by Maxwell King
Showalter also remembered that all the children in class at Latrobe Elementary got out of school early on Fred’s birthday so that they could go downtown to the movies, courtesy of Nancy Rogers. Another classmate, Anita Lavin Manoli, recalls that the Rogers family would travel to Florida each year, often for a long winter vacation. When Nancy Rogers got back to Latrobe, she had presents in hand for Fred’s fellow students and teachers.11
The Rogers family philanthropy and the religious basis for it became two of the most important strands in young Fred Rogers’s life. For Nancy, the centerpiece of her giving was the Latrobe Presbyterian Church: the Scots-Irish Rogers and McFeely clans were staunch members of the church, located on Main Street in the center of town. Her whole family attended.
In her role as a community watchdog, Nancy Rogers could find out which families needed help. As often as not, the solution to a problem involved Jim and Nancy Rogers writing a check, which they did on an almost weekly basis. Nancy Rogers also organized a consortium of several Latrobe churches—including the Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, and Episcopal—into a network of ministers and volunteers called “Fish,” according to the Reverend Clark Kerr of the Latrobe Presbyterian Church, whose father was one of the ministers with whom Nancy worked.12
The name “Fish” was picked because of its Christian symbolism: The symbol of the fish was used as a secret sign by early Christians; Jesus referred to fish and fishing throughout his teachings; and several of Jesus’s twelve apostles were fishermen. Nancy Rogers gathered intelligence from the ministers of the churches, from other volunteers, from her husband’s workplace connections, and even from her own children and their experiences at school. When she learned of a family in need, she would bring this information to “Fish” and the group would make plans to help. If money was needed, Nancy could be counted on to dip into her own funds to buy clothing, food, or medical care.
In Jim Rogers’s role as key manager of several of the Rogers-owned companies—including Latrobe Die Casting and the McFeely Brick Company—he could watch out for the families of employees and step in with a loan or a gift when needed. Jim Okonak, secretary of the family holding company, Rogers Enterprises, Inc., and executive director of the family philanthropy, the McFeely-Rogers Foundation, remembered that scores of employees from several Rogers companies would come on payday to the pay window outside Jim Rogers’s office to pick up their cash wages. Often, some of them would be back the following day to take out loans from Jim Rogers because part of their wages had disappeared in the many taverns and bars that lined the streets between the steel mills and other manufacturing plants. These loans were all chronicled in a great ledger book; when Jim Rogers died, the book recorded thousands of “loans” that were never collected.13
Okonak also recalls Jim Rogers’s habit of chewing tobacco, which he only indulged when he walked the floors of Latrobe Die Casting, McFeely Brick Company, or other Rogers-led firms. He would put a chew in his cheek, loosen his tie, and walk through the rows of manufacturing machines, addressing each employee by name, inquiring about their work and about their welfare.14 Back home, Rogers would report family problems to his wife, who would organize community aid efforts. The young Fred Rogers went to school with the children of these families and carried a constant awareness of how special his family was in this small, tight-knit city. He was proud of his mother’s good works, and at the earliest age he shared the family devotion to the Presbyterian Church, but he was also increasingly self-conscious and shy.
In the early twentieth century, this kind of “enlightened capitalism” was not confined to the Rogers family. George F. Johnson of the Endicott Johnson Corporation in upstate New York initiated what he called a “Square Deal” for his workers that provided everything from parades to churches and libraries to “uplift” workers, encouraging loyalty, and at the same time, discouraging unionization. The company had a chess-and-checkers club and funded health and recreational facilities. The family trust also supported the construction of local pools, theaters, and even food markets.
