by Maxwell King
And though he was at times quite frustrated with the Pittsburgh Presbytery and the Presbyterian Church itself, he stuck with it in large part because of the strong western-Pennsylvania, Scots-Irish, Presbyterian culture that had nurtured his family for decades. It was a culture that was bred to the bone in Fred Rogers, as it was to so many of the boys and girls growing up in western Pennsylvania in the middle of the last century.
The Pittsburgh essayist and poet Annie Dillard remembered that her childhood was defined, in part, by church, Bible camp, and the very serious and sometimes dour example of the Presbyterian elders who populated her East End neighborhood.
Even the architecture reinforced the notion of a severe and sober world: “The church building, where the old Scots-Irish families assembled weekly, was a Romanesque chunk of rough, carved stone and panes of dark slate. Covered in creeper, long since encrusted into its quietly splendid site, it looked like a Scottish rock in the rain. Everywhere outside and inside the church and parish hall, sharp carved things rose from the many dim tons of stone. . . . If your bare hand or arm brushed against one of the stone walls carelessly, the stone would draw blood.”11
The Presbyterian values—hard work, responsibility and caring for others, parsimony, duty to family, ethical clarity, a strong sense of mission, and a relentless sense of service to God—drove every moment of Fred Rogers’s life. Though an artist at heart—writing scripts, operas, musical scores, creating puppets and tales of fantasy—he could never escape a life of duty. The miracle is that he so wonderfully, so successfully, put the two together.
David McCullough, the Pittsburgh-raised historian and author who knew and appreciated Fred Rogers, emphasized the importance of Rogers’s ability to bring his creativity down to the practical level of producing extraordinary television: “I’ve always liked writing about people who made something,” said McCullough. “He made something.”
McCullough, who grew up in the same time, region, and culture as Fred, adds that a key to understanding Rogers is the western Pennsylvania work ethic: “The Pittsburgh work ethic is not a Puritan work ethic. In Pittsburgh, if you were a good worker, you were respected, you were welcome.”12 The Puritan ethic could be a bit abstemious and pinched; while the Scots-Irish, Pittsburgh ethic is more inclusive, expansive, and appreciative of a strong commitment to work.
One of the most influential people in Fred’s spiritual life was Dr. William Orr, the chain-smoking seminary professor who focused on the New Testament, loved more than anything to debate theology with his students, particularly Fred Rogers, and came as close to anyone Fred had known to being a living saint. When Rogers first arrived at the seminary, he asked the staff in the admissions office: “If you were starting your theological education right here and now, and you had time to take only one course, what would that course be?” He knew that his commitment to WQED would mitigate any greater course load.
As Rogers explained, “They didn’t even hesitate, ‘Oh, Bill Orr’s Systematic Theology,’ they said unanimously.
“Thus began a lifelong friendship. For the next eight years, three or four days a week, I would leave the frantic life of television production and drive to the seminary to study with a person who not only taught Christian theology—he lived it. Oh, we learned about epistemology and Christology, and eschatology, sanctification, and justification, and existentialism, but most of all, we witnessed the unfolding of the life of one of God’s saints.”13
More than once, Rogers saw Dr. Orr leave for lunch on a winter’s day and come back without his overcoat, having given it to someone he encountered living on the street. Orr told Rogers not to worry: He had other coats back home. With everyone at the seminary, students and faculty alike, Orr was willing to give freely of his time, his books, his money, or anything that was needed.
Rogers found Orr, with his emphasis on kindness and caring and his deep belief in forgiveness, to be an example of how to live, and Fred decided to work hard to emulate his professor. When Rogers asked Orr what was the most important word in his theology, Orr replied that the word forgiveness was paramount because it alone could defeat the Devil.
“One little word shall fell him,” Bill Orr told his student, who adopted the idea of forgiveness as the essence of human kindness. Rogers was strongly influenced by Orr to try to lead a life dedicated to human kindness, and he also found inspiration in Orr’s principle of “guided drift.”14
As explained by the Reverend William Barker, a friend and seminary mate of Rogers, Dr. Orr’s philosophy was that one needed to live a life that was open to change and serendipity, that embraced the possibilities of life rather than the confines of a rigid set of rules.
