by Maxwell King
“It got so that Fred started to worry about wording,” recalled Josie. “You never fight with Fred. But once we had a twenty-minute discussion about whether to use the word would, should, or could.”
And they kept talking about the glove-compartment joke that infuriated Fred: “‘Do you realize,’ said Fred, ‘that it’s one of the worst things you can tell a child? A child is so afraid of being left or lost, and it’s such an enclosed place, the glove compartment. That child is going to feel that he’s being put into a small place—that he’s lost his parents.’”
Josie lost her patience with all this anxiety over words: “I said, ‘Hey, it’s a joke. It’s a silly program. The kids know it’s silly.’ Fred thought it was just horrible.”30
Even as The Children’s Corner enjoyed great success, and Fred struggled with his working relationship with Josie, WQED got a new general manager. Dorothy Daniel went onto the board of directors, and William Wood joined the station as the new, demanding manager of a station now past start-up and beginning to grow. An experienced professional, Wood’s goal was to create a more orderly management structure out of the WQED chaos.
In one of the oddest moments in television history, William Wood decided that one of his first moves to professionalize the station would be to fire Fred Rogers. It seemed that he decided that Rogers lacked the appropriate production credentials to run a show like The Children’s Corner.
As Josie later recalled, one of Wood’s objectives was to save money for the station:
“They were going to fire everybody, especially Fred, because they figured he was just a producer, and, you know, they could get somebody else for half the money. I don’t know what Fred was making. The whole place was staffed mostly with volunteers. There were only four or five people who actually got paid. I think he [Wood] actually did fire everybody on a Friday, and rehired us the next Monday.”31
Over the weekend, Wood got the message—from Daniel, Hazard, and the board—that he, not Rogers, would be out of work if he did not relent. Perhaps Wood felt threatened by Fred Rogers, who was playing so many different roles—producer, writer, performer, director, program manager—that it seemed he was everywhere at once. But Leland Hazard and Dorothy Daniel put things back on course, and reestablished the successful team behind The Children’s Corner. In the end, Wood was even prevailed upon to write Fred a letter thanking him for his excellent work. The two coexisted at WQED for several years, wary of each other, but able to work together.
But Josie was finding it more and more difficult to make a connection with Fred. She said she really didn’t think he liked entertainment, and he hardly ever watched commercial television or listened to the radio: “Sometimes Fred didn’t want to have any connection with the outside world. Most people have a radio in their cars; Fred had his taken out.
“He’d only watch television once a week, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour [Alfred Hitchcock Presents, in the 1950s, was succeeded by The Alfred Hitchcock Hour from 1962 to 1965], because he liked to see Alfred Hitchcock come in and say hello. And then he’d turn it off.”32
As much as Josie was embracing the world of entertainment, Fred seemed to be moving away from it, toward a dedication to early childhood education. “He started to get quieter, and he started to get more interested in a child’s reaction,” said Josie.
Nothing irritated Carey quite like the popcorn incident; it convinced her that Fred was so particular in his standards that they were just not going to be a good fit for the long haul: “I was on, and he was popping popcorn. He put too much popcorn in the popper, and the lid came up and started dancing around and the popcorn started falling over. We finished the program. Then he said, ‘Now we have to do that again.’
“I said, ‘Why? That was fun! The kids will love it.’”
But Fred was concerned that particularly for little children, the uncontrolled popping and spilling could be frightening. Luckily the popcorn erupted during a taping session, not live on air.
“We had to do that whole section all over again, because too much popcorn came out of the popper,” said Carey with a combination of frustration and amazement.
Later Josie Carey said she wished she had fought that decision by Rogers. To her, the popcorn spilling out all over the place was just plain good old television programming. It was entertaining.33
For Fred, though, it was the sort of thing that was fundamentally important: If Sterling Yates stood for a good laugh no matter what, Fred Rogers would stand for the right thing for children, no matter what. He had gotten into television to make it better, to make it more appropriate and educational for young children. The slapstick, pie-in-the-face quality of early television was just what he wanted to change. Later in his career, he let his sense of humor come out more on air, especially when he wanted to show children that adults make mistakes, too.
One of the things that highlighted the significant differences between Rogers and Carey was the opportunity to work in New York. Rogers’s former employer, NBC, sent a producer to Pittsburgh to look at another WQED program, Parents and Dr. Spock, featuring the renowned pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock. Dr. Spock had published The Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care, one of the most successful bestsellers of all time, and he was still teaching at the University of Pittsburgh.
NBC executives figured there might be great potential in his local television program for parents. But when the producer got to Pittsburgh and reviewed Spock’s program, she was disappointed. According to Fred Rogers’s recollection, she was sitting in the lobby of the WQED building watching Parents and Dr. Spock when she happened to catch part of The Children’s Corner. When she got back to New York, she recommended that NBC try to acquire the Corner and hire Fred Rogers and Josie Carey.34 Josie, of course, was very excited. Predictably, Fred was full of reservations.
