The Good Neighbor

by Maxwell King

  When an actress known as “Miss Pat,” who did occasional interviews for the Corner, once failed to appear to interview two local bakers she’d recruited, Woodwell had to jump in to do the interview: “It was two men who were cake decorators, who wore white bakers’ suits with short sleeves. One had tattoos up both his arms. These guys were absolutely monosyllabic. There was this dead silence as they decorated a cake.

  “I said, ‘Could you tell me how you do this?’

  “They said, ‘Ya’ learn.’”

  Margot Woodwell had to turn quickly to Fred and Josie to bring some action back to the program.15

  As often as not, when such an interruption broke the flow of the show, Fred would grab Daniel Striped Tiger or one of his other hand puppets, get behind a small puppet stage created for the show, and talk with Josie. And a kind of magic would take place.

  Once when Josie came rushing over to WQED from another station where she had been doing some freelance work, she was visibly upset by something that had disrupted her work. As Fred Rogers remembered it: “She came in and just said to Daniel, ‘I am so upset.’

  “She bared her soul to Daniel the puppet. I wonder if she even knew that we were on the air and the camera was on. She probably did. But she trusted Daniel’s ears so, and she trusted her audience, so that she could be her whole self.”16

  As the chemistry built between Fred and Josie and their audience of small children, Fred gained the confidence to bring out more of his puppets, including King Friday XIII. They perched behind the puppet stage and talked with Josie Carey. Once when they were shooting on location at South Park just outside Pittsburgh, Fred surprised Josie with a new puppet, X the Owl, who suddenly appeared, crying out that he had “x-caped”—thus, the name X.

  As usual, Josie instantly related to the new puppet; soon they were singing together. As the relationship between Josie and the puppets developed, the whole tenor of the show changed. The essence of the program became these conversations, and the dialogue between Fred as puppeteer and Josie Carey as hostess emerged as both the charm of the show and the opportunity for educating children.

  For years, Fred Rogers had been shy and somewhat guarded about his love of puppets. Even Joanne Rogers said later that she had never seen him playing with the puppets in the early years of their marriage.17

  Since he’d been a child in elementary school, Rogers had invested thousands of hours of creativity into his puppets, but he wasn’t sure if their character and charm would resonate with anyone but him. But now as he brought out the puppets, his role as creator, performer, and, most importantly, listener, emerged. He found his way as an artist. Josie, guileless and trusting, fell in love with the puppets and talked to them as if they were living.

  Sometimes after a long conversation with one of the puppets, when the show ended, Josie would rush over to tell her friend Fred Rogers what she and the puppets had been talking about. “I would get so engrossed in the conversation, especially with Daniel, that after it was over I would go around the back of the set and tell Fred what Daniel had said to me, totally forgetting that Fred was Daniel.” The puppet characters were as real to her as they were to Fred.18

  But it wasn’t just Josie who loved Daniel and the other puppets. Dorothy Daniel, Leland Hazard, Margot Woodwell, the cameramen, the soundmen—everyone at WQED—found the conversations between Rogers’s puppets and Josie Carey to be charming and engaging.19 The crew loved Fred, who treated them with respect and patience. And everyone was caught up in the serendipity of the show as it evolved more and more into puppetry.

  Then the letters poured in from parents, who appreciated how much Josie and the puppets meant to their children. They didn’t know very much about Fred, because he had no regular performance role on the show other than with the puppets. But he did appear on a couple of occasions, once as “Prince Charming” instructing Josie in ballroom dancing, and once as a minister performing a fictional wedding.

  Josie remembers only one really negative letter from a parent out of all the mail they got: “It hurt for days. . . . She was mad because her children hadn’t gotten something they had sent for. It turns out that our crew had gotten so overwhelmed with the mail that they burned some of it. They were volunteers, they were kids, and that’s why she never got an answer.”