“Once Bill Orr was talking about the Christian life, one in which you’re kind of going along on a stream,” said Bill Barker, nearly half a century later in an interview. “You can put out some poles from time to time to keep from bumping into the logs or hitting the banks, but primarily you guide yourself along. Still, it’s with a sense that you’re being carried along in ways you’re perhaps unaware of.”15
This notion of “guided drift,” that we’re guided by our principles but are also free to embrace the flow of life, was one Fred Rogers made his own and shared with friends for the rest of his life. It strongly influenced his willingness to experiment and take chances in his career.
Rogers remembered Dr. Orr as so focused on his teaching that he was forgetful of virtually everything else around him: “Talk about absentminded, as far as outside things were concerned. I mean, he’d come into the room—he was a smoker—and he would flick his ash in the wastebasket. One time it caught fire. He was lecturing, and he just took his foot and put the fire out. He didn’t skip one syllable—just kept on talking.”16
Fred got such pleasure from listening to Orr, and watching him perform, that he used to come back to the seminary years after graduation to attend his old teacher’s lectures.17 Rogers offered a simple explanation: “You know how, when you find somebody who you know is in touch with the truth . . . you want to be in the presence of that person.”18
Andrew Purves remembered that after retirement, Bill Orr became confined to a nursing home, suffering the ill effects of his years of smoking. Fred Rogers visited him at least once a week for several years. Dr. Purves, who referred to Fred’s visits to Orr as examples of the “covenantal faithfulness that Fred Rogers represented,” marveled at how thoroughly the student had become the teacher.
Certainly, Orr’s appeal to Fred Rogers derived from his intellect and his ability to explain theology and scripture to the younger man. But it was the example of Orr—someone living a Christian life Rogers could emulate—that was the real draw.
Another Rogers friend, the Reverend George Wirth of the First Presbyterian Church of Atlanta, explains: “For Fred, Dr. Orr was one of the great mentors of his life, because Dr. Orr, a world-renowned Biblical scholar, one of the top theologians and professors in the seminary, was one of the most humble, approachable, loving people you could find. Fred’s life was like Will Orr’s life: great things, but never self-centered or self-aggrandizing, or self-anything. Father to son, in one sense; but brother to brother—older brother to younger brother—in another.”19
Inevitably there were those at the seminary who compared Bill Orr to Christ—and others, later, who made the same comparison of Orr’s student, Fred Rogers. Both men were dismayed at such suggestions, but the comparisons were persistent.
Dr. William Hirsch, a friend of Fred and Joanne from the Sixth Presbyterian Church who also knew Orr, chose to focus on the distinction Dr. Orr made between the Old Testament and the New Testament: “Well, if you met Christ, what would he be like? If you really think about that, he wouldn’t be like your grandmother that was always just cooking you cookies, and patting you on the head. I think Fred had the qualities of Christ—the mother nature and the father nature.
“You know, that’s why I think Jesus is really what God is, not the father God that is so scary
. Dr. Orr used to say that the God of the Old Testament was more like the Devil than God, this creature that brought down fire and picked and chose who he was going to love and not love. But Fred had that feminine quality of mother love and acceptance, and no matter what you did, he loved you.
“So what would Christ be like? He would be like Fred. He would encourage you to do things that were right and would help other people.”20
The Reverend Burr Wishart, who worked with Fred Rogers during the years that Wishart ran The Pittsburgh Foundation, which provided some of the funding for the Neighborhood, shared Hirsch’s feeling: “I would lay him down against most of the prophets I know about from the Bible. I think he stands right up with the best of them. Fred preached. He was so talented at addressing the issues of morality and truth and caring and love and forgiveness, all the values that moral assumptions cover. He did it every day on the tube in various extraordinary ways. I loved not only his direct talk about some issue important to kids like bed-wetting; there was always a truth coming out. That’s delicious.
