by Maxwell King
Fred Rogers was first and foremost an accomplished musician whose passion for the art form equaled his spiritual convictions. The combination both gave him a unique “platform” from which to reach children and their parents and allowed him to grow as a creative artist. A notable highlight of the new Neighborhood was music that guided kids from one segment on the stage set into the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was taped live in the studio, and Fred Rogers encouraged musical director and jazz musician Johnny Costa, leading an excellent trio, to improvise. When Fred Rogers opens the door to Mister Rogers’s television “house,” his viewers listen to the trilling notes of the celeste, or celesta, a French keyboard instrument with a sound as delicate and endearing as Mister Rogers himself.
When Johnny Costa was first approached in 1968 about the job of music director of the Neighborhood, he was reluctant to accept the position, not wanting to play “kiddie” music, but Fred encouraged him to play arrangements as musically complex as those Costa would do for adults.
Indeed, as Costa once noted: “What we do isn’t simple. Fred doesn’t write simple tunes, and the jazz arrangements I do are very sophisticated, too. Fred always says if it’s for the children, it has to be the best we can give.”19
Joe Negri, the Neighborhood “handyman” who is also a jazz-guitar virtuoso, adds: “In those days, a job was a job, and it was a good job. And we all needed work. I never considered working on the Neighborhood as something that was beneath me.”20
When young trumpet sensation Wynton Marsalis appeared on the show later, in 1986, he had no trepidation about doing so, because of the musicians Fred Rogers worked with: “Of course, I didn’t know about how much he [Fred Rogers] knew about music, and how much he was a musician. I always knew they had the hippest music on TV. If you were a musician, you knew Joe Negri and Johnny Costa. My daddy [Ellis Marsalis] had played with Johnny Costa, and knew Johnny Costa’s character. Johnny Costa was known as an Art Tatum type figure by piano players. And the band [on the Neighborhood] was out of sight.”21
Negri and Costa, friends since their days as composition students at Carnegie Mellon, both worked at the local commercial stations, too, as musical consultants, and continued to perform on the local club circuit, sometimes together, or separately with their bands.
Fred Rogers also used music to help fund the television show. Initially he’d incorporated Small World Enterprises in 1955 to sell and distribute The Children’s Corner materials, primarily songbooks and records.
At first, Small World consisted of Elaine Lynch and Fred Rogers, working out of a set of back-to-back apartments in the Cathedral Mansions apartment building on Ellsworth Avenue in Pittsburgh’s Shadyside neighborhood, not far from WQED. While Lynch worked in one apartment, Rogers had the other to himself for writing, away from phones or other distractions.
Small World had licenses for an array of products through Golden Books and Hallmark. But the main business was in children’s music. Elaine Lynch recalls: “Fred and [band leader] Johnny Costa and George Hill, while they were doing . . . Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood . . . were also making LPs of Fred’s music, and we were selling them through Columbia House, the children’s arm of CBS Records.”22
Then record stores across the country started allocating more space to rock and roll. Even venturing into the music business had been a tough sell to Fred Rogers until he decided that if the records were targeted to parents, it might be a way for bringing families together.
Though the profits brought in by Small World products were in effect helping to underwrite the TV shows, “When we went to color and realized how much more it was going to cost to do that, we found that the corporations and the foundations were not willing to contribute funds to something that was profit making,” recalls Elaine Lynch.23
One day in the early 1970s, Fred Rogers woke up and saw his picture on the milk carton as he prepared breakfast. It hit him that as an employee of WQED, his own image was not his to control: The station had brought in a little extra revenue by selling his picture.
Fred Rogers decided to transform Small World into a nonprofit, Family Communications, Inc. As he once related, “I didn’t know anything about it. I was advertising something, or promoting something, that this station just didn’t bother to ask me about. So much of the money that was coming to make the Neighborhood was being used for administration (by WQED). But I felt that we could be better stewards with that money if it came directly to us. In 1970 we formed Family Communications, Inc. From then on, we rented our offices and the studios and all the other facilities that we needed at WQED.”24
The other motivating factor for Fred was his deep frustration with the controlling way WQED doled out the funds he himself had raised. Paul Taff of NET remembered that he was sometimes called in by WQED managers who reported having difficulty dealing with Rogers’s requests. According to Taff, Fred was almost always right; WQED was being cheap.
One example: Though Rogers was producing his show in color, WQED denied him a color monitor for use on the set. He didn’t need it, they said, because he was color-blind—which he was. Taff came into Pittsburgh and quickly concluded that Rogers’s on-set staff did need the monitor. And they got it. Taff remained an essential supporter of Rogers in those early years.25
Leland Hazard and John Heinz collaborated on the legal and business planning that put Family Communications together for Fred and afforded him the corporate freedom to manage his own production. Together, all these things gave Rogers the ability to set his own standards. He became an even more fierce defender of quality in his program.
