by Maxwell King
A precise picture of what would become Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was lodged in Fred Rogers’s head, and the intensity of this picture was matched by his own rock-hard determination to get it done. Outwardly, Fred might seem to be underemployed and adrift, and his parents—particularly his father—were worried about him. Inwardly, he had never been more sure of his course.
But he was going to have to figure out how to garner the support necessary to do it. Then he got a call from a local advertising executive, George Hill, the chief of his own eponymous agency.1 Among his clients was the Joseph Horne Department Store in Pittsburgh (a local business where Andy Warhol had worked in the display department in the summer of 1947).
Joseph Horne wanted to have a program on the air between Thanksgiving and Christmas that could attract families and children and bring them into Horne’s rather than their chief competitor, the somewhat better-known Kaufmann’s Department Store. (The Kaufmanns famously contracted with Frank Lloyd Wright to design Falling-water, their country retreat.)
Someone in Hill’s agency mentioned Fred Rogers and his work in Toronto. “I said, ‘Well, I don’t know Fred Rogers, but I’ll call him,’” recalled Hill.2
Hill and Rogers had lunch in Horne’s dining room; Rogers recounted his work history in Canada and his vivid ideas for children’s television. Soon they were on the cusp of a deal. But then Fred told Hill there was a nonnegotiable condition: no commercials. This was a novel concept for the chief of an advertising agency, whose client wanted to attract customers. But Rogers was intractable: He believed it was immoral to present ads to little children, who were not capable of distinguishing between a program and the commercial that was selling them something. Rogers did not object to marketing to adults, only to children.
Remarkably enough, the leaders of the department store agreed that the program would have no advertising for Horne’s, just a line telling viewers that Horne’s was the sponsor of this children’s program at the beginning and end of each show. And equally unexpectedly, it worked: “Horne’s got all kinds of rave reviews as a result,” said Hill, who explained that the positive publicity for Horne’s did as much or more for the store than advertising could have done.3
Fred had gotten the chance to try out his new ideas during his time at the CBC—and with a push from Fred Rainsberry, to begin shaping his role as “Mister Rogers” in front of a camera. But the Canadian program, though successful, could not fulfill Rogers’s ambition. Fred was working for Rainsberry and the CBC, not for himself. He wanted to use his connection to the Arsenal Center to advance his high-minded ideas, and he wanted to do it on his own turf, working closely with Dr. Margaret McFarland. Fred Rogers wanted to run his own show.
The program with Horne’s turned into a run of thirteen fifteen-minute episodes, with the full sponsorship of the store. They were taped at Pittsburgh’s ABC affiliate, WTAE, and aired on Sunday mornings.
At the time, guitarist and composer Joe Negri (later Handyman Negri on the Neighborhood) was providing music on other children’s shows at the station: “In the afternoon, we had cartoon shows, like Popeye and Friends. I’d sit and talk with the cub scouts and the girl scouts who were the audience.
“My second year at WTAE, he [Fred] came over to do a . . . program I thought was the prototype of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, which was to come later. I was put on the show to be his musical director. I would help supply the music for the backgrounds.
“Then a few shows in, he said, ‘How would you like to walk through the Neighborhood and just talk to some of the puppets?’ So, I started doing that with X the Owl, King Friday, Henrietta Pussycat.”4
As Rogers assembled the elements for the new show, with George Hill’s guidance and support, he would get his shot. For the first time, Fred Rogers could create just the program he envisioned. Of course, the educational material and the emotional messages in the program, initially called Misterogers’ Neighborhood (carrying over the title of the CBC show), came from Fred’s work with Margaret McFarland.5
The rest of the program flowed straight out of Rogers’s life: from his childhood, his family, and the small town of Latrobe. It flowed out of the attic of his parents’ house on Weldon Street, where a small, shy elementary-school child amused a handful of playmates with his puppets; and from the streets of Latrobe, where the young Fred Rogers listened for the clang of the trolley before crossing the street. He took inspiration from neighbors, merchants, and the local librarian who first introduced him to books.