“He would take offense at it, but he was the most Christlike human being I have ever encountered.”21
Lisa Dormire, who worked on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and later served as a vice president of the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, saw the comparison of Rogers and Jesus in terms of authenticity: “I think he had very Christlike qualities, and that is part of what drew children. Children know a fraud more than anyone. . . . I truly believe he was one of the most authentic and Christlike people that I have ever known in my life. Just his manner. His ability to listen. . . . Everyone you talk to that had any encounter with him: It was a real moment in their lives.”22
Interestingly, Rogers himself saw Jesus’s strength more in terms of Jesus’s authenticity as a real person than his mythological power as the son of God. In his occasional sermons, Fred Rogers would marvel at how genuine Jesus’s childhood was: “And like so many other teenagers absorbed in their own pressing, growing needs, Jesus got scolded and went home with his parents.
“All this is to say that Jesus, the Christ, the Son of the Living God, was not only born a baby, he grew through all the stages of becoming an adult human being that each one of us grows through. He felt the pains of separations, the shames of being scolded, the joys of knowing that he was worthwhile, the frustrations of trying to convince people of the truth, as well as the angers that everyone knows.
“You see, I believe that Jesus gave us an eternal truth about the universality of feelings. Jesus was truthful about his feelings: Jesus wept; he got sad; Jesus got discouraged; he got scared; and he reveled in the things that pleased him. For Jesus, the greatest sin was hypocrisy. He always seemed to hold out much greater hope for a person who really knew the truth about himself or herself even though that person was a prostitute or a crooked tax collector. Jesus had much greater hope for someone like that than for someone who always pretended to be something he wasn’t.”23
Fred Rogers felt that part of the authenticity, the realness, that Jesus achieved came from his skillful use of storytelling. During his life, Jesus turned more and more often to the use of parables. At one point, he literally did all his teaching through them, taking everyday problems and situations and transforming them into short, vivid, compelling moral lessons. The most famous is that of “The Prodigal Son.” Jesus understood, as did Fred Rogers, that a message delivered in story form is much more powerful than a sermon or an admonition.
In a speech in the early 1990s to a group of educators who worked with very young children, Fred Rogers employed storytelling to make the point that it is almost always a mistake to stifle the joyfulness of a child, even in the most serious setting. Fred told a story from his own life: “Last month I went to Cleveland for my Aunt Alberta Rogers’s funeral. Aunt Bert was a very old lady who had lived a wonderfully full life. People of all ages felt comfortable with her because she was always herself. At any rate, after the service, all the family and friends gathered in the social hall of the church; and, as everyone was looking at pictures and reminiscing about the times we had had with Aunt Bert, one of her great-grandchildren—four-year-old Helen—started to do cartwheels across the floor of the social hall. And she did them very well.
“I learned that she had been going to gymnastics class ever since she was two years old—ever since a very wise doctor had suggested that class (rather than Ritalin) for this super-active girl. It was obvious that she had caught her gymnastics enthusiasm for the sport and she was well on her way to using it to express who she was and how she was feeling. I thought how pleased Aunt Alberta would be to see her little Helen doing that—especially right then! Doing cartwheels in the church! Dealing with her loss as she celebrated the life of her very special great-grandmother.”24
In a way, it was serendipity that led Fred Rogers to Dr. Margaret McFarland, another great storyteller whose teaching methods employed narratives prominently. When the staff at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary asked Fred, about halfway through his studies there, what sort of ministry he envisioned for himself, they were surprised to learn that Rogers hoped to find a way to make his television work a ministry to children. Nothing like that had ever been fashioned from Presbyterian fabric, and Fred’s teachers were somewhat at a loss to know how to guide him.
But one of them came up with the idea that if Fred was to find a way to work with children, he needed to study child development as well as religion. It was suggested that Fred could benefit from working with Dr. McFarland at her Arsenal Family & Children’s Center, which she had established in the 1950s in the Lawrenceville section of Pittsburgh. Fred Rogers’s studies under Dr. McFarland’s tutelage led to a lifelong collaboration between the two that changed the trajectory of Fred’s work and had a profound impact on the future Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
As much as anything, it was Margaret McFarland’s example that inspired Fred Rogers’s embrace of storytelling as a central device for teaching. Associates of Dr. McFarland at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine sometimes marveled at the sheer number of stories that McFarland came up with to transmit her instruction. Sometimes it seemed as if she really couldn’t just come out and tell you something; it had to be embedded in a tale.25
When Rogers finally graduated from the seminary with a master of divinity degree in 1963, he had also completed several years of study under McFarland and other Arsenal Center experts. Fred Rogers felt that he was ready to take his new ministry back to television to serve children.