Bill Isler, former head of Family Communications, observes: “Fred had great business instincts. . . . He understood business from the feet of his father and grandfather in ways people never gave him credit for.”26
Fred Rogers was no pushover. Eliot Daley recalls a comment made by Leland Hazard as they left a contentious meeting with Fred Rogers: “I wonder at what age is it that Fred no longer likes you just the way you are?”27
11.
THE PASTORE HEARING
Very quickly, the program Fred Rogers had first formulated in Toronto, and then refined with the support of Horne’s Department Store, became the fully formed Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—the children’s program that defined his contribution to television, to early childhood education, and to American culture.
Only a year after the 1968 debut of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on NET, Fred Rogers had achieved such credibility that he was selected to testify before Congress on behalf of educational television. The age-old fiscal tussle between the White House and Congress was playing out once again.
Searching for ways to defray the rising cost of the Vietnam War, President Richard Nixon needed some budget savings. He wanted Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island to assist him by chopping the funds for public television. Because public TV was still relatively new in 1969, Nixon was betting that it lacked the array of powerful stakeholders to defend its funding that some of his other potential targets would have.
On the table was a special appropriation to establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. President Lyndon B. Johnson, Nixon’s predecessor, was an advocate of public television and had proposed the 20 million dollars to kick-start its national adoption. Nixon was in his first year of office; he had never been much of a fan of public media (or any media, for that matter), and he was certainly no fan of programs pushed by Johnson, a Democrat considered a liberal spendthrift by Nixon and other Republicans. The president wanted Pastore’s Subcommittee on Communications to cut at least 10 million dollars from the appropriation.
Nixon had reason to hope that Pastore—an Italian American “tough guy”—might join him in viewing public television as something of a government frill. Although a Democrat, Pastore was known as a blunt, no-nonsense social conservative who shared the Republican interest in keeping federal spending in line.1
Public television had bee
n evolving city by city for some years, with the initial stations located at colleges and universities. The first community-based public station with broad support was WQED in Pittsburgh, whose primary champion, the corporate lawyer Leland Hazard, had helped bring Fred Rogers aboard.2 Hazard and other Pittsburgh civic leaders saw benefit in creating a station that was entirely devoted to the interests of their community, rather than to an academic institution.3
Over the next fifteen years many others followed their example, and by the time of Pastore’s hearing in 1968, there were scores of community and university stations around the country, loosely affiliated with organizations such as the National Educational Television network and the Eastern Educational Network.
The champion of this group, then and always, was WGBH in Boston, which had gone on the air in 1955, a year after WQED. From the beginning, WGBH was the most ambitious and successful creator of new programming in the public television world, and it commanded a fervently loyal base of supporters in New England. In coming decades WQED and WGBH would be considered rivals in strong programming, with WQED building a record of fine documentary films, and WGBH offering such educational and entertainment triumphs as NOVA, Masterpiece Theatre, The French Chef (with Julia Child), Frontline, and Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego (made in partnership with WQED). The television pioneer who brought Boston’s station on air was Hartford N. Gunn Jr., who was still its general manager in 1969 (and would go on to become the first president of PBS).4
Earlier that year, when executives of public television were strategizing about the prospective Pastore hearings, Gunn had taken the lead. A graduate of Harvard Business School who was known as a cunning strategist, Gunn had a risky, intuitive, and crafty idea. He wanted to bring on the host of his station’s most popular program, the forty-one-year-old Fred Rogers.5
The risk was clear. Rogers wasn’t then nationally known; he was simply the host of a children’s show, lacking the title-filled résumé and public-affairs gravitas US senators might expect to see. But from his own experience and from his observation of WGBH viewers, Gunn knew that Fred Rogers had a powerful ability to make quick, strong connections with people.
Now Gunn was betting that Rogers’s direct, disarming manner could win more support for public television than the traditional businesslike style of most of the executives who ran the stations. Most importantly, Rogers could make strong connections on two fronts: in person and through the camera. That mattered because the hearings would play to both the senators gathered at the Capitol and television viewers who would later see film clips of testimony. Gunn knew that he and his allies had to win both audiences, not only to get the 20-million-dollar appropriation, but also to secure reliable, annual funding for public television.
Gunn invited Rogers to Washington to testify before Congress. Rogers agreed, and he brought along friends with Neighborhood connections: the advertising executive George Hill, who had helped Rogers in the program’s early years and could provide informed moral support,6 and Pittsburgh optometrist Bernard “Pepper” Mallinger, who had appeared as a guest on the Neighborhood, examining Rogers’s eyes in programs designed to explain medical procedures to children.
Hill simply wanted to be there to hear Rogers speak and to offer his public-relations expertise should Rogers need it. Mallinger, who had a gentle and thoughtful manner, had been very effective at helping to disarm children’s fears. But in Washington he would have a different role: Rogers and Gunn wanted him to explain to the senators how children process information coming to them from television and other electronic media. Through his studies, Fred Rogers knew that information delivered this way could be tricky for very young children, and he hoped Mallinger’s testimony could help Pastore and the other senators understand the complexities being addressed through the Neighborhood approach.7
Hartford Gunn was betting that a mix of dry testimony, consisting of his own talk about the administration of public television, and Pepper Mallinger’s report on children’s visual and intellectual processing of electronic information would be suddenly enlivened and brought home emotionally by the persuasive powers of Fred Rogers. It was a pretty big gamble in view of what was at stake for the future of public television.
