The Good Neighbor

by Maxwell King

  Fred Rogers continued: “When I got to Canada, Fred Rainsberry said, ‘I want you to be on camera; I’ve seen you talk with kids.’ And I said, ‘Oh, I thought you wanted me to come and do puppets and music, which is what I’ve always done.’

  “He said, ‘No, you can do that, too. But I want you to look into the lens, and just pretend that’s a child, and we’ll just call it Misterogers. Let’s just do that.’”9

  Fred Rogers was attracted to the fact that while Rainsberry was a professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto, he also was head of children’s programming for the CBC.

  In turn, Fred Rainsberry was sure that Fred Rogers’s authenticity as a person would come through on camera, and he was adamant about Rogers giving it a try. Like Rogers himself, Rainsberry had become convinced through his academic work that television had the potential to be an important educational tool, if properly conceived and managed to the highest standards.

  According to his son-in-law, “Fred Rainsberry was a fierce foe of schlock, and a guardian against children being seen as another market segment of consumers. Canadian children’s television in the 1950s and 1960s was kinder, gentler—and usually a lot more fun and emotionally connected—than its American counterparts because Fred Rainsberry was committed to that philosophy.”10

  So here was a well-connected television executive who shared Rogers’s antipathy to the exploitation of children, who had the resources to enable Rogers to pursue his vision, and who had sought out Fred in Pittsburgh.

  What’s more, Rainsberry had become something of a student of the nascent early childhood education movement. He shared with Fred Rogers one of the books on child development he had been reading, and finally he convinced Rogers to appear on camera to see if that could become one of the important ways in which, together, they could advance educational television.11

  The new showcase for Fred Rogers’s talent was an instant success. Misterogers, a fifteen-minute, daily show taped in black and white, debuted on the CBC in 1963 and ran until 1967. It was a miniature version of what would later become the half-hour Neighborhood. Many of the elements that would distinguish Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in Pittsburgh—the trolley, the cardigan sweater, the puppets, the music, the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, the gentle, reassuring tone of Fred Rogers—were part of the show, distributed nationally in Canada.

  Francis Chapman recalls extensive discussions with Rogers about the separation between elements of the program: “Well, he didn’t want the children to confuse make-believe with reality. Therefore, he wanted a definite transition saying, ‘We’re going from this to that. This is one world, that is another, but it’s a play world.’”12

  Chapman later felt that the very depth of Rogers’s own involvement in creating Misterogers—writing the scripts, performing the puppets, writing and performing the music, directing and producing the show—insulated him from his fears about performing. That is, Fred Rogers was so intent on shaping a good program that he didn’t even think about portraying a character—he was just Fred being Fred.

  “Well, it was really very, very simple,” recalls Chapman, “because Fred was so totally honest, a naturally honest person—I don’t mean that acting is not honest. He just couldn’t be anything but himself. He managed that very, very comfortably and easily, once he found that what he did was accepted by the people around him. The studio people found it difficult at first—Fred seemed almost too good to be true—but they very quickly discovered that he was as true as he seemed. He was so focused on doing the right thing by his audience that he wasn’t anxious.”13

  The other strong element of the show that later appeared in Pittsburgh was Rogers’s emphasis on the fears and insecurities of young children. He frequently talked to Rainsberry about his work with Dr. McFarland, emphasizing their strong belief that good programming for children must address social and emotional needs, not just cognitive learning.

  According to Chapman, “He . . . would tell me what theme or the fundamental message was that he wanted to get across—or the fear, the childhood fear, that he wanted to address. It . . . was all Fred’s. I would be a sounding board, but it was Fred’s instincts that ultimately decided everything.

  “Ultimately, it all sprang from his own childhood recollections and, I suppose, his sufferings as a child, even though he had good parents. He was extremely sensitive, and now it was his turn to help other children come through.”14

  Rainsberry, Chapman, and the CBC gave Rogers his first real opportunity to take the concepts from the Arsenal Center and put them to work on TV. What’s more, Rogers suddenly had access to the sort of resources he could only have dreamed of at WQED.

  In fact, the trolley and castle were created for the Canadian program by CBC designers and in collaboration with producer Bruce Attridge. Francis Chapman explains, “We had very good facilities: magnificent carpentry shops and special-effects shops at the CBC. That was one thing that Fred was luxuriating in; he had a much better budget and materials to work with than he had had previously in Pittsburgh. . . . Owl had his house and King Friday had his castle, and the castle wall.”15

  Another thing that predominated in this new environment—and that would also become a hallmark of Rogers’s later work—was Fred’s extraordinary focus and intensity. “We would do fifteen minutes in the morning, and fifteen minutes in the afternoon,” says Chapman, explaining the taping sessions for the quarter-hour slots. “It was tight, and it was only possible because Fred was so disciplined. He had his schedule and knew exactly when he had to have a script ready. He worked from home when he was writing, and he was very disciplined about his work. He would get up at a certain hour and go through the scripts.”