But he got a surprise: the elders of the Pittsburgh Presbytery didn’t agree. Despite the course of Fred’s studies, and the case he made for working with children, the elders felt he should follow a traditional path: He should go to a church and become an assistant pastor and then work his way up to the top post and deliver sermons on Sundays. The local Presbytery had the authority to rule on any such assignment, and Fred was stuck.
But he was determined not to give in. He didn’t want to take over a church, and he particularly didn’t want to give sermons. He was very comfortable on television, but he got nervous and decidedly uncomfortable in the pulpit. Jeanne Barker, wife of the Reverend Bill Barker and, like her husband, a lifelong friend of Fred and Joanne Rogers, remembered that Fred always resisted giving sermons: “I remember once they [the teachers at the seminary] sent him out to preach at church. He was so shy about having to stand up and preach. He got really tense, having to stand in a pulpit.”26
When Bill Barker was about to be installed as the minister of a new church, he asked his good friend Fred Rogers to come and give the installation sermon, a lesson that would set the tone for Barker’s tenure as pastor. But Fred was so nervous in the pulpit, Bill and Jeanne remembered, that the tone he set was more about tension than anything else.
According to Bill Barker, the leaders of the Pittsburgh Presbytery were very conservative and lacked the imagination to see the potential of Fred Rogers’s idea. Barker, who had attended the seminary a
t the beginning of Fred’s time there and was now teaching part-time at the seminary, got frustrated: He decided he would go to bat for his friend and directly challenge the elders of the church. “I had to convince the Pittsburgh Presbytery eventually. They had the traditional idea that if you are going to be ordained as a Presbyterian minister, you are going to be in a pulpit, you are going to wear a black robe, and you are going to stand up there at eleven on Sunday morning, you know, the whole routine.”
In speaking out this way, Barker was risking his own position in the church, as well as the possibility of creating more animosity among the elders toward Fred.
Bill Barker invited himself into one of the meetings of the Presbytery and made an impassioned plea for Rogers’s ministry to children: “Look, here’s an individual who has his pulpit proudly in front of a TV camera. His congregation are little people from the ages of about two or three on up to about seven or eight. And this is a whole congregation of hundreds of thousands if not millions of kids, and this is a man who has been authentically called by the Lord as much as any of you guys sitting out there.”27
It worked. The elders relented, and somewhat reluctantly approved Fred’s plan to try to build his own Presbyterian ministry through television. At the time, it was the most unusual plan for a young minister to come out of any local Presbytery in the United States. When Fred was ordained, he turned again to his friend Bill Barker to give the charge at his ordination ceremony.
As Rogers recalled years later, Barker laid it on thick, partly for the benefit of the church elders, about the fact that now Fred’s “pulpit will not be so much the traditional piece of oak wood up in front of a group of pews there, but in front of a camera, a TV camera, that red eye that you see in the studio on those two or three cameras that are being moved around. . . . I was telling him, and trying to tell the church, too, that this was Fred’s very unique form of serving God.”28
On a subsequent trip to Scotland, Bill Barker bought two Presbyterian-clergy tartan ties, a traditional pattern that signified an ordained minister of the church, and gave one to Fred. Ever thankful to his brother minister, Fred Rogers wore the tie for years to come, including during some of his television tapings. Later, at the end of his life, Fred chose to be buried in the tie. But as successful as Barker had been in standing up for his friend, the leaders of the Pittsburgh Presbytery were unmoved on another front. Not long after Fred was ordained, he applied for funds to advance his television ministry. No dice: The elders ruled that they were not going to devote any of the Presbytery’s resources to television. Neither Fred nor Bill Barker could change the elders’ minds.