In what is still considered one of the most powerful pieces of testimony ever offered before Congress, and one of the most powerful pieces of video persuasion ever filmed, the mild-mannered Fred Rogers employed his gentle demeanor and soft voice to dominate the proceedings, silence a roomful of politicians, and nearly bring the gruff committee chairman to tears. It has been studied ever since by both academics and marketers.
The Pastore hearing signaled the birth of a new champion: Fred Rogers as a national advocate not only for public television but also for the great vision that had inspired him since the early 1950s: that television has the power to be uplifting and educational, not just for children, but for everyone. Over the coming decades, Rogers would be the most consistently visible campaigner for this idealistic notion.
In Senator John Pastore, Fred Rogers wasn’t really confronting an enemy. It was true that Pastore was no great friend of free and open communications. A social conservative, he used his subcommittee position to saber rattle at television he felt pushed the bounds, including everything from crime shows to the comedy series Laugh-In to Noxema shaving-cream ads with a sexy theme (“Take it off. Take it all off.”). And he became the bête noire of The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a 1960s program delivering social satire and political commentary. Pastore tried to have a government panel preview the comedy of Tom and Dick Smothers, biting critics of the Vietnam War and Lyndon Johnson. But the show’s network, CBS, fended him off.8
Despite all this, Pastore was sympathetic to the idea of public television. After all, Lyndon Johnson, one of his great friends and mentors, was its principal backer. Pastore had given the keynote address during the 1964 Democratic Convention at which Johnson was nominated to run for re-election to the presidency.9 Pastore was familiar with Johnson’s hopes for public television. He would have to be convinced at the hearing, but he was predisposed to listen.
The hearing took place on May 1, 1969. More than four decades later, the exchange between Pastore and Rogers still can be seen online. The chairman of the Senate Subcommittee on Communications curtly commands his witness to begin: “Okay, Rogers, you’ve got the floor.”
In his disarming, guileless way, Rogers immediately alters the tone of the proceeding. With his first words, delivered in the same measured cadence he uses in the Neighborhood, he slows listeners to his own very deliberate pace. He starts by telling Pastore that he won’t read his prepared remarks, as they would take about ten minutes.
Pastore draws laughter with a condescending riposte: “Would it make you happy if you read it?”
But in his soft, slightly nasal, western-Pennsylvania twang, Fred Rogers replies that he’ll be glad to just talk about the work. (Perhaps the only person unhappy with his decision was Elaine Lynch, his secretary back in Pittsburgh, who had been asked to type up Rogers’s remarks from a longhand version on a yellow legal pad. She had dutifully created manuscripts for Rogers to read and share with those at the hearing. “I worked so hard in typing that speech,” she recalled later, “and then he didn’t read it. I was so disappointed.”10 Rogers did intend to read the text, but his extraordinary situational sense told him it would be better to be direct and personal with the brusque Pastore.)
Continuing to speak slowly and quietly, Rogers becomes passionate as he describes his work: “One of the first things that a child learns in a healthy family is trust, and I trust what you have said that you will read this. It’s very important to me. I care deeply about children.
“My first children’s program was on WQED fifteen years ago, and its budget was thirty dollars. Now, with the help of the Sears-Roebuck Foundation and National Educational Television, as well as all the affiliated stations—each station pays to show our program, it’s a unique kind of fund
ing in educational television—with this help, now our program has a budget of six thousand dollars. It may sound like quite a difference, but six thousand dollars pays for less than two minutes of cartoons. Two minutes of animated, what I sometimes say, bombardment. I’m very much concerned, as I know you are, about what’s being delivered to our children in this country. And I’ve worked in the field of child development for six years now, trying to understand the inner needs of children. We deal with such things as—as the inner drama of childhood. We don’t have to bop somebody over the head to . . . make drama on the screen. We deal with such things as getting a haircut, or the feelings about brothers and sisters, and the kind of anger that arises in simple family situations. And we speak to it constructively.”
Listening intently, Pastore asks Rogers about the program’s length. A moment later, he asks his staff, “Could we get a copy of this, so we can see it? Maybe not today, but I’d like to see the program.”
Fred Rogers goes on, becoming more intense as he describes the hundreds of programs he made for the EEN, or Eastern Educational Network: “And then when the money ran out, people in Boston and Pittsburgh and Chicago all came to the fore and said we’ve got to have more of this neighborhood expression of care. And this is what—this is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying, ‘You’ve made this day a special day, by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are.’
“And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health. I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger—much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. I’m constantly concerned about what our children are seeing, and for fifteen years I’ve tried in this country, and Canada, to present what I feel is a meaningful expression of care.”