by Maxwell King
Fred Rogers dealt with difficult topics in a style that calmed and nurtured children. When his pet goldfish died, Mister Rogers didn’t replace the fish. Instead he told his viewers—his “television neighbors”—what happened, and used the occasion to talk about loss and sadness and death.
Key to the success of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was Rogers’s iron insistence upon meeting the highest standards without qualification. So painstaking was Fred Rogers’s approach that some of his friends and coworkers came to refer to “Fred-time”: Whenever one sat down to talk with him, urgency seemed to dissipate, discussion proceeded at a measured, almost otherworldly pace, and the deepest feelings and thoughts were given patient attention. Occasionally Rogers brought production of the Neighborhood to a halt, leaving a full crew idling on the set while he rushed to the University of Pittsburgh to consult with Dr. Margaret McFarland or other child-development experts on the show’s direction. If he was not sure an episode’s content was optimal, he wouldn’t let production proceed.
Fred Rogers’s rigid personal standards that wouldn’t allow him to ignore any individual child sometimes came off as a stubbornness that brooked no argument. Former producer Margy Whitmer observes: “Our show wasn’t a director’s dream. Fred had a lot of rules about showing the whole body, not just hands. When actors or puppets were reading something, Fred wanted the kids to see the words, even if viewers couldn’t literally read them. The camera moves left to right, because you read left to right. All those little tiny details were really important to Fred.”
For all his firm standards, Fred Rogers was willing to show his own vulnerability on the air. In a segment with a folk singer named Ella Jenkins, Mister Rogers and cast member Chuck Aber sang a song that goes, “Head and shoulders, baby / one, two, three / knees and ankles.” Mister Rogers got all mixed up and, laughing hysterically, touched head and shoulders while the others were on knees and toes.
Margy Whitmer figured she’d be asked to cut the scene. But Fred Rogers said, “No, we’re going to keep it. I want children to know that it’s hard to learn something new, and that grown-ups make mistakes.”
Fred Rogers never—ever—let the urgency of work or life impede his focus on what he saw as basic human values: integrity, respect, responsibility, fairness and compassion, and of course his signature value, kindness. In many ways, he was ahead of his time. In the 1970s, he became a vegetarian, famously saying he couldn’t eat anything that had a mother, and in the mid-1980s he became co-owner of Vegetarian Times, a popular magazine filled with recipes and features. He also signed his name to a statement protesting the wearing of animal furs.
On the show, he often invited actors of diverse backgrounds, such as François Clemmons, an African American singer and actor who played a police officer; Maggie Stewart, the African American “mayor” of Westwood, adjoining the Neighborhood of Make-Believe; and Tony Chiroldes, the owner of a shop that sold toys, books, and computers in the Neighborhood, and who sometimes taught Mister Rogers words in Spanish.
Humility and kindness to all people originated not only through Rogers’s Christianity, but also his careful study of other religions and cultures. Rogers was a student of Catholic mysticism, Buddhism, Judaism, and other faiths, and many of his admirers came to see an almost Zen-like quality in the pace of his work and his life. As time went on, this characteristic became more telling in distinguishing Rogers and the Neighborhood. While communication technology proliferated, becoming ever faster and more complex, Fred Rogers used it in ways that were slow, thoughtful, and nuanced. Among the values he represented to viewers was the unusual one of patience. He was that unique television star with a real spiritual life. He worried about the lack of silence in a noisy world and pondered how those in the field of television could encourage reflection. Today these ideas may seem quaint, yet they can also seem radical and more pressing than ever.
Mister Rogers recognized the way children live in the moment: “When Fred fed the fish on the show, he would tap a little food into the fish tank, then Bobby Vaughn, the cameraman, would pan down and zoom in. Children across the nation would watch in total silence as flakes of fish food slowly moved through the water,” Elizabeth Seamans observes.
“Fred could take that risk with the pressure of the clock. In television, every second counts. He allowed himself to be oblivious appropriately because he also knew when to move on. His timing was incredible. I think that was linked to his life as a musician, because that beat and rhythm, that dance-like relationship with the unseen viewer, is a sixth sense.”