Josie remembered that though she and Fred agreed to go to New York one day a week to shoot a once-a-week version of the Corner for national distribution, they didn’t want to abandon WQED, in part because the Corner was so important to the fortunes of the Pittsburgh station. “We made a lot of money for WQED,” said Josie. “They wouldn’t be on the air if it weren’t for [The] Children’s Corner. That first year, we were the ones that kept that station going, and that’s when NBC found us. We said, ‘We can’t leave; they need us here.’”35
Josie was somewhat wistful and sad about missing the opportunity for full-time employment at a New York network station. But Fred never really wanted it, and he threw up roadblock after roadblock to the executives at NBC. First, he said he would only fly in on Saturday mornings to shoot the NBC program, and that he had to fly right back out again Saturday evening. Although NBC wanted Fred to stay around to promote the show, Rogers explained that he had to be back in Pittsburgh for his Sunday morning church service at his Presbyterian church.
And Rogers let NBC know that though they could present ads aimed at parents, they could not advertise anything, even the show itself, in commercials aimed at children. The NBC executives reluctantly agreed, and they placed the show in their public-service department rather than the commercial division. They figured that when Fred eventually appreciated how much money he could make, he would come around and agree to aim ads at children. They explained to Fred that they made their money from ads, and he could, too. And they explained the potential of commercializing his puppets. They might just as well have tried to explain the benefits of atheism to the Pope.
The network executives tried to get Josie and Fred to adopt silly costumes that would amuse the children. Fred explained that each of them was a real friend to the children, and they wanted the children to see them for the real people that they were. When Fred and Josie sang their very charming but overtly religious song, “Goodnight, God,” NBC objected.
“They called us in,” recalled Fred, “and said, ‘We think it’s better that you not . . . uh . . . mention God on the program.’
“And I said, ‘Well, then, I don’t think we’l
l come back.’ They had a lot of viewers for our program, so they rescinded that. You can be an agent of what’s good and not be terribly direct about it.”36
Fred, of course, understood the need to subordinate overt religiosity on network television; throughout his career, he skillfully focused on strong humanistic values without dwelling on religion. But he was not inclined to give the NBC executives a break.
The Children’s Corner was very popular on NBC. Carey recalled that they immediately broke the record for fan mail for a children’s program on any station. The Corner started out as a program that replaced the ventriloquist Paul Winchell and his dummy Jerry Mahoney, and it quickly became so successful that NBC gave it a regular, weekly slot. But Rogers was not really interested in going back to commercial television, and eventually NBC executives grew weary of his opposition to advertising to children. The Children’s Corner on NBC was canceled after thirty-nine weeks.
Fred Rogers had been given fair warning by Frances Horwich of Ding Dong School, who was about to be replaced by a new game show called The Price Is Right. Programming for younger kids was being pushed aside in network schedules for shows like Davy Crockett that appealed to older children, and for shows for adults.
For his part, Rogers was relieved that he didn’t have to travel weekly to New York anymore. But Josie worried that her chance at stardom might be slipping away: “Had we stayed in New York, and insisted that NBC promote us and do the things that people do to become stars, well, you know, things would have taken a different turn.”
She went on to host Josie’s Storyland and Funsville, two KDKA commercial children’s programs, and later had a successful children’s program in South Carolina in the 1970s. But she never became a national star.
When she and Fred ended their working relationship, wrapping up The Children’s Corner in Pittsburgh after seven years, she was working regularly on KDKA and willingly signed over to Fred the rights to the puppets and the songs that had been developed on the Corner.
Later Josie came to regret that decision, but she also became rather philosophical about the fact that Fred did become a national figure and she did not: “We had a wonderful time. He had a great sense of humor and he’s very caring, very interested. . . . He didn’t really want to go to New York. He wanted to stay at WQED, and I think in the early days before he decided to become a minister, he was starting to feel a call of some kind. He was my best friend in those days. We were really very, very close.”37
7.
ON-AIR MINISTRY
After four years of working in television, and just as his career was taking off, Fred Rogers remained committed to the idea of the ministry. He couldn’t quite give up the idea of service through the church he’d found attractive as a young boy sitting in the pews with his mother. Nancy and Jim attended the Latrobe Presbyterian Church every Sunday; Fred Rogers came with them.
The Latrobe Presbyterian Church had always been a cornerstone of the family’s life. Nancy and her husband, Jim, set up two charitable foundations, The Latrobe Foundation and the McFeely-Rogers Foundation, which stewarded millions of dollars for the Latrobe community, funding dozens of amenities like parkland and community recreational facilities. But for Nancy, the centerpiece of her giving was the Latrobe Presbyterian Church, where she was grounded by her deep religious faith.
The noblesse oblige that Fred Rogers adopted, putting his commitment to children and their education ahead of any personal gain, might never have been possible without the family wealth that gave him, and his mother, such freedom. If Rogers had been born poor, his attitudes would quite likely have been different.