Fred Rogers loved his home town, even though at times he had been unhappy there. In the Neighborhood, he used his memories of Latrobe to create an idealized version of the town, where children could feel understood and valued.
The new program incorporated most of the highly imaginative elements that later became famous on the Neighborhood: the puppets, the sneakers, the sweater, the trolley, the slow pace and quiet manner that invited children into the world of this gentle man, who looked right into their eyes and talked their language. At the start of every show, Fred Rogers sang, “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood . . .” The Mister Rogers’ “anthem,” composed by Rogers, like all the other songs on the program, signaled to millions of kids watching that Fred Rogers valued them “just the way you are.” The song was not just reassuring; it was catchy.
The new Misterogers program was a lightly staffed operation. Elaine Lynch had been working for Fred Rogers as a secretary since she’d met him as a receptionist at George Hill’s ad agency. While still employed by Hill: “I was typing the scripts . . . On the left side of the page it would say, ‘King Friday’ colon, and then you would go over to the right side of the page, and he would say something like, ‘We shall meet in the castle at five and a quarter.’ And then perhaps the next line would be ‘Henrietta Pussycat’ colon, and to the right it would say, ‘Meow, meow, why?’
“And occasionally Fred would call and say, ‘I need a stuffed toy. Can you get it from Horne’s?’ Our offices were right across the street, so I would run over and get a couple of things for him to choose from. He particularly liked the Steiff stuffed animals, or he would get airplanes, rugs, that kind of thing. And so besides just doing scripts and stuff, while I wasn’t considered a prop person, I was getting props from the store.”6
The program was essentially local in its reach, but it was very successful for WTAE. It got good viewership in the Pittsburgh region, created a strong community, and generated fan mail from many viewers. After Elaine Lynch typed up Rogers’s handwritten responses to mail, he would sign them.
Fred still believed in educational television, and he wanted to produce on WQED, not on a commercial station like WTAE. But the money problem remained. Horne’s show on WTAE, like the CBC program, was only fifteen minutes long, and Horne’s wasn’t in a position to fund a longer, daily program. WQED was interested, but didn’t have the resources. It was up to Fred to raise the money. Once again, George Hill was a key to the future.
Hill had become Fred’s de facto agent and business manager: “I never had a contract with Fred; I just showed up, you know, with the Horne’s thing, and then I continued to work.”7
Fred made clear to Hill that he thought it was time for him to move back to public television; and Hill, who was well-connected locally, managed to tap some local funders for support. In addition, Rogers had connections, through Leland Hazard and his father, to corporate funders, and through his friend H. John Heinz III (later the US senator from Pennsylvania) to the Heinz philanthropies and other foundations.
With bits and pieces of funding from a variety of places, Fred rejoined WQED in 1966, confident that with some additional support, he could start a longer, regularly scheduled program to fulfill his goals.
Hedda Sharapan, who first met Fred when she was a graduate student at the small school in the basement of the Bellefield Presbyterian Church, soon joined him at WQED. At that point, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, a black-and-white, half-hour show, was produced o
n WQED and shown in several other American cities besides Pittsburgh—including New York, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia—on the Eastern Educational Network, a precursor to PBS and the system of National Educational Television (NET).8
Although NET also contributed funding to keep Rogers on the air, the schedule was impermanent, and the future uncertain. Sharapan remembers that the question of funding for Fred’s future work was pervasive; when he finished shooting a sequence of programs in the spring of 1967, he told all the children goodbye because he had no idea whether he might be able to continue.
