The Good Neighbor

by Maxwell King

  Toward the end of the twentieth century, after some parents had taken this lesson a bit far in terms of permissiveness, there was a negative reaction to Spock and his lessons in some parts of popular culture. But the strongest criticism of Spock’s methods misses the point that he was redressing an imbalance in how children were viewed and raised. As Fred Rogers himself often noted, what works best is a fine balance between flexibility, creativity, structure, and discipline. And the best discipline is not punishment, but teaching a child the art of self-discipline.

  When Fred Rogers’s teachers at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary had the good sense to send him over to Margaret McFarland, he found the perfect environment in which to marry his creative work with high academic standards. Rogers took the teachings of McFarland, Spock, Erikson, and Brazelton and gave them a practical role in the real world of early childhood education. He gave their research immediacy and currency by thrusting it into the new world of television and popular culture.

  Eventually, it was Fred Rogers who taught multiple generations of American parents how very critical the first few years of human life could be, and how social and emotional learning is more important at that age than cognitive learning. More than any other popular voice in American culture, Fred Rogers taught this powerful lesson to parents, teachers, and to children themselves through his gentle, slow-paced but richly textured programming.

  McFarland’s approach to teaching graduate students from the medical school and other programs at Pitt was completely distinctive. Although she certainly cited leading thinkers in the field—like Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, and Anna Freud—and assigned their texts to be read by her students, her lectures were not lectures at all. Instead, they took two unusual forms for a university professor: stories or parables that conveyed her meaning through narrative, and discussions with parents and children about learning, which were held in the presence of McFarland’s students.

  Nancy Curry, who studied with Fred Rogers under McFarland and later became a professor at Pitt and a consultant to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, remembers the power of the McFarland method: “The field of child development . . . was relatively new. The literature, Margaret knew very, very well . . . and so that’s what we learned in our courses. That’s what Fred was learning, too.

  “Every week we would have a case conference up in the attic, where Fred would come, too, and we would discuss one child. Then psychologists would test the child, the teacher would report on the child, and then the consultant . . . would discuss what we had presented.

  “Nurses came, and doctors—I think they were first-year residents—came for a term. . . . Margaret would bring families into her classes and have us observe them and discuss them. And the families knew we were research people and they were neighborhood people, which is what Spock wanted . . . he wanted the neighborhood kids in the room.”10

  When McFarland brought families into the center, into the midst of a discussion among teachers, researchers, and students, she would always spend time in small talk with the parents to make sure they were relaxed and comfortable in the setting, and didn’t feel like guinea pigs.

  Once, she took the entire time allotted for the class in small talk about cooking with a young mother who seemed wary. Hedda Sharapan, one of the key staff members at Fred Rogers’s Family Communications, Inc. remembers: “But the story with Margaret is that she was doing a case study and had the physicians—medical students—lined up in her office to watch her discussion with a parent. There was a problem with the child. The woman came into the session late—the mother—and she said, ‘I am so sorry. I’ve been baking, and I forgot the time.’

  “So Margaret started talking to her about what she was baking—and this was a family recipe—and on and on and on, and only in the last few minutes did they actually talk about the little boy. And the medical students, afterward, said to Margaret, ‘You wasted all that time, talking about the cookies, the recipe.’ She said, ‘How could I ask them to trust my competency until I showed her that I trusted hers.’”11

  McFarland and Rogers shared this sensitivity to the feelings of other people. And they shared a great sensitivity to the impact of specific language, particularly with impressionable young children.