Finally, there was another aspect of Rogers’s life and work that’s in sharp counterpoint to mainstream American culture: his relationship with money. He never seemed to care much about it. When asked how he coped with increasing fame, he observed, “You don’t set out to be rich and famous; you set out to be helpful.”
Of course, given his family’s wealth, Fred Rogers never had to worry about money the way most Americans do. Indeed, he was handed great gifts: a concert grand piano when he was about ten, a new car after his marriage to Joanne Byrd, a vacation cottage on Nantucket just as they were having children. Still, Rogers never focused on making money in his long television career.
When he set up a company in 1971 to produce Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, he established it as a nonprofit. Eventually tax attorneys had to pressure the company to pay Rogers a higher salary; his compensation had been set at a level too low to be credible under the tax laws. As he grew older, Rogers and his wife lived more and more modestly.
They sold their house in Pittsburgh’s East End and lived in a large apartment. Rogers drove a Chevrolet, and then an old Honda. He dressed modestly and eschewed luxuries. He and Joanne never fixed up their small cottage at the western end of Nantucket, a simple, rustic structure with small, modestly furnished rooms and no central heating, much like the fisherman’s shack it had been originally. All around it, more elaborate homes showcased their owners’ wealth.
Most significantly, Rogers turned down offers from the major networks to take his show from PBS to commercial television, where he could have earned millions as scriptwriter, songwriter, and star.
Nor would he ever allow the artifacts of the Neighborhood—the puppets, the trolley—to be turned into toys marketed directly to children. His nonprofit company did contract the production of these items for sale to parents, but because Rogers would not tolerate any advertising directed at children themselves, the toys never delivered the massive profits that could have lined his pockets.
In addition to giving up significant income from more aggressive commercialization of the Neighborhood and the puppets, Fred Rogers gave up something else, something he would have valued highly: a legacy as strong and lasting as that of Sesame Street and the Muppets. The pointed commercialization of Sesame, including marketing directly to children, gained millions for the Children’s Television Workshop and Jim Henson, but it also created an international base for the show. Today Sesame is seen around the world and still appreciated by scores of millions of children, parents, and teachers.
By contrast, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is sometimes available on broadcast television, and as of this writing, can be purchased from PBS, iTunes, or Amazon. Certainly, children see it, but nowhere near the numbers who still experience Sesame. Fortunately, the Fred Rogers Company has produced successful new programming like Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood that captures the spirit of Rogers and advances his legacy. But clearly, Fred Rogers’s highly ethical choices cost him something more than money.
In this and in most other ways, Fred Rogers’s life offers an interesting contrast to a twentieth-century world consumed by rapid change and inexorable growth. In everything he wrote, in all the programming he produced, in the life of caring, kindness, and modesty that he led, he set a very clear example. His legacy lives in the concept of a caring neighborhood where people watch out for one another, no matter where they come from or what they look like. Far from being old-f
ashioned, his vision is in fact more pertinent than ever in a fractured cultural and political landscape.
Fred Rogers’s work still resonates not only because he recognized the critical importance of learning during the earliest years. He provided, and continues to provide, exemplary leadership for all of us, at all ages, at a time when the human values Rogers championed seem to be a thing of the past. Today, the kindness he embodied and championed could not be more relevant.
In our era, the geographical concept of the neighborhood in the United States is vastly diminished. Many young people coming into the workforce today are moving away from where they grew up, to live and take jobs in other parts of the country. More than half of marriages today end in divorce. Gentrification of urban neighborhoods has displaced millions of people from the places they considered home.
These and other factors have evolved into a much harsher landscape that, most often, offers little of the neighborhood solace and succor that supported young Fred Rogers. The grocer down the street doesn’t know the young boy walking by on the way to school, and the matrix of helpful cousins, aunts, uncles, and close friends has scattered across the country.