“I remember sitting with a little boy who actually broke down in tears,” said Sharapan later. She watched Fred reacting to the child’s tears, trying to reassure the child while he himself was so uncertain about the future. And Sharapan was wondering in her own way what miracle might keep things going.9
Another key player on the early iteration of the Neighborhood was David Newell, a Pittsburgh native who went to work for Fred in 1967 for 7,000 dollars a year. Newell had had a lifelong interest in the theater and became unusually close to Rogers as the show developed. Initially Newell had been hired as a production assistant on the Neighborhood after volunteering a few days a week at WQED. He knew Fred Rogers’s work from watching The Children’s Corner: “I sensed an intelligence there, and respect for what they [Rogers and partner Josie Carey] were doing.”10
His role on the Neighborhood expanded when Rogers wrote a role for a speedy deliveryman who could help bring some of the props onstage. His character’s first delivery was of an armadillo, for a show on armor and protection. His easy rapport with Fred Rogers led to a collaborative effort to make his character a little more well-rounded, so that Mister Rogers might ask the speedy deliveryman to slow down and sit with him for a while.
Newell was also plunged almost immediately into the search for money. As word got around to other East Coast cities in the EEN that the Neighborhood could be canceled, there were spontaneous demonstrations protesting the threat to the program. The educational stations in those cities were stunned at the intensity of the demonstrations; nothing in their programming histories had ever drawn such strong public reaction.
As luck would have it, the Sears-Roebuck Foundation was run then by a high-minded businessman named William F. McCurdy, who was very interested in television and the opportunity to fund programming that might reflect well on the Sears image. McCurdy was to become key to Fred’s future. Fred Rogers himself later remembered that the producers at NET “ran out of money and weren’t able to produce any more [children’s] programs. There was a group of women, mothers in Boston, who heard that we might be going off the air. They marched door-to-door to get people to make contributions to the Children’s Programming Fund. They said that it was essential to keep this program on the air.”11
Fred and his savvy PR man, David Newell, made trips to cities where the Neighborhood was on view and hosted local families at their educational television stations. The results were electric. Thousands of children and their parents showed up for events in Boston, Los Angeles, and elsewhere, impressing the television staffs and the media in these NET cities (Los Angeles and Miami had been added) and cementing strong relationships with families.
Station managers in these cities—often overwhelmed with crowds five or ten times the size they expected—shared their stories with WQED and the national NET executives. Word of the marches and the fund-raising spread to other cities, including New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
For “Mister Rogers Day” at KCET in Los Angeles, the staff planned for a crowd of several hundred—only to be stunned when ten thousand people, mostly excited, screaming kids, lined up outside the station to see their hero. To manage the huge crowd, KCET staff tried to organize the eager fans into smaller groups to see Mister Rogers, but the whole day teetered on disorder.
McCurdy and others at Sears, based in Chicago and New York, read the papers and were intrigued by the show of passion, including that of the parents trying to save children’s programming. “It came to the attention of Bill McCurdy,” said Rogers. “He had been talking with NET about underwriting something, never thinking that they might be interested in children’s programming. So he got with Paul Taff [director of children’s programs for NET], and he said, ‘What’s this Neighborhood program about? I understand it needs funding.’
“Paul said yes. And Bill McCurdy said, ‘Why don’t we try that if we’re going to launch into public broadcasting? How much do you need?’ Paul Taff told him and he went to the Sears Foundation and they said sure. That was the beginning of our network programming in this country.”12
At first, Taff tried to convince Rogers to minimize costs—and the fund-raising burden—by limiting the program to fifteen minutes, as it had been in Canada and in the shows sponsored by Horne. Fred stuck to his guns; he wanted thirty minutes for each show, as they were currently presented, and he wanted exactly the program he had envisioned. Taff relented.
“Again, I did not create Fred Rogers,” said Taff years later. “I just knew what he was doing was right. I had that responsibility at NET to bring the best children’s programming I could. And he was the epitome of that.”13
At one point in their collaboration, Paul Taff flew to Nantucket to review scripts with Fred. When Taff and his wife were leaving the island, Nantucket fogged in, as it often does. Fred had already brought the Taffs to the airport; instead of leaving them to wait for the fog to lift, Rogers stayed with them for hours until their plane was cleared.