  Nancy Curry remembers how carefully and thoughtfully Dr. McFarland dealt with each detail of her studies with children: “She taught us to be careful observers, to use our empathy and our own experiences as children to understand the child we were observing, to relate these observations to psychodynamic theory, and then respond with clinical insights to children in our care. This method of teaching made working with and learning about children enriching and exciting.”12

  Dr. McFarland was a notoriously impetuous driver. Nancy Curry recalls an instructive instance: “One of my fondest memories was of Fred accompanying our class on a field trip to a wooded area that was beloved by Margaret from her own childhood. Fred arrived in his yachting whites [as a young man still under the influence of his parents, Rogers could be a much more dapper dresser than in later years] and agreed to drive half the children in his car while Margaret drove the others. Once on the parkway, we were amazed to be in the wake of a transformed Margaret who drove at such a speed and took such risks that Fred and I were both breathless and not a little terrified. Our relief at arriving became tempered by the daunting task of scaling an almost perpendicular hill in search of the waterfall where Margaret promised the children a surprise.”

  One of the children was particularly fearful. It was the 1950s, in the middle of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, and the child’s fears fixed on what he had heard from adults about the possibility of a nuclear bomb.

  “How can we see the mushroom-shaped cloud through all these trees if we are bombed?” he wailed.

  When Curry and Rogers finally got back to Fred’s car and began the harrowing job of following McFarland back to the Arsenal Center, “the little boy now was lying on the back seat, sucking his thumb . . . and clutching his penis,” recalled Curry. “Fred, exhausted and rumpled, muttered, ‘Leave him alone. It’s probably the happiest he’s been all day.’”13

  Curry and Rogers did appreciate McFarland’s serious nature as a scholar. But they and other students sometimes wearied of that serious side, particularly when Dr. McFarland would cite a seemingly endless stream of famous scholars to support her teaching. Eventually, Nancy Curry and Fred Rogers made up their own fictional early childhood expert to fill in when they couldn’t remember all their teacher’s citations.

  “It was hard to keep all the experts and their theories straight,” said Curry later, “so we invented an imaginary expert, ‘Orvetta Wells,’ a universal child theoretician to whom we could turn when we forgot to attribute some bit of wisdom: ‘As Orvetta Wells would say . . .’ we would mutter when a teacher would drop one too many names.”14

  According to David Newell, a.k.a. Mr. McFeely, one of the earliest cast members on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, McFarland’s very gentle, unassuming, and sweet manner was deceptive: “Margaret reminded me of a person who would work in a Fanny Farmer candy store! Little did people know that she held her own with Ben Spock and Erik Erikson.

  “She was no shrinking violet. She, like Fred, had [a] backbone of steel. For both of them, outward appearances were deceptive. . . . I think sometimes people interpreted them outwardly only.”15

  Nancy Curry agrees that Margaret McFarland only seemed soft: “Well, at first I thought she was like a saint. Nobody in my life had ever made me feel as good as she did. She had a very controlling side, quietly controlling. The guys at the Western Psych [a psychiatric hospital affiliated with the Arsenal Center] would say that she was ‘the iron fist in a velvet glove.’”16

  Eliot Daley, former head of the early Rogers for-profit company Small World Enterprises, notes that Rogers and McFarland shared similar childhood experiences and developed much the same nature as adults. These similarities of background and character are the
secret to how well they collaborated over the years. Daley thinks of Rogers and McFarland as studies in contrasts: sweet and innocent, but focused and sharply determined; each somewhat masculine and somewhat feminine (or “androgynous,” to use Daley’s term); caring and thoughtful about other people, but with a steely resolve about their own goals.

  “And, you know, he may have . . . actually absorbed some of that [character] from Margaret McFarland,” Daley said in an interview several decades after his work with Small World: “There’s a harmony there; there’s a resonance between. Fred spent so many hours with her.”17

  It was, in a way, an almost perfect partnership. Rogers brought an intense creativity and a worldly connection to the fields of television and entertainment. McFarland brought an academic rigor and authority that Rogers desperately wanted as the underpinning for his programming. Their work together was so intense that Rogers, uncharacteristically, ordered the doors locked and no interruptions from anyone else when they were closeted in one of their offices.18 And they sustained a great love and respect for each other throughout their decades together.

