The Good Neighbor Read online

  Joanne Rogers often dropped in to see Fred at NBC as part of her exploration of her new city: “It was exciting, and fun. We’d watch Fred at a rehearsal.”

  She also concentrated on getting to know and understand Fred better, and to get a grasp on their quickly evolving relationship: “You know the person, but you don’t know them that well. And while we were on the go and busy a lot of the time, there’s a lot of learning to do about getting along, thinking of the other person and what he might like to be doing. For the first few years, it’s very difficult just to learn to live together.”17

  Given that they’d both been raised more or less as only children, she figured out quickly that each needed space: “I never had even had a roommate in college. We had suite mates, you know—but a little cubicle, at least, with your own room. So to share a room with somebody—that’s the least of it, though.

  “We waited until we were married about seven years before our kids came along. And I’ve always been glad of that, because we knew that the marriage was going to be okay.”18

  As the young couple settled in, Fred Rogers was getting a world-class education in television. The timing was crucial: In the 1950s, NBC was uniquely committed to creativity and quality, partly because everything about television was new and being invented on the spot by the people Fred was working with.

  Fred was lucky enough to have been dropped right into the middle of the tenure of the head of NBC, Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, who created an almost magical period in the early evolution of television. The whole NBC crew, led by Weaver, believed they were on a mission to create a magnificent new era of American high culture, all through the new medium of broadcast television. Many critics then viewed television as an exciting new art form, and they focused on Pat Weaver’s work as evidence of its cultural potential. Weaver himself wrote, “Television is a miracle . . . [that] must be used to upgrade humanity across a broad base.”19

  The new technology was the culmination of an extraordinary period of invention that had started in the previous century and had dramatically improved living conditions and the overall health and wealth of society, but it also led to a faster-paced and intense level of complexity. Dramatic population growth, transformative environmental degradation, and scientific advances fueled the Industrial Revolution, the petrochemical revolution, and set the stage for the telecommunications revolution that is still in midcourse.

  These technological advancements shaped the wealth of the Rogers family as well as the thinking and work of Fred Rogers. His interest in using technology for education, and his embrace of a deep and simple life committed to universal human values, flowed directly from the world-changing developments of the nineteenth century. They set the stage for the tech-driven world we live in today—an environment that Fred Rogers reacted to in a very powerful way.

  The Industrial Revolution shaped the western Pennsylvania environment in which the Rogers, McFeely, Kennedy, and Given families (Fred Rogers’s clans) lived and worked. Western Pennsylvania was a focal point of the Industrial Revolution, and Rogers’s forebears were among the early investors in manufacturing and in the technology that enabled radio and television. It can be said that Fred Rogers lived out the conundrum of modern life: embracing technology and using it in imaginative ways to benefit children, while rejecting the dehumanizing aspects of complex technological advancement.

  The evolution of electrical engineering—the practical uses of electricity to power devices—enabled all these things, including early experimentation that would lead to commercial television. A cadre of inventors struggled for decades to evolve television—the ultimate long-distance communications device, carrying sight, sound, movement, the human voice, and all the action of a faster-paced world. Numerous English, Scotch, German, and Russian scientists labored for years over the puzzling question of how to use electricity and technology to carry a live picture over the airwaves. Their experiments focused into two camps: those who were trying to evolve a mechanical solution to transmitting a live picture and those who focused essentially on an electronic solution.

  At the very beginning of the twentieth century, the Russian innovator Boris Rosing made a significant advance by taking the mechanical system of rotating discs developed by Paul Nipkow, a German, and coupling that system with a cathode ray receiving tube that had been in development under the German engineer Karl Braun.20

  This was one of the key breakthroughs in transmitting a live moving picture. Ultimately, the electronic side of television development triumphed, and the cathode ray tube (CRT) became a standard piece of equipment for years in television sets and, later, computers.

  Working with Rosing in his lab in St. Petersburg, Russia, was the young scientist Vladimir Zworykin, who would immigrate to America and evolve the CRT technology, ultimately under the leadership of David Sarnoff at RCA.21 Zworykin and Sarnoff and their American team developed a commercial television system that used the cathode ray tube for both transmission and reception, brought commercial television to the US, and then dominated broadcasting for years. (There are many who feel that Zworykin and Sarnoff stole some of their technology from another leading television pioneer of the time, Philo Farnsworth; in fact, RCA later agreed to the payment of some royalties to Farnsworth.)

  Interestingly, Zworykin got his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh a year before Fred Rogers was born in nearby Latrobe, and he left the Pittsburgh-based Westinghouse Corporation in frustration with management’s lack of interest in his experiments in television technology.22 Had the Pittsburgh managers of Westinghouse seen the same potential in television that Sarnoff and his staff at RCA saw from where they sat in New York, the history could have been quite different. As it was, Zworykin’s work (and, indirectly, Rosing’s work back in St. Petersburg) went to the savvy Sarnoff in New York—and some of the money went back to the heirs of the banker Thomas Given, including Fred Rogers.