  With the help of Rainsberry and Chapman, Rogers could control every aspect of the show, including the selection of the cast. “We sometimes used the casting department of CBC,” says Chapman, “but of course we auditioned them ourselves. I had had a lot of dealings with the drama department, so I knew quite a few actors, and I would suggest certain people.”16 But Rogers could also demonstrate unexpected flexibility. When the show’s keyboard operator suddenly died, Fred accepted a substitute who was quite macho and aggressive and seemed incompatible with Mister Rogers. The reason: he was a very skilled musician, and Rogers respected that.

  Fred Rogers and Francis Chapman worked so closely together that even after collaborating all day, they would often talk on the phone after work. Once when Chapman got a ride home with Rogers, Fred brought his two young sons, Jim and John, along for the drive.

  As Chapman was getting out of the car, he and Rogers continued discussing several aspects of the show. Finally, growing impatient with this ceaseless talk about work, five-year-old Jim asked, “Uncle Francis, does it always take this long to say good-bye?”17

  As was so often the case with Fred Rogers and the people with whom he worked, Chapman and Rogers became fast friends; Chapman later visited Fred and Joanne Rogers in Pittsburgh and at their vacation house on Nantucket.

  Already, the intensity of his devotion to work was taking a toll on Fred Rogers. Chapman remembers that early on, Rogers was seeing a psychiatrist for advice: “He underwent psychoanalysis, but I don’t remember what he learned from the psychoanalysis. I think he told me once that his analyst had found him so interesting that he took him on for free—which wasn’t necessary for Fred, but it was nice.”

  At the core of Rogers’s issues was a tension between his dutiful side and his creativity. He consulted the psychiatrist Dr. Albert V. Corrado for much of his adult life, and recommended him to close friends.18 One of the things Chapman recalls about Fred’s treatment was that Rogers said his sessions with the psychiatrist sometimes focused on the concept of the Oedipus complex, a fixation on a parent of the opposite sex.

  And Rogers had shared with his wife, Joanne, how much he had struggled as a boy navigating between the very different expectations of his gentle mother and his businessman father. He felt he benefited from a chance
to step back in his sessions with Dr. Corrado and gain perspective on the day-to-day elements of his intensely focused and deliberate life. Later, Fred Rogers also consulted Dr. Corrado with some regularity on scripts for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.19

  Joanne and Fred Rogers loved Toronto overall, but their time there was difficult in terms of parenting, mostly because of a series of mishaps that plagued the life of young John Rogers. In Rosedale Park, where Joanne loved to play with her two young sons, John fell off a set of climbing bars for children and broke his jaw.

  As older brother Jim remembers it: “He had to wear a jacket to sleep in, basically, that had one sleeve that—all the way around the sleeve, there were wooden slats that ran from shoulder to wrist, and the reason was so that he couldn’t bend his arm to suck his thumb, which would have messed with the broken jaw. I just remember feeling so bad for him.”20

  No sooner had John’s jaw healed than he pulled over a pot of boiling coffee and badly burned his leg. When Joanne got the boys to Nantucket, she had to try to keep John from swimming in the ocean, which the whole family loved, to keep the bandage on his leg dry.21

  Then when they got back to Canada, John needed surgery to repair hernias in his abdomen and in his groin, which proved to be a great trial to him and to his father. Although the surgery, which took place in a hospital in Toronto, was successful, it had a disastrously traumatic effect on young John, and on Fred as well. The operation was long and difficult for such a young child. John was very frightened, and that fright intensified when the staff chose not to give him any sedation before they started procedures. Joanne later recalled that when nurses pricked John’s finger to take blood, Fred was with him.

  “They needed a blood test,” said Joanne, “and Fred said he was just terrified, and he held him and talked to him soothingly while they did that. So, he was just settled down back with us again when they came and said it was time to go, and they just grabbed him and took him. He was screaming and crying.”22

  The hospital staff, some of whom seemed to Fred and his young son to be laughing and joking while this went on, would not let Fred go with his son. It took them forty-five minutes in the operating room to anesthetize the traumatized little boy. The vision of his young child, panicked and screaming for his father as he was taken down the hall, haunted the hypersensitive Fred Rogers for the rest of his life.

  Fred’s older son, Jim Rogers, later recalled that his father felt guilty for years that he had not been able to help John. That same sort of guilt had shown itself earlier when Rogers’s older son was barely a year old, in Florida with the family on vacation.

  As the story was relayed to him later: “Mom . . . had taken me down by the water’s edge and was holding me, and a big wave came in and pulled me out of her arms and out into the surf. Dad frantically ran out and managed somehow to grab a hold of my foot and drag me out of the water. It must have been a terrifying thing for him.

  “He would often say to me, ‘Oh, you swim so well, and I’m surprised that you would even go near the water after what happened to you.’ And I just remember thinking, ‘Well, you know, it was scary for you. I don’t remember it, so it doesn’t really bother me.’”23

  The trauma younger son John suffered in the hospital in Toronto led to several years of his being quite accident-prone and fearful, according to psychiatrists who saw the boy after he returned to Pittsburgh.

  As Joanne Rogers remembers it: “John went to nursery school over at the Arsenal. And he just showed a lot of anxiety. So we asked if the psychiatrist there, who was training psychiatrists in work with children . . . if he would watch John. Margaret (McFarland) suggested it.” Joanne adds that John acted out the entire surgery for the doctor.