  Pittsburgh-born historian and writer David McCullough best described McFarland’s special skills as an instructor: “There was a wonderful professor of child psychology at the University of Pittsburgh named Margaret McFarland who was so wise that I wish her teachings and her ideas and her themes were much better known. She said that attitudes aren’t taught, they’re caught. If the teacher has an attitude of enthusiasm for the subject, the student catches that whether the student is in second grade or is in graduate school. She said that if you show them what you love, they’ll get it and they’ll want to get it.”19

  Fred Rogers remembered that when McFarland wanted to expose the little children at the Arsenal Center to the work of a sculptor, she gave these instructions to the artist she invited to visit her classes: “‘I don’t want you to teach sculpting. All I want you to do is to love clay in front of the children.’ And that’s what he did. He came once a week for a whole term, sat with the four- and five-year-olds as they played, and he ‘loved’ his clay in front of them. The children caught his enthusiasm for it, and that’s what mattered. Like most good things, teaching has to do with honesty.”20

  9.

  TORONTO AND THE CBC

  Francis Chapman studied English literature and philosophy at university in Canada, where he grew up, and he thought he might translate that into an academic career when he graduated. His father was an architect, his mother a concert pianist, and he was raised in a big house in Toronto full of people and talk and intellectual ferment. “There were six children, and it was a very full house. It was a very large house—my father, mother, grandmother, six kids, dogs and cats, and various hangers on who would come to stay,” he recalled years later.1

  The intellectual intensity of academia might well have suited him. But when it came time to go to work, Chapman balked at the formality of an academic life, and he plunged into something wholly new and different—television. It was the early 1950s, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) was just getting started, and Chapman was intrigued.

  “The first year of television for Canada came around,” said Chapman, “and I heard that there were openings on the stage crew. So I joined the stage crew ahead of considering an academic career because I thought this sounded like an interesting opportunity.”

  It paid off right away. Soon he was working as an assistant director. Then he got an opportunity to make what he called an “expedition” to Africa to use his directing skills to document stories there. “We produced a film and a recording of Pygmy music, later released by Folkways,” he said. “We drove . . . through France, and shipped across the Mediterranean to North Africa, to Ghana. . . . That was a very interesting time, because there were political upheavals in Ghana. We interviewed Kwame Nkrumah, who was about to be president of the new republic. And then we drove on to the Belgian Congo.”2

  All this was very heady stuff for the young Chapman, and he—quite accurately, as it turned out—envisioned an exciting future as a director of television and film.

  But suddenly one of the CBC bosses threw a curveball into this fledgling career. Chapman was back in Toronto, and Fred Rainsberry, a top CBC executive in charge of children’s programming, asked him to take on a rather odd role: in Chapman’s words, he was asked to “look after” a young television creator and performer from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Rainsberry told Chapman that Fred Rogers was “a treasure that ought to be taken care of.”

  Although Chapman was somewhat nonplussed by this unusual assignment, he took an immediate liking to Rogers: “I spoke to Fred on the telephone—that was the first time we met—and we very soon hit it off. He had a very nice sense of humor, but I was aware that he was very, very serious—extremely serious, about his work and that this was an important step in his work.”3

  In fact, it was this very intensity of purpose that led Fred Rogers to Canada and a newly minted career at the CBC. Toward the end of his studies at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Fred Rogers had ended his work on WQED’s The Children’s Corner to devote all his time to his school work, hoping to quickly finish at the seminary and become an ordained Presbyterian minister. At least, that was the story at the time.

  Years later, his wife, Joanne, would recall that he was becoming frustrated with The Children’s Corner and felt that he could fashion a much better program for young children based on his own experience and his studies in early education under Dr. Margaret McFarland. And he knew that his work with Josie Carey, as popular and successful as it had been, wasn’t the right road to his future.4

  According to Rogers’s later recollection, Rainsberry told him he had seen The Children’s Corner—and he had seen Fred speaking directly with children at a public appearance Rainsberry had attended. He was hoping to convince Rogers to come to the CBC to produce a daily fifteen-minute program for children. It seemed a godsend: Rogers would have the ample resources of the CBC to focus on high quality, and he would have the freedom to shape his own show.