  All this entrepreneurial activity set the stage for Sarnoff to hire Pat Weaver not long after World War II. NBC had been started back in the 1920s as radio, and it wasn’t until the late 1940s that the stage was set for the rapid commercial development of television. Sarnoff encouraged Weaver to develop the best and most exciting television programming possible, to enable RCA to dominate commercial television just as it had dominated the technological evolution of the medium between the two world wars. And Weaver took this as a mission to set the highest possible standards for television programming—which, of course, created just the right environment for the highly idealistic young Fred Rogers.

  Pat Weaver was tall, at six feet, four inches; handsome, with short, curly red hair and bright blue eyes; and charming. Like Browning and Rogers, Weaver came from a wealthy family. Unlike Rogers and Browning, Weaver stayed right through his Ivy League college years to graduate from Dartmouth.23 He recruited other idealistic Ivy League graduates to help fashion NBC into what he hoped would be a cultural powerhouse and the leader in television programming.

  He was forty-one in 1949 when he joined NBC after years in advertising, and his tenure as the leader of the network would last only seven years. But during that time, he proved himself brilliant at conceiving new shows, pulling together the advertising support to make them possible, and fashioning the creative and production teams to imbue them with excellence.24 At one point under his direction, NBC hosted eight of the top ten programs on TV.

  Weaver fostered such pioneering television efforts as Your Show of Shows with Sid Caesar and Imogene Coca, the Today show, Tonight Starring Steve Allen, Home (with Arlene Francis), Wide Wide World (hosted by Dave Garroway), and the children’s show Kukla, Fran and Ollie. His programs carried interviews with intellectuals such as anthropologist Margaret Mead, poet Robert Frost, and architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Weaver fashioned many of the protocols and practices that made network television so successful, like the practice of assigning the task of creating a show to the network’s internal staff and selling different segments of the show to di
fferent advertisers.

  As Pat Weaver’s fame grew, Sarnoff grew jealous of the attention paid to him. Finally, when The New Yorker magazine chose to profile Weaver instead of Sarnoff, David Sarnoff pushed him out and replaced Weaver with Robert Sarnoff, his son.25 Weaver was gone from the network by 1956. The important thing for Fred Rogers, though, was that Weaver’s genius was given full rein at NBC during Fred’s two years there, and Weaver’s support of creative freedom and the setting of high standards of excellence for programming helped foster those very qualities in Rogers himself.

  Nothing better exemplified these standards than the 1951 production of Amahl and the Night Visitors. Fred’s work on Amahl took him out of his usual role of assistant to the producer (“That meant going and getting coffee and Cokes,” said Rogers) and gave him the chance to work as the floor manager for the program’s director, Kirk Browning.26

  As floor manager, Fred had the responsibility of communicating the directions and the vision of Browning to the crew on the studio floor, and then communicating back from the floor to the director, who was usually in the control room. Amahl was a high point in NBC’s creative period, and it was the most exciting project Fred Rogers worked on at the network.

  In keeping with Pat Weaver’s ambitious cultural agenda for NBC Television in the 1950s, the network had given renowned Italian composer Gian Carlo Menotti a commission to create an opera specifically for TV—a first. Weaver, who viewed Amahl as an opportunity to kick off his new anthology series, Hallmark Hall of Fame, and to try to bring opera to a mass TV audience, said, “I appealed to our creative people at NBC to conceive of programs that would use entertainment to enrich, inspire, and enlighten viewers.”27

  Menotti said that he was inspired to create Amahl as he wandered the galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. When he stood in front of the painting The Adoration of the Magi by Hieronymus Bosch, he was transported back to his childhood in Italy, where children receive gifts from the Three Kings, not Santa Claus. Amahl, a disabled boy living in Bethlehem, walks only with the aid of a crutch. But by the end of the opera, he has received an unimaginable gift from the three royal visitors.

  Amahl and the Night Visitors premiered live on Christmas Eve in 1951 from Studio H in Rockefeller Center, current home of Saturday Night Live, and has since been performed over twenty-five hundred times. Kirk Browning and his young assistant Fred Rogers were thrilled with the reception accorded the opera, which got a positive write-up on the front page of the New York Times and attracted five million viewers, a record for an opera telecast.28 It appeared every Christmas until 1961, with the first two presentations in black and white and the subsequent ones in color.

  Rogers later remembered that the conductor Arturo Toscanini (music director of the Metropolitan Opera in New York, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, and the NBC Symphony Orchestra) conducted the NBC orchestra in its performance of Amahl: “After the dress rehearsal,” said Rogers, “Toscanini said to Menotti, in Italian, ‘This is the best you’ve ever done.’”

  The only downside for Fred was that for the first time in his life, he missed Christmas at home with his family. His sister, Laney, remembers that the whole family was disappointed when Fred had to work right through the Christmas holidays to help produce the television opera.29

  But working on Amahl enabled Fred to help Browning shape an ambitious American cultural moment, just the sort of thing Fred had dreamed of when he was at Rollins. In a later interview, Rogers explained his excitement at getting to work on NBC Opera Theatre productions: “Radio began as a vehicle to broadcast classical music. Television, in the early days, was doing the same thing. Until television became such a tool for selling, it was a fabulous medium for education. That’s what I had always hoped it would be.”30

  According to Browning, “Amahl was rather an important moment in television history. It’s interesting to me that that was the first opera that Fred was on, because here we have this crippled boy [Amahl] who is visited by the Magi [the Three Kings of Biblical tradition] on the way to the birth of Jesus. That’s something that resonates in Fred’s later work.

