirk Browning, one of the most talented and accomplished television directors of the era. Browning was an exceptional producer and director for NBC during the 1950s, and he went on to produce and direct major programs for PBS stations, including Live from the Met and Great Performances. He directed Frank Sinatra’s first television special for NBC, as well as many Hallmark Hall of Fame programs.

  He also did the television adaptations of a number of plays, like Damn Yankees, The Taming of the Shrew, and Death of a Salesman. Perhaps his most famous accomplishment was the opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, written expressly for NBC by the Italian composer and librettist Gian Carlo Menotti and directed by Browning.13 All together Browning won four Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award for excellence in television.

  During the two brief years that they worked together, from 1951 to 1953, Fred Rogers
and Kirk Browning became friends, and they sustained the relationship for the rest of their lives. It was logical that they would find each other compatible: Browning also came from a wealthy family. Like Fred, Kirk dropped out of an Ivy League school, Cornell, and focused for a time on developing his skills as a writer. Browning loved music and had studied it in school, just as Fred had.

  When World War II came, Browning chose to serve in the American Field Service, driving an ambulance that carried injured British soldiers from the battlefields of North Africa, writing poetry between enemy bombardments. After the war, he struggled to make a living farming part of his family’s Connecticut farm. As chance would have it, he sold eggs to a neighbor, Samuel “Chotzi” Chotzinoff, a close friend of RCA CEO David Sarnoff. After a career as a music editor and critic at the New York World, Chotzinoff became director of the music department at NBC.14

  Chotzinoff chatted frequently with Browning when Chotzinoff stopped by to pick up eggs, and he was impressed with the young man and his knowledge of music. When Chotzinoff invited Browning to come to work at NBC, Kirk protested that he knew absolutely nothing about TV.

  “Nobody knows anything about television,” replied Chotzinoff, “and you have a musical background, and NBC is interested in going into musical programming.” It was a response that could have applied equally to Fred Rogers as to Kirk Browning. Much of early television involved music, because it was essentially radio programming, with pictures added.15

  Joanne Rogers became friends with Browning as well; she and Fred formed a lifelong friendship with Kirk and Barbara Browning and later shared vacations with them on Nantucket, off the coast of Massachusetts.

  During those first months in New York, when she wasn’t out exploring the neighborhood and the city, Joanne spent much of her day practicing on the piano—Fred’s concert grand, which occupied a good portion of their one-bedroom apartment—so that she could continue her growth as a musician: “I would practice, and then sometimes go out into that big city, surrounded by so many things, I didn’t know where to start. And I would just go back home again and practice some more. I tried to make New York a small town, I think, by being in my neighborhood a lot of the time.”16