  In a letter composed on May 12, 1958, Fred Rogers told Rainsberry of his excitement about his opera for children, Josephine the Short-Neck Giraffe, begun in Rogers’s student days at Rollins: “The script is nearly complete. It’s an ambitious work, but I believe it could be a spectacular work for the whole family.”

  Fred Rogers offers to swing by Toronto while on a summer road trip with Joanne if Rainsberry “might be interested in using this musical fantasy. One of the record companies in New York wants to record it, but I feel it should be produced as a live television drama or a fully animated cartoon before it’s put on disc.”5

  The two Freds hit it off, though clearly Josephine was not ideal for a fifteen-minute format. As we know now, Rogers’s student opera didn’t make it onto the air until 1989, when it was shown on the Neighborhood in a thirty-minute program. But in proposing this to Rainsberry, Fred Rogers presented himself as a self-confident musician and composer, articulating his ideas for ambitious future children’s programming as he wound down his role on The Children’s Corner.

  In 1960, Rogers’s whimsy kicks in as he writes to Rainsberry as “Doctor Painsteary”: “Joanne and I are expecting a little playmate for Jamie in June. We’d always hoped to have at least two children. Jamie’s such a dear; we just hope that his sister/brother will be just as good.”

  In a later letter to Rainsberry in 1961, Fred Rogers details his new courses at the seminary, including psychology and counseling (in a Freudian framework), as well as Old Testament theology. Clearly his studies, combined with the joys but also the anxieties of being a new parent, contributed to some unease.

  He tells Fred Rainsberry: “You’ll never know what your phone call did for my spirits the other night! It had been a long day of plannings and doings, and I had come home to wonder if man wasn’t really meant to just sit by his own fire, and develop a craft which could easily be carried out at home. Whittling was very tempting
at the moment (but I don’t know the first thing about whittling).”6

  Whittling aside, in 1962, Fred Rogers went ahead by himself to Toronto to see how a new show would work out before he moved Joanne and the two young boys to Canada. When Misterogers debuted in 1963, Jim was four. His younger brother, John, was two.

  The family didn’t make the move north until the show was well into production. Once Fred was comfortable with the CBC and the development of Misterogers, Joanne and the boys moved up to a rented house in Rosedale, an affluent section of Toronto directly north of downtown, not far from the CBC studios. Both Joanne and Fred later remembered Toronto as a wonderful place to live, and they fit into their new neighborhood, where there were plenty of parks for young boys to play.

  Fred Rogers saw a great deal of Francis Chapman’s large family in the year before his own family arrived, and he became friends with all of them. One of the reasons Rogers fit so well into the family was music, as Chapman later recalled: “In a very primitive way, I played a little bit of violin. One of my brothers played the cello; my sister played viola and piano and violin. There was always music in the house.”7

  Rogers played the piano with Chapman’s mother, who had trained as a concert pianist in England where she had grown up, and with the rest of this extended family. And Chapman threw himself into his assignment of helping Fred Rogers and Fred Rainsberry achieve their goals for children’s television. That job, Chapman later remembered, was “to help Fred realize his own dream of a very serious series addressing the needs of young children, and of addressing their fears and providing on the television screen a kind of comfort and a home.”8

  But this program was going to be different, because Fred Rainsberry had a surprise for Fred Rogers: He wanted Rogers to come out from behind the puppet stage and appear in person on television. Except for a couple of very brief appearances on the Corner, Rogers had rarely appeared on camera, and he didn’t want to. He was naturally unassuming, even somewhat shy, and he was most comfortable behind the scenes and behind his puppets. Asked years later whether Rainsberry easily persuaded him to appear, Rogers said firmly, “No.”