  “I had known a little bit about Fred’s background and his childhood. I extrapolated from the conversations that we had that he had a somewhat—not a difficult childhood, but there had been difficult moments in his childhood, moments when he needed a sort of comfort level.”31 In fact, as Browning recalled, the production of Amahl and the Night Visitors provided a seminal television experience for Rogers, an experience that brought together his interests in childhood, music and religion.

  By Kirk Browning’s lights, Fred Rogers rose to the occasion: “All I remember is that I never had any fault to find with anything he did. He ran the floor beautifully . . . it was a very useful period for him to learn the mechanism of live TV, in real time. He learned lots of very useful things by being a floor manager, as I did.”32

  It proved to be marvelous basic training. Rogers had to be calm and cool under pressure, had to be able to anticipate problems and opportunities, and always needed to ensure that everyone on the crew understood the flow of the program.

  Later when he visited the set of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Kirk Browning was impressed with how well Fred had taken his NBC learning and applied it to the challenges of making children’s television for PBS: “When he . . . started his show in Pittsburgh, he called me and asked me if I’d come out and help him set up the style of direction for the program.

  “I said, of course, I’d be glad to come out. When I went there, he and the director had done the job for Fred that I did for NBC. They had evolved a technique that was so good for what Fred was doing that I said, ‘Fred, I have nothing to say at all. . . . You have the most perfect ways.’

  “I said, ‘There’s nothing I could possibly say that would improve what he’s doing.’ He has found the perfect language, visual language, to talk to the viewer.”33

  Fred Rogers’s other experiences at NBC, though not as profound as working on Amahl, provided a broad-based education in television production and in working with performers and studio crews. One of the programs he spent the most time on was The Kate Smith Evening Hour, a variety show that aired from 1951 to 1952 on Wednesdays at 8:00 P.M., featuring everything from animal acts to comedy routines, along with ample opportunities for Smith to demonstrate her formidable singing chops. Musical guests included country music greats Maybelle and June Carter and Hank Williams.

  Kate Smith’s stirring version of “God Bless America” was a standard rendition at sports events for years. Her popular radio program (1937–1945) featured comic talent like Henny Youngman and Abbott and Costello.

  Rogers enjoyed working with the larger-than-life singer: “She was a very imposing person,” he recalled. “And her mother and her dog were with her all the time. She had some of the first contact lenses I’d ever seen. They looked like fish bowls. And she wore a huge corset. It was almost like an iron lung that she would get in. She was an enormous woman with one of the most beautiful natural voices—just a glorious instrument.

  “One funny day—didn’t seem funny then—she was standing in front of this painted set of a farmhouse, singing a farm song. I thought it was over, so I gave a cue to the stagehand to raise the scenery so that we could get on to the next scene. Well, the song wasn’t over—there was just a little bit left. The set started to go up, and on camera it looked as if Miss Smith was going down into the ground. But it was live, you know, and people were very forgiving with live television.”34

  In addition to the valuable experience Fred gained managing The Kate Smith Evening Hour, he learned almost as much from being an assistant on The Gabby Hayes Show, which ran from 1950 to 1954 on NBC. Hayes’s offering was a Western entertainment program that was one of the first cowboy shows for children ever broadcast on television. It featured George “Gabby” Hayes, a vaudevillian from upstate New York who turned himself into a cowboy for movies and television.

 
Rogers asked the wily Hayes how he managed to connect so well with his audience, and Gabby replied that the only way to manage a television role in which one is asked to speak directly to a disembodied, distant audience is to convince oneself that one is speaking only to one little child. “Just one little buckaroo,” Hayes told Rogers; just think of talking only and directly to “one little buckaroo.”35

  Rogers admired Gabby’s skills as a performer, but he also came to appreciate Hayes as an individual and a character: “Gabby Hayes would come in his Western clothes and show old Western films. He would introduce them, and at the end say, ‘See you, buckaroos,’ or something. What fascinated me was that he had a Western accent, but when the program was over, he’d go to the dressing room, and on nights he had his Metropolitan Opera tickets, he’d get into his formal clothes and go to the opera. He had a box there; he loved the opera. Often you don’t know the depth of someone that you see only on television.”36

  One of the most awkward moments for Rogers came when NBC started to experiment with color television for a commercial audience in 1954. There were only three sets in all the RCA/NBC universe that could broadcast in color: one in the office of RCA CEO David Sarnoff, another with NBC Chairman Niles Trammell, and the third in the office of NBC President Pat Weaver. Fred Rogers, who was red-green color-blind, got the assignment to move colored objects around the set so that these three biggest bosses in his world could assess the quality of a color broadcast.

  “All we did in the studio,” said Fred later, “was to move things from one place to another so that the camera could take pictures of them. My first day on the job, somebody said, ‘Move the green parrot to the left.’ I said, ‘Which one is the green one?’”37