As his future colleague Eliot Daley observes: “Look at the choices that Fred had to make. . . . He was born into a lot of money, a lot of privilege, a lot of this and that, and he could have done anything. He could have been a playboy; he could have done all kinds of stuff. And I think it was a quiet series of probing choices . . . that had proved to be diversionary, but all against the backdrop of—you know, we were dropped in here for some reason.”1
In 1955, feeling a conflict between his work on The Children’s Corner and the call of the ministry, Fred Rogers split the difference: He continued to work as the creator, scriptwriter, songwriter, and producer of the show, as well as the program manager for WQED, while also enrolling part-time at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.2 Rogers still wasn’t sure television was serious work. He knew the ministry would be serious, but he also realized that he would badly miss the excitement of television if he left it.
Josie Carey, his partner at The Children’s Corner, remembered that Fred would try to come into the station early in the morning to get his work started, then rush over to the seminary (almost thirty blocks away, across the busy streets of Pittsburgh’s East End) to take a course or two, and then drive quickly back to WQED. He would drop his text books and jump into preparations with Josie for that afternoon’s one-hour live broadcast of the Corner.3
Josie had been a Catholic-school student as a child, and she later said she was almost as religious as Fred. Together they sometimes created an easygoing blend of religion and television: “We had two songs that we did once a week. One was ‘Goodnight, God,’ and one was ‘Good Morning, God,’ and there are people who still sing ‘Goodnight, God.’ Some ladies have taught it to their children, and it’s still a part of their nighttime routine. It was a beautiful song, but we can’t do things like that anymore. You’re not allowed to do anything religious, anything with religious overtones on the children’s programs.”4
She remembered Fred as an odd blend of the very serious and the spontaneously funny. He could be silly and unconstrained on the set. Away from work, he had no interest in socializing, going to parties, or participating in the various benefit productions in Pittsburgh that often called for local television talent. He watched very little television himself, and other than reading books and spending time with his family, he put all his time into work and his religious studies.
Fred and Joanne’s son James, called Jim, was born in 1959, the seventh year of the Rogerses’ marriage. As Joanne explains it: “Things were moving smoothly at the time.” Joanne was teaching piano as well as performing concerts in the Pittsburgh area. When Jim was born on September 4, 1959, she recalls: “Fred and I enjoyed the complete care of him, and my piano was put on the back burner.”5
She didn’t go back to her instrument until 1970, when the Rogerses found a housekeeper to aid them. By then, they were a family of four, with the arrival of John Rogers on June 18, 1961 (Father’s Day). As Joanne describes it: “It was our adventure of early parenting, with all the joys and anxieties that attend it.”
Balancing his new role as a father with his studies, as well as his role at The Children’s Corner, Fred Rogers managed to earn top honors and a leading prize for homiletics, the art of preaching, at the seminary.6 The president of the seminary, Dr. Clifford E. Barbour, gave Fred a copy of his seminal work, Sin and the New Psychology, with the inscription: “My favorite and most brilliant student.”7
When Rogers graduated in 1963 with a master of divinity, after eight years of study, he got his degree magna cum laude, as he had from Rollins College.
Fred’s tenure at the seminary was during a time of deep dissension and controversy both for the Presbyterian Church in America and for the seminary itself. There were hard divisions between the very conservative United Presbyterian Church and the more liberal and progressive practitioners of the faith, and their battles were so hard-fought that they finally caused the seminary to appoint a special commission to release a set of recommendations to heal the divisions within the faculty and the institution.8
Rogers was always on the liberal side of this equation, and he later became a parishioner and sometime preacher at Pittsburgh’s Sixth Presbyterian Church, a famous bastion of the progressive. The Sixth Church emphasized inclusion, and it was known in part for welcoming gay and lesbian parishioners, a position that was wholeheartedly supported
by Joanne and Fred Rogers: “Fred was very happy in our [Sixth] Presbyterian Church because there are no exclusions,” recalls Joanne. “There’s no exclusivity. If there had been a church called ‘Reconciliation,’ I think he would have joined it.”
Joanne emphasizes Fred’s belief that religious faith should bring all sorts of people together, not pull them apart.
She recalls that Fred kept trying to arrange a date with a woman for one of the male friends they met at the Sixth Church, before their new friend finally told Fred and Joanne he really wasn’t interested: “Finally he said to Fred—about the third time they were together—he said, ‘You know, Fred, I’m gay.’ And Fred had no idea. It didn’t matter one way or the other.”9
Fred’s social leanings were strongly progressive, but he learned from both his seminary experience and his television role to be circumspect about his views. Fred’s nature was the opposite of quarrelsome, and he eschewed the endless left-right debates of the seminary. Some of his friends in Pittsburgh were disappointed that Fred didn’t speak out publicly on behalf of the disadvantaged or vocally champion tolerance and inclusion, the values in which he so fervently believed. But Rogers worried that such public posturing would cause confusion with the parents and children he reached on television. And he always felt that actions—kindness, understanding, and openness in relationships—were more important than words.
According to Dr. Andrew Purves, professor of reformed theology at the seminary, Fred’s political reticence stayed with him forever: “I don’t remember him ever speaking on the floor of the Pittsburgh Presbytery. . . . I have seen him at meetings of the Presbytery, just sitting quietly by himself.”10