“And that, in a sense, could sum up the relationship,” said Taff later. “Typical Fred. He was not going to leave us on Nantucket alone.”14
What Rogers had conceived for his program—what made him so very adamant about getting just the terms he needed from Taff and McCurdy and others—was the exact blend of reality and fantasy that he believed children needed and that later became his acclaimed signature programming mix.
“I really feel that [in] the opening reality of the program,” Fred explained in an interview, “we deal with the stuff that dreams are made of. And then in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, we deal with it as if it were a dream. And then when it comes back to me (at the end), we deal with a simple interpretation of the dream. . . . Anything can happen in make-believe, and we can talk about anything in reality. Margaret used to say, ‘Whatever is mentionable is manageable.’”15
Rogers had learned at the Arsenal Center—and in the basement of the Bellefield Presbyterian Church—that children learn through this mix of fantasy and reality, of playful creativity and measuring their growing sense of reality against the adults with whom they deal. His genius was to bring it to life on the screen.
On the fund-raising front, it was George Hill who once again provided the critical support for Fred. As he often did for friends and associates, Fred Rogers had offered a few weeks’ vacation in his Nantucket cottage to Hill, who was enjoying the beach in front of Fred and Joanne’s Madaket home when he got an urgent call from Rogers summoning him to a spur-of-the-moment meeting at the Sears, Roebuck and Co. offices in New York.16
In a later interview, Hill recalled that he told Fred Rogers: “‘If there’s a plane, I’ll be there.’ I met him, and we went to Sears’ offices. I can’t remember the exact conversation, but it went something like this: ‘We at the Sears Foundation are looking for a project for children. We’ve seen your program. We like what you do. And we would like to underwrite you nationally.’
“It was that simple,” added Hill. “And then I think he [Bill McCurdy] said something like, we have some people who will take care of the details. . . . It was amazing. It really put us over the edge and made everything work.”17
That funding relationship, borne out of Hill’s perseverance, Rogers’s talent, and McCurdy’s abiding interest in aligning Sears with the highest-quality television, lasted for twenty-four years, rivaling the funding of Masterpiece Theatre by ExxonMobil. It enabled Fred Rogers and WQED to take risks and to
establish themselves as leaders in the field of children’s television.
For Fred Rogers and David Newell, the memory of the big-city demonstrations on behalf of the Neighborhood always remained very poignant. It was powerfully important to Rogers that it was parents who turned out to save the Neighborhood for their children.
The only complication arose when one of the earliest Neighborhood scripts created a character named “Mr. McCurdy,” a genial mailman who was to be part of the regular show. The real Mr. McCurdy worried that this could look like a favor that might appear to be a quid pro quo for the Sears funding.
“Mr. McCurdy was my name in the first script,” recalled David Newell. “But minutes before the first taping, Sears called, pleased with everything except the name. McCurdy was maybe too self-serving. Fred said, with twenty minutes to go before the first taping, we have to get you a name. Seconds later, he blurted out McFeely.”18
Because of McCurdy’s scruples, Fred borrowed his own middle name, the last name of his beloved grandfather. David Newell became Mr. McFeely, the “Speedy Delivery” mailman who graced the show for over three decades.
The extraordinary importance of the Sears support was that it gave Fred Rogers freedom from commercial pressures, and the freedom to focus only on the highest academic standards—his own and those of Dr. Margaret McFarland. The result was television that quickly won the trust and affection of children and their parents.
Fred’s dream was realized: He was given a full weekly schedule—half an hour each day, five days a week—and national syndication across the country. The new show, still in black and white, debuted on February 19, 1968. Season One was composed of an astonishing 180 episodes. Soon, with support from Sears, other charitable funders, and National Educational Television itself, Rogers and his production company, a for-profit called Small World Enterprises, were producing sixty-five programs in color each year.