  Fred Rogers never really got over feeling terrible about John’s surgery. John himself recalls not his surgery, but an accident-prone aftermath, at ages “five, six, seven, maybe eight years old”: “One thing I remember . . . that was quite troubling, was slamming my hand with the car door a few times in a row, and it got to the point where my parents wouldn’t allow me to close the car door. There must have been something in my unconscious that affected me.”24

  Through the years of producing Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Fred took every opportunity to create programming—some of it regular episodes and some of it special material—that would constructively deal with the fears of young children, so that parents and teachers and hospital staff, and the young children themselves, might get as much helpful information as possible. Some of his teaching videos about going to the hospital are still used at prominent hospitals, like Bellevue in New York City.

  In 1966, Fred and Joanne Rogers decided to move back to Pittsburgh. As their visas were about to expire, they faced a decision about becoming Canadian citizens. Quickly they agreed that they wanted to raise their sons as US citizens, and that Pittsburgh would be a great, family-oriented city in which to do so. And the whole family was a little homesick for western Pennsylvania.

  Certainly, John and Fred’s experience in the hospital in Toronto factored into this decision. Once he returned to Pittsburgh, Fred went out of his way to work with hospital staff at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh to ensure that young children were treated with the utmost sensitivity.

  Fred Rogers would return to the US with invaluable experience as a writer, puppeteer, host, and producer of just the sort of show he had hoped to make. It became the template for the public television program in the United States that would make Fred famous as an educator of young children. But he also went back to the US with one of the worst memories of his life.

  Fred Rogers seldom got angry. But his associates at Family Communications, Inc., later reported more than one incident in which he became absolutely furious if he thought he observed hospital staff being thoughtless and insensitive with young children. “To think that one morning in a hospital can cripple two-year-olds emotionally,” said Rogers years later in a speech to a family court association. “What I’ve come to appreciate more and more, the older I get, is the long-lasting effects of things that happen to us in childhood.”25

  But there was a problem with Fred’s plan to move back to Pittsburgh: He had no job there, and no prospect of one. Fred would be giving up a promising career at the CBC and going back to a very uncertain future in Pennsylvania. But once again the Rogers family fortune gave Fred the freedom to pursue life and work where he wanted. He and his family bought a huge house in the fashionable East End of Pittsburgh on Beechwood Boulevard—a mansion by Pittsburgh standards at that time, at eleven thousand square feet—and hoped for the best.

  They sent the two boys off to private school in the city. Joanne was very happy to be back and to have her boys in school in an American city. For his part, Fred was somewhat at loose ends, hoping that WQED would find the funds to produce a children’s program that would provide a vehicle for his ideas, his music, and his puppets. To stay busy, and stay involved in early education, Fred worked as a volunteer with children at preschool classes in the Bellefield Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh’s Oakland section, where he used his puppets to teach children. He observed their reactions to his work carefully to see what connected with real children in a live setting.

  The University of Pittsburgh and WQED were located nearby, and he could stay in touch with Dr. Margaret McFarland at the Arsenal Center and his associates at the television station. But nothing encouraging was developing at WQED, and in the fall of 1966, Fred Rogers was beginning to worry about his future in broadcasting.

  PART III

  All our lives, we rework the things from our childhood, like feeling good about ourselves, managing our angry feelings, being able to say good-bye to people we love.

  —FRED ROGERS

  10.

  THE BIRTH OF MISTER ROGERS’ NEIGHBORHOOD

  When Fred Rogers got back to western Pennsylvania in the fall of 1966, he wasn’t at all sure where his career was going, or how he could bring it back to life in Pittsburgh. He
was confused about where he could find support for the kind of children’s television he wanted to make: Would WQED or the Eastern Educational Network (EEN) help with funding? The EEN, incorporated in 1961, was a regional cooperative that exchanged shows like The French Chef (with Julia Child) among its member stations. Eventually it morphed into NET (National Educational Television, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, and later partially owned by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting). In 1970, it became PBS (the Public Broadcasting Service).

  Were there foundations willing to bankroll Rogers’s ideas based on his experience so far in children’s television? All he knew for sure was that he and Joanne wanted to raise their two boys in Pittsburgh, near Latrobe, where he grew up and where his family still lived. Still, with nothing encouraging developing at WQED, he couldn’t help but feel that his promising television career was stalling out.

  In the 1960s, most children’s television was light and breezy, devoted largely to fun. Shows like Howdy Doody, Captain Kangaroo, and Lunch with Soupy Sales all focused on entertaining the young members of the audience and keeping them in their seats, as well as selling lots of branded products to kids in the TV audience.

  With the advantage of family wealth, Fred Rogers could bide his time to make his mark in children’s television. And he had one other great advantage: He knew exactly what he wanted to do. Based on his experiences in New York, Pittsburgh, and Toronto, Fred had developed a crystal-clear vision of the sort of program he wanted: one where he could take his work with music, puppeteering, scriptwriting, and storytelling and marry it to the strong principles of child development he had learned from McFarland, Dr. Benjamin Spock, and others at the Arsenal Center.