So where do we find the strength of neighborhood today, in a world of dramatic globalization, an environment of rapid technological change, a planet increasingly consumed with fear of the other? So many people are overwhelmed today with the relentless pace of change, and a sense of their being left behind, that anger, resentment, misogyny, and blame are driving the public discourse.
In his work, Fred Rogers himself pointed the way back to the neighborhood. He used the cutting-edge technology of his day, television, to convey the most profound values—respect, understanding, tolerance, inclusion, consideration—to children. He gave them a reassuring and inviting neighborhood based on a skillful blend of the most old-fashioned values, derived from his Christianity, in a new medium. Millions of his viewers grew up to be adults who hold on to those values and maintain a loyalty to Fred and his work.
He exemplified a life lived by the Golden Rule: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” found in some form in almost every religion and philosophy through history. His lesson is as simple and direct as Fred was: Human kindness will always make life better.
PART I
It always helps to have people we love beside us when we have to do difficult things in life.
—FRED ROGERS
1.
FREDDY
Nancy McFeely Rogers had come back to her parents’ house in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, forty miles southeast of Pittsburgh, just before Fred Rogers was born. She wanted to be sure that she would have as much help and support as possible for what might be a hard delivery. Nancy’s first baby was coming two and a half years after her marriage to James Hillis Rogers, a handsome, dark-haired young man who had finished his engineering studies at Pennsylvania State University and the University of Pittsburgh.1 Jim Rogers and his young bride, also dark-haired and attractive, made a striking couple in this small but growing industrial city in western Pennsylvania in the mid-1920s.
Fred McFeely Rogers was born on March 20, 1928, in Latrobe in the McFeely house, a handsome, old brick home at 705 Main Street.2 Her doctor had warned Nancy Rogers that the baby’s birth could be hard for such a small woman. The labor was a long and arduous ordeal. During much of it, Ronnie, the family’s Pomeranian dog, was huddled under the birth bed, adding its voice to that of Nancy as she struggled. By the time Nancy’s son—named after his maternal grandfather, Fred McFeely—was born, she was exhausted. The family doctor advised her not to think about having another child, which might be not only difficult, but devastating—even fatal.3 It was advice that Nancy and Jim would follow.
Young Fred was to become a great favorite of his maternal grandparents, Fred and Nancy Kennedy McFeely. Nancy Rogers was immediately protective of her new baby, smothering him with maternal love and guarding him against the outside world. In one of the photographs from that time, she is seen hugging the young boy close to her, one arm wrapped around his frame and the other protectively holding his arm. She is slight, with an angular beauty; he is a bit chubby, with a quizzical look on his face.
Sixty-five years later, Fred Rogers would say in a television interview: “Nothing can replace the influence of unconditional love in the life of a child. . . . Children love to belong, they long to belong.”4
More than anyone else in Fred’s life, his mother gave him that unconditional love. Certainly, her overprotective mothering contributed to the little boy’s shy and withdrawn nature, but what is even more clear is that her absolute devotion, along with her extraordinary generosity, contributed essential ingredients to Fred Rogers’s developing character and gave him the resilience to overcome an introverted, sometimes sickly (with severe asthma), and sheltered childhood. His mother was renowned throughout the family and the city of Latrobe for her giving nature and her boundless kindness.
Nancy Rogers came from a wealthy Pittsburgh family that moved to Latrobe, which is bisected by the Main Line of the Pennsylvania Railroad. Her father, Fred B. McFeely, built the family business, McFeely Brick, makers of silica and fire clay bricks for furnaces, into an important Latrobe manufacturing firm. Westmoreland County had abundant coal and other natural resources, and the proximity to Pittsburgh, a major river-shipping center, gave the city additional commercial advantages.