Ironically, the very generosity that made Fred Rogers’s parents so popular with adults sometimes made Fred a target of other children. Because he was so easily identified as the rich kid in town, and because of his sensitive nature, he spent part of his earliest years as an outlier in Latrobe. And he suffered from childhood asthma—increasingly common in the badly polluted air of industrial western Pennsylvania. During some of the summer months, Fred was cooped up in a bedroom with one of the region’s first window air-conditioning units, purchased by his mother to help alleviate his breathing problems.15
All the way back to the eighteenth century, before the French and Indian War helped accelerate the dispersal of the indigenous Indian population—mostly Lenni Lenape, or Delawares, as the whites called them—the area around Fort Ligonier and what would become Latrobe was mostly wilderness. Only the hardiest scouts, explorers, and trappers ventured into the new territories well west of Philadelphia and north of Virginia.
That part of western Pennsylvania had been one of the earliest and longest-sustained areas of human habitation in North America. A little more than fifty miles west of present-day Latrobe is Meadowcroft Rockshelter, believed to be one of the oldest sites, perhaps the oldest site, of human habitation recorded on the continent. The massive rock overhang was used for shelter as long as sixteen thousand to nineteen thousand years ago, by primitive peoples, some of whom were the ancestors of the American Indians who later dominated this territory before the coming of the British and the French.
At the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, a torrent of new settlers poured into the area. In fact, few regions in the world saw such rapid expansion, extraction of natural resources, and industrial development as the territory now known as western Pennsylvania.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, settlers arrived from Germany, Ireland, Scotland, England, and parts of the eastern United States. Among them was a group of German Benedictine monks who founded Saint Vincent Archabbey and Monastery in 1846 in Latrobe under the guidance of Father Boniface Wimmer. It is the oldest Benedictine monastery in the US. About the same time, the monks founded Saint Vincent College, which later bestowed honorary degrees on both James Hillis Rogers and his son, Fred, and has educated thousands of Pennsylvania’s native sons and daughters.
One of the largest contingents of settlers from the Old World was composed of Scots-Irish Presbyterians—an ethnic group with roots back to Scotland and Northern Ireland—who were discouraged by misfortune in Ireland: a series of droughts, increasing land rents from their English landlords, and disagreements with the Protestant hierarchy in Ulster. Some of the Rogers, McFeely, Kennedy, and Given families were represented.
By the mid-nineteenth century, Latrobe flourished very quickly once a new rail line through the site connected Harrisburg and Pittsburgh. One of the very first businesses in town was the new Pennsylvania Car Works, which manufactured rail cars for the Pennsylvania Railroad. More, diverse business followed quickly: the Loyalhanna Paper Company, Latrobe Tannery, Whitman & Denman Tannery, the Oursler Foundry, and other iron works and foundries, as well as numerous coke works, brick works, and agricultural businesses. The founder of the Pennsylvania Car Works, which also repaired railroad cars, was Oliver Barnes, who got rich buying land around and ahead of the route he laid out for the railroad’s expansion into western Pennsylvania.16
Located just north of the best coal and coke fields in western Pennsylvania, blessed with an abundance of rich and beautiful farmland all around, only forty miles from the confluence of the Monongahela, Allegheny, and Ohio Rivers in Pittsburgh, and built around rail yards on the main line linking eastern Pennsylvania and the Atlantic Seaboard to Pittsburgh’s new “gateway to the West,” Latrobe simply couldn’t miss as an industrial and commercial center.
At the end of World War I there was an abundance of strong manufacturing firms in Latrobe, including the Saxman Family’s Latrobe Steel C
ompany (still a world leader in specialty metals products), the Burns Crucible Steel and Metallic Company, the Besto Glass Works, Peters Paper Company, and West Latrobe Foundry and Machine Company.17
Later there were many others: Vanadium-Alloys Steel Company, the McFeely Brick Company, Kennametal (another international leader in specialty metals products), Latrobe Die Casting, and Stupakoff Ceramic and Manufacturing Company. At one time or another, James Hillis Rogers, Fred’s father, served on the boards of many of these companies. Latrobe Die Casting, a small and struggling firm in the late 1930s, was bought by a savvy James Rogers, who built it into a much larger tool and die manufactory with hundreds of employees before it was sold after his death.