  Of course, Fred Rogers called the complainant to apologize and explain.20

  The devotion of the kids in the audience for The Children’s Corner almost led to an early disaster. Josie and Fred had set up a Children’s Corner Club for their viewers, who could earn club stripes for simple achievements. The fourth stripe came for learning the club song, and Fred and Josie decided that they would invite all the children who got all four stripes to come to a special birthday party for Daniel Striped Tiger, which the station held about three months after The Children’s Corner first went on the air.

  Josie said later: “We expected a handful of kids—four stripes, you know. We looked out the window about an hour before we went on the air and there were children lining the whole block. We couldn’t fit them in the studio. They were in the studio, they were in the gallery, and in the backyard.

  “We had gotten little cakes and a little piece of ice cream and a cold drink for each child. We had to cut the cakes in four, the ice cream in four, and if you got one, you couldn’t get the other, or if you got a drink, you couldn’t have cake or ice cream, because we had to stretch it out for everybody. Every child knew that song. There wasn’t anybody who came to that party under false pretenses. They sang as one voice . . . I still get goose bumps when I remember it. It was probably the most exciting moment in my career.”21

  Because WQED was brand new, and the Corner was its signature program, one of the local newspapers covered the club party, and the popularity of the show became the talk of the town.

  There were some mistakes, of course. The program was still largely unscripted; Fred and Josie just wrote up a rough plan for each show on a yellow legal pad, often just one sheet long, and then improvised from it. The story line and the dialogue were not worked out. Fred, as the voice of the puppets, and Josie, as the host of the show, would create the content as they went along. This made for some delightful spontaneity, and the occasional problem.

  One of the characters on the show once said to Josie, “Oh, you smell good this morning.” She explains her reply: “I didn’t want to say ‘perfume,’ and I said, ‘Oh, toilet water.’” A parent of one of the viewers wrote in to say, “My three-year-old came out of the bathroom drenched . . . and she said, ‘I’m wearing toilet water, just like Josie.’”

  Another time, Josie told the children they could get the weather by dialing a weather station in Denver. Fred and Josie and their assistant Margot Woodwell got phone calls from bemused parents who reported that their children were racking up long-distance phone charges to Colorado.22

  Fred had to run back and forth between the organ, which he played when Josie sang, and the puppet stage, where he crouched down with his hand raised to one of the holes in the facade of the stage to present one of the hand puppets. And he discovered that if he had left any coins in his pocket, they would jangle loudly as he ran. So often he would run just out of range of the camera, leaning over so he could clutch his pocket tightly with one hand to keep the change still.

  Then he discovered that his shoes squeaked on the wood floors of the old stone mansion in the university section of Pittsburgh that the new station was using for studios and offices. Fred bought a pair of rubber-soled sneakers to make the mad dash from organ to stage without disrupting the show with squeaking. Later this rather pragmatic decision became a signature element of Fred’s.23

  Then there was the time that Josie was playing the part of “Emily Brontosaurus,” whose job it was to tell the children about other animals: “As Emily, I was supposed to bring in a friend from the zoo every time I was on. So we had a lion cub, and it got spooked by the lights or the noise and went for me. Unfortunately, I had a big tail
[on her costume]. It clawed into the tail, and Fred jumped in front of the lion and distracted it. But then it went for Fred’s sweater. They had to stop the show until the man from the zoo came to get the lion cub.”24

  Despite the spontaneity and chaos of the show, there were standards about what could be said and what might be shown to the children who were watching. The standards were not articulated but came instead from the thoughtful care that Fred Rogers put into the dialogue between the puppets and Josie.

  Even that early in his career, Fred was clear about the importance of appropriate child development, which he was reading about and discussing with friends and associates. Josie and the rest of the crew picked up on Fred’s interest. They had the support of Dorothy Daniel and Leland Hazard in trying to set good standards.