Nancy Rogers spent her life giving to the people of Latrobe. During World War I, the fourteen-year-old girl knitted sweaters for American soldiers from western Pennsylvania who were fighting in Europe (knitting was one of the great passions of her life; she continued knitting sweaters for family and friends—including a new cardigan each year for Fred—for over six decades).5 The next year Nancy lied about her age to get a driver’s license so she could help local hospitals and doctors’ offices during the terrible flu epidemic of 1918.6
Her father needed to sign off on paperwork to allow her to drive. To discourage her, he informed her that first she’d have to learn to rebuild an engine in case the truck broke down on the road. With the help of local mechanics, the determined young woman learned quickly and was soon on the road. Though she spent months hauling away used bandages and other medical waste, she managed to escape falling victim to the flu herself.
By the time her first child was born, she was regularly volunteering at the Latrobe Hospital, and Fred was often left with a caretaker while Nancy pursued her work. She’d once dreamed of becoming a doctor, but that was an impractical ambition for a young woman in western Pennsylvania in that era. She contented herself with a lifetime of volunteer work at the hospital.
A longtime friend of Nancy Rogers, Latrobe Hospital nurse Pat Smith, later recalled, “She would come into the nursery and just work. If a baby were crying, she wouldn’t hesitate to assist with the feedings or tenderly rock them in her arms in the nursery rocking chairs. She wouldn’t leave until she was certain that all was secure, and that included making sure the staff had time for dinner, usually at her expense.”7
The Rogers’s home, a three-story brick mansion at 737 Weldon Street, was in the affluent area of Latrobe known as “The Hill.” Fred Rogers grew up with a cook to make his meals and a chauffeur to drive him to school. He was a cherished only child until his sister, Nancy Elaine Rogers Crozier, called Laney, was adopted by Nancy and Jim Rogers when Fred was eleven. Given the age gap between them, Laney recalled in an interview that she always saw him as “a very grown-up playmate.”
Years later, Fred Rogers told Francis Chapman of the Canadian Broadcasting Company that “his parents adopted his sister, Laney, as a present for him. . . . I don’t know whether Fred had requested a sibling or not, but Fred thought that his parents thought that it would be nice for him to have one.”8
Given his family’s wealth and stature in the community, Fred Rogers’s formative years were spent in an environment in which his family had an extraordinary influence over his friends and neighbors, and almost everyone
in Latrobe. By the time Fred Rogers was born, the city’s population was around ten thousand. And Latrobe is still recognizable today as the very attractive cityscape of brick and stone houses and commercial buildings that Fred captured in his Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood trolley-track town. With its tidy homes and many parks and playgrounds, it looks like quintessential small-town America.
To put the wealth of Fred Rogers’s family into perspective, it helps to examine not just the industrial heritage of the McFeely family, but also that of Nancy McFeely Rogers’s maternal ancestors. They included William J. A. Kennedy of Pittsburgh (a salesman) and his wife, Martha Morgan Kennedy, who worked as a housekeeper for a leading banker, Thomas Hartley Given, in an era in which the Mellon banking fortune was built in Pittsburgh. Martha divorced Kennedy and married Given, who provided, through his investment genius, a huge family fortune that carried down through subsequent generations. Records at the McFeely-Rogers Foundation indicate that when the estate of Thomas H. Given settled on June 30, 1922, his fortune was valued at roughly 5,509,000 dollars, or about 70 million dollars today.9
One of the most fascinating aspects of the Martha Kennedy–Thomas Given romance is that Given built most of his considerable estate as a very early investor in Radio Corporation of America. And RCA, of course, made huge profits for its investors, including Given’s heirs (about half his fortune at the end of his life was in RCA stock), through the development of television, where Fred eventually made his career.
Fred Rogers grew up keenly aware of the influence of his family, derived from the exceptional largesse and charitable works of his parents, and from the fact that Jim Rogers played a leading role in many of the large businesses in Latrobe.
A childhood friend of Fred’s, Ed “Yogi” Showalter, remembered that even in grade school Fred Rogers seemed to be adopting his parents’ penchant for good deeds. “I think he inherited that from his family.” Showalter explained that Fred reported to his parents that kids in his class were discussing the fact that a young classmate’s parents couldn’t even afford shoes for him. Within days, the boy showed up at school in brand new high-top shoes.10