And McFeely Brick, founded by the family of Fred’s grandfather Fred B. McFeely, was also built into an important Latrobe manufacturing firm before the family sold it years after McFeely’s death. As an adult, Fred Rogers served on the boards of both the McFeely Brick Company and Latrobe Die Casting, and played an unwilling and unhappy role in a major labor strike at Latrobe Die Casting in 1980.
Many of Fred’s ancestors, on both sides of his family, were farmers and merchants. Besides the McFeely clan’s focus on mill work and manufacturing, one of Fred’s forebears, John McFeely, went out to California to try his hand in the 1849 gold rush before coming back to the Pittsburgh region as a manufacturer of blankets for Union troops during the Civil War and, finally, founding Steubenville Furnace and Iron Co. in Ohio in 1872.18
Fred’s childhood friend Anita Lavin Manoli, when asked about the wealth of Fred’s family in relation to most of his peers’ families, says, “I think he was always sort of in denial of that.” She speculated that part of Fred’s lifelong embrace of simplicity was in reaction to it.19
But Manoli also credits the modesty and humility of the Rogers family for the humility that evolved in Fred Rogers’s character. “His mother and father were millionaires who were not pretentious at all. Of course, they lived in a beautiful home. Of course, they had servants. Of course, they went to Atlantic City in the summer. Of course, they ultimately went to New England and had a home on Nantucket. But they were not pretentious people. They were very simple, down to earth.”20
She also gives credit to Fred’s parents for the development of his work ethic: “I think that’s what drove him. He didn’t have to work. He could have just played golf and learned to play polo or something. But he didn’t; he worked.”
Fred’s sister, Laney, remembered her father’s fierce work ethic—which he had learned working summers on his grandparents’ farm; the ten dollars he got for a whole summer’s work was immediately turned over to his parents. Jim Rogers drilled that ethic into his son.21
Still, for all the positive influence of his parents’ faith, hard work, and philanthropy, over time their protectiveness of Fred seemed to have contributed to an insecurity and insularity that made his earliest years painful. Another childhood friend, Rudy Prohaska (whose mother, Anna Prohaska, worked for years for the Rogers family and sometimes cared for Fred when his mother was out on volunteer work), remembers other children bullying Fred, calling him names, and chasing him. “There were a lot of people in school who irritated me by the way they treated him. I couldn’t take the name-calling and all that. My personal opinion is, Fred was just too sheltered.”22
Prohaska and other friends all talked about how Nancy Rogers contributed to Fred’s tentative and uncertain character. To a large extent, the careful sheltering of the only Rogers son was a natural outgrowth of the times for such a wealthy family. Although the Rogers estate survived the stock market crash of 1929 and the ensuing Great Depression largely unscathed, millions of people around the nation were living in abject poverty, sometimes lacking even food.
Prohaska came from the other end of town. “We came through the Depression, but it was rough. We had food, we had clothes on our back, maybe not the best. But when you went to their place [the Rogers home], it was overwhelming, the fine furniture and all. But they never put on the dog.”23
Despite the deep appreciation most of the local people expressed for the Rogerses’ philanthropy and for their unpretentiousness, Nancy and Jim Rogers worried that Fred could be a target of resentment or even a criminal act. When the twenty-month-old son of Charles Lindbergh and Anne Morrow Lindbergh was kidnapped from their estate near Hopewell, New Jersey, in 1932, it contributed to an atmosphere of near-panic among some wealthy American families with young children. The Rogers family listened to the news with horror when, two months after the kidnapping, the little boy’s body was found, his skull shattered.
The ensuing trial of Bruno Richard Hauptmann so dominated the news that newspaper columnist H. L. Mencken called it “the biggest story since the Resurrection.”24 The whole nation seemed riveted to news of the case, and public fears led to legislation that made kidnapping a federal offense. The Federal Kidnapping Act, or the Lindbergh Law, enabled federal law enforcement officials to pursue suspects across state lines. For Jim and Nancy Rogers, whose small son was only a couple of years older than the only child of the famous aviator and his writer wife, the Lindbergh story and the prospect of someone kidnapping Fred was deeply affecting.