  Rogers recalled: “We had an idea where we might like to go with the story line, but most of it was unrehearsed. There was a whole array of puppets. At first, children seemed so much safer having the puppet say what the child was feeling, rather than the child himself.”

  Much later, academics at the University of Pittsburgh with whom Rogers studied child development explained to him that his own instincts, as someone who had stayed in close touch with the feelings of his own childhood, helped guide him to just the right dialogue for children.25

  Josie Carey took particular pride in being told by parents how much they trusted her, and The Children’s Corner, to properly care for their children: “We had a big book called the Scrapograph and we put the children’s pictures on it, or the things that they drew. They were part of our program. . . . And the mothers that I meet now say that I was such a good babysitter. They could trust their children to watch Children’s Corner. They knew [their children] were not going to learn anything they weren’t supposed to know.”

  All the care and effort that Fred and Josie put into the show paid off in 1955, when The Children’s Corner won a Sylvania Award for the best locally produced children’s programming in the country.

  Carey was thrilled about going to New York to get the award, but Fred wasn’t interested: “Fred would not go with me to collect that award. I had to get a friend of mine to go by train with me to . . . New York to collect it.”26

  At the time, there was a handful of other children’s programs on television, some of them very good, like Kukla, Fran and Ollie and Ding Dong School, and almost all of them, like The Children’s Corner, produced in a fairly ad hoc fashion. One of the earliest was DuMont Television’s Small Fry Club, which featured host Bob Emery playing the ukulele and introducing film clips. It went on the air in the spring of 1947. A year later, NBC debuted Kukla, Fran and Ollie, which built a fiercely loyal audience of young children with its puppets and host Fran Allison.27

  Both shows were successful in attracting an audience of children and parents at a time when the post–World War II baby boom was just beginning. The birth rate in the US spiked at the end of the war and stayed unusually high until the 1960s, providing a new market for television. But most of the programs, like DuMont’s Captain Video and His Video Rangers or CBS’s Winky Dink and You, didn’t have the sort of connection for little children that Fran Allison of Kukla or Josie Carey of the Corner offered. The combination of a personal, engaging host and puppets clearly had some special magic.

  Kukla was created by an eccentric puppeteer named Burr Tillstrom, who, like Fred Rogers, combined his passion for puppets with strong feelings about the importance of quality programming for very young children. Also like Rogers, Tillstrom grew up playing with puppets and developed his creations into a very unscripted and spontaneous television show that charmed children and parents. Although the original Kukla series went off the air in 1957, more than a decade before Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood went into national production, Tillstrom and Rogers are often compared to each other because of how deeply they each respected the needs and sensibilities of young children.

  Tillstrom grew up on the North Side of Chicago in the 1920s, putting on puppet shows for his parents, using his toy teddy bears as props. He attended the University of Chicago, but dropped out to concentrate on his puppet theater. He struggled to find a paying audience, but finally found employment in the mid-1930s in a Chicago Park District puppet program that was sponsored by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration. It was on that Chicago program that he created the hand puppet Kukla, whose name derived from a Russian term of endearment for a doll.

  Burr Tillstrom was lucky enough to perform his puppet art at NBC during the 1950s, when Pat Weaver was president of the network. Tillstrom—like NBC intern Fred Rogers—benefited enormously from Weaver’s leadership in that “golden era” of television. Weaver was pushed out of NBC by David Sarnoff, president of NBC’s parent, Radio Corporation of America, in 1956. A year later, Tillstrom’s run at NBC was over.

  The other early television program that is credited with adhering to high standards of quality was Ding Dong School, hosted by educator Frances Horwich and shown on NBC in the 1950s. Clearly, Fred Rogers was aware of it, and of Frances Horwich’s approach, which involved a style like that later adopted by Mister Rogers: speaking to the child in the audience as if he or she was right across the room from the host.