Nancy had their chauffeur, Grant Ross, drive her little son to school every day, pick him up for lunch and bring him home, and then take him back to school. At the end of every school day, Ross would wait to take Fred home, carefully guarding the young boy’s every moment out in the community.25 Naturally this must have contributed to Fred’s feeling of being apart from his schoolmates and his neighbors.
Later in life, Fred Rogers reported that although he loved the small-town atmosphere of Latrobe, he struggled to fit in with his peers. He turned to reading, listening to music, and playing by himself with his toys and puppets. Fred took solace in his nascent artistry, evolving his own puppet theater in the attic of the family home, sometimes performing before family and friends, and beginning what would be a lifelong love of the piano.
Nancy Rogers’s earnest, sometimes controlling, management of young Fred Rogers’s life extended to arranging playmates for him. For almost a full year in elementary school, Peggy Moberg McFeaters was chauffeured with Fred back and forth to school at lunchtime by Rogers’s family driver Grant Ross.26 Fred and Peggy would share a lunch prepared by the family cook and then go up to the third-floor attic, where one of the large rooms had been organized as a playroom, complete with a small stage for Fred’s puppet theater, developed even before he’d started school.
Years later, Peggy recalled: “Fred entertained me with his puppets and marionettes. I sometimes think I was watching the beginning of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”27
In her account, Fred carefully studied her to see what she reacted to with enthusiasm. Fred Rogers, who years later would seem almost preternaturally young and childlike as an adult, was preternaturally mature and sophisticated as a purveyor of puppet entertainment for his young classmate.
Young Fred also found himself growing up in a family, and a house, that was increasingly a social center of this more-and-more prosperous community. His parents loved to throw parties, inviting the families of other wealthy business owners from Latrobe. Three-quarters of a century before Fred’s birth, Latrobe hardly existed. And by the end of his life, it had retreated economically, losing population and vibrancy and influence as a center of business. But when he was a child, the town’s prosperity and social scene were at their height.
Through their good deeds, business acumen, and love of the community and the society of their peers, Fred Rogers’s parents became the first couple of Latrobe. Their home was a constant center of dinner parties, informal gatherings of friends, and even large bashes thrown open to the whole community.28 Their annual Christmas party was famous for a bountiful table and an open-door policy that brought together everyone, from tool-and-die workers, to neighbors down the street, to members of the exclusive Rolling Rock Club in nearby Ligonier—bastion of the famed Mellon banking fam
ily, led by Jim Rogers’s friend General R. K. Mellon. Everyone enjoyed the food, drink, and song through the evening.
Fred’s sister, Laney, remembers that each Christmas her parents would buy a big turkey for the family of each person who worked for one of the Rogers’s enterprises, and that all year long they would send food baskets to families they’d heard were short of food.29
Rudy Prohaska tells of visits from the Rogers family chauffeur, Grant Ross, an African American man, who brought a basket of presents from the Rogers family the day before the Prohaska family was to go over to the Rogers’s house for the big Christmas party: “The first time I knew I had a Santa Claus, he was black. Grant would come down on Christmas Eve with the yellow convertible—a Packard—and my dad and him would unload presents from the Rogers family.”
After Anna Prohaska stopped working for Jim and Nancy Rogers, she still got a Christmas card with a check in it every year until she died, her son recalls, tears filling his eyes.30
Though Fred Rogers would later refer to is parents’ generosity with pride, he also remembered retreating upstairs during his parents’ parties to his own room, to his puppets and music. Meanwhile, downstairs, songs of that era—“Over the Rainbow” by Judy Garland, “One O’Clock Jump” by the Count Basie Orchestra, “Stormy Weather” by Ethel Waters—would waft up the stairs from the phonograph. Listening, Fred would memorize the melodies and later play them on the piano. His little sister, Laney, would later recall that Fred had a “photographic memory” for music and could hear a tune at his parents’ house or at the movies and be able almost instantly to play it by ear.31