  Horwich, who won a George Foster Peabody Award for excellence in television programming in 1953, was cited by New York Times television critic Jack Gould for her work: “She imbues in the youngsters a sense of friendliness, confidence and faith that is truly magical television. She is a teacher, yes, but she is also a very genuine friend of the tots who sit entranced before the receivers.” Later, though, when she began promoting the products of sponsors of her show—not just in the form of commercials, but embedded in the program itself—Gould and Fred Rogers were both disappointed and critical of this intrusion. Jack Gould now called it “a reversion to hucksterism at its most callous level,” deploring Horwich’s “blatant coercion of unsuspecting small children.”

  He concluded with a line that could have been written by Fred Rogers: “Even in this age of television with all its materialistic outlook, little boys and girls between the ages of two and five still are something very special—and precious.”28

  Rogers felt let down by Horwich, who had a doctorate in education from Northwestern University and had been a critic of advertising aimed at children. The experience hardened Fred Rogers’s increasingly adamant opposition to commercials for children.

  As comfortable as the collaboration was between Fred Rogers and Josie Carey, there were some differences between his careful nature and her easygoing improvisational style, and as time went along, these differences loomed larger. Once, when they were having great fun creating the show, Josie was so enthusiastic she told the children she didn’t want to leave them as the show was ending: “We were having such a good time, and I kept saying, ‘No, I don’t want to go. I don’t want to go. I want to do more. I want to stay here.’ But they took us off the air, of course, and the switchboard lit up with little kids: ‘Let her come back on; that wasn’t nice!’”

  Josie was amused, but Fred was worried that the children would be upset and frightened. With increasing frequency, he would chide her for saying anything that he thought might be misconstrued by kids in the audience.

  Josie did some freelance work for the local commercial television station, KDKA. During the taping of one of these freelance efforts, one of the writers, Sterling Yates, wrote a gag about someone losing their baby.

  “Oh,” said Josie on the show, “where was the last place you saw it?”

  Yates, who played opposite Josie in this bit, said, “I think it’s in the glove compartment of a car that was headed to Cleveland.”

  Fred heard about this from Josie, who thought it was quite funny. But Rogers was appalled, and he lectured Josie on the dangers of small children misunderstanding the joke. The same KDKA programming had included a small hand puppet, which looked like a baby. The “baby” wound up on the floor, followed by a joke in which Yates acc
used one of the show’s guests of “dropping” his baby.29

  Again, Fred, who almost never lost his temper, was furious with Josie for countenancing material he saw as harmful. Fred could not understand how such a good-hearted person as Josie, who clearly understood and liked children, could put such potentially frightening material on children’s television. It was the beginning of a rift that would prove fatal to The Children’s Corner.

  Josie was an entertainer. She was thrilled to be on television, to be part of show business, and she loved the easygoing, zany, anything-goes quality of the entertainment field. She wanted, more than anything else, for her show-business career to flourish. She very much liked working with the writers at KDKA, particularly with comedian and jazz musician Sterling Yates, whom she described as “the total opposite of Fred. He would do anything for a laugh, and he didn’t care what the message was.”

  In fairness, on KDKA, Carey and Yates thought of themselves as entertainers, not educators, and they were aiming at an older audience than the preschool kids Rogers was targeting at WQED.

  Joe Negri, a highly accomplished jazz guitarist who played at clubs and on local radio and television all around Pittsburgh (later he appeared as Handyman Negri on the Neighborhood), was a friend of Josie’s.

  He observes: “She was a very talented girl. I had written songs with Josie, too; she was a wonderful lyricist. Maybe . . . Josie was more of a musical theater sort of writer, whereas Fred was more interested in writing about lessons for the children, in songs like ‘You’ve Got to Do It,’ about how you just have to keep doing it if you want to learn to ride a bike.”

  Rogers was headed in another direction from Josie. More and more, he thought of himself as an educator, as a champion of the needs of children. And he was building a burning passion for setting the highest standards of excellence in children’s television. Increasingly, that meant Fred and Josie were at odds.