by Maxwell King
Senator Pastore famously responds: “Well, I’m supposed to be a pretty tough guy, and this is the first time I’ve had goose bumps for the last two days.”
Rogers thanks Pastore for his reaction, and for his interest in the work. He explains that he is the host, the composer of all the music, and the writer of the scripts for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Then he asks to quote the lyrics of a Neighborhood song.
For the next sixty seconds, before a silent hearing room, Fred Rogers recites the words of a children’s song, one that he considers very important, one that “has to do with that good feeling of control which I feel that children need to know is there. And it starts out, ‘What do you do with the mad that you feel?’ And that first line came straight from a child. I work with children doing puppets in—in very personal communication with small groups—
“‘What do you do with the mad that you feel / When you feel so mad you could bite / When the whole wide world seems oh so wrong, and nothing you do seems very right / What do you do / Do you punch a bag / Do you pound some clay or some dough / Do you round up friends for a game of tag or see how fast you can go / It’s great to be able to stop when you’ve planned the thing that’s wrong / And be able to do something else instead—and think this song—
“‘I can stop when I want to / Can stop when I wish / Can stop, stop, stop anytime / And what a good feeling to feel like this / And know that the feeling is really mine / Know that there’s something deep inside that helps us become what we can / For a girl can be someday a lady, and a boy can be someday a man.’”
Senator Pastore’s dramatic and very famous closing line: “I think it’s wonderful. I think it’s wonderful. Looks like you just earned the twenty million dollars.”
With the widely viewed testimony, public television’s start-up funds were secured, and Fred Rogers was lauded nationally as an advocate for it, as well as for better children’s programming. In fact, the following year President Nixon asked Rogers to chair the 1970 White House Conference on Children and Youth, an event with over a thousand attendees from all over the country that had been held once a decade since being established during the Theodore Roosevelt administration.
As Gunn had foreseen, Fred Rogers achieved this impact by simply demonstrating who he was—Mister Rogers, the earnest, authentic, consciously moral person he had set out to be decades earlier. In place of the formal stuffiness typical of congressional testimony, he was personal, informal, and direct, talking about human feelings and relationships without using the language of sociology or psychology.
In the videotape of Rogers’s testimony, seen by millions of television and web viewers in the forty-plus years since the event, he is so even-mannered and deliberate as to seem unconcerned about the prospect of testifying before Congress and the national press. In fact, as Pepper Mallinger recalled years later in an interview, he and Rogers were both nervous because “it was a little overwhelming.”11
Pastore was intimidating, Mallinger added: “He didn’t seem to be a warm and friendly person. He was a guy who [was] all business—at least in that situation.”
But Rogers, though he hated being called a “performer” in his role as Mister Rogers, was a consummate performer who knew how to read his audience. He could see Pastore responding to his comments about young children and education, and he focused intently on the senator as he delivered his testimony. Afterward, Fred Rogers was somewhat spent. Pepper Mallinger remembered that he, Rogers, and George Hill shared relief as they drove back to the airport in Washington that day.12
Pastore himself became a friend to Rogers, and they corresponded for several years after the hearing, discussing children and grandchildren, television and values.13 In 1970, when Rogers conducted hearings in his role as chair of the White House Conference on Children, he turned the tables and asked Pastore to appear as a witness.14
In the years after the Pastore hearing, for Fred Rogers, there was some irony—even a hint of tragedy—in his newfound prominence as a champion of better television. Although he soldiered on for decades, trying to produce optimal children’s programming and making scores of speeches about the potential of television, the medium itself happily took the low road, pursuing high ratings and low taste as its leaders sought to extract as much money as possible from the American public. Exceptions were quality and thought-provoking programs from talents like Norman Lear.
Public television continued to produce a great deal of quality programming in addition to the Neighborhood. Still, later in life, Fred Rogers began to wonder aloud about how useful an advocate he had really been. In talking with his wife, Joanne, he deplored the meanness and venality of popular culture and its mirror, commercial television.15
For a while Joanne worried that Fred was becoming depressed; but then he bounced back. Through hours of daily prayer, he came to feel that his work had been acceptable: that he had done the very best he could with his array of gifts to help public television and the children and adults it served.
If Fred Rogers had lived, he might have felt vindicated by the widespread re-airing of his testimony in early 2017, when funds for public television were once again on the congressional chopping block in the wake of the 2016 election. Once again, he was the champion his audience remembered, and that a nation counted on.
12.
LANGUAGE AND MEANING
With his family resettled happily in Pittsburgh, where the boys enrolled in St. Edmund’s Academy, near their home, now Fred could focus on ways to refine the Neighborhood. His new program, already a success for WQED despite its short tenure on the air, was helping shape the lives of millions of young children.
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was then in color and had been nationally shown on educational television for about two years. Given his famous appearance defending public television in the Pastore hearings before the United States Senate and his chairmanship of the White House Conference on Children, Fred Rogers was a public figure now—known throughout the country, idolized by millions of children and many of their parents, already getting some pointed satirical treatment on other television programs for his ever-so-gentle manner.
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was bringing the importance of early childhood into the mainstream of popular culture. Fred Rogers’s instinct to use television, the most powerful popular culture tool of his time, to advance such a high-minded educational agenda was a stroke of pure genius. It provided a direct line to the rise of the early education movement in America and much of the rest of the world.
It wasn’t until the twentieth century that research into child development flourished and a new, deeper understanding of childhood emerged. The researchers came to understand that childhood was utterly distinctive and powerfully important, and the learning that could take place in those first few years, if grown-ups would pay attention, was the most crucial earning of all. An extraordinarily important part of the capacity of each person would develop in these early years, including language, creativity, and even the physical development of the brain.
This is what Fred Rogers got, what he apprehended, what he learned and internalized and made his very own passion. This is what he wanted to give to children and to convey to adults through Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Rogers took intense care in shaping each episode of his program. Every word, whether spoken by a person or a puppet, had to be scrutinized closely, because he knew that children hear things literally. As his former associate Arthur Greenwald put it: “There were no accidents on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”1
If something wasn’t quite right, Fred Rogers might worry enough to stop performing the puppet dialogue that was an essential part of every episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and come out from behind the set.
Despite all the care that had been taken to prepare the script, one day something still felt wrong. Fred had written it longhand on a yellow legal pad and given it to his secretary Elaine Lynch to type out. He had reviewed it carefully and al
so shared it with a couple of other producers to get their comments.
After this first pass, Fred—or Elizabeth Seamans or Eliot Daley or one of the other staff members of Family Communications, Inc. (FCI) who sometimes helped Fred write scripts for the Neighborhood—would usually walk down Fifth Avenue from the WQED studios to the University of Pittsburgh to review the material with Dr. Margaret McFarland, sometimes for several hours. This script had gone through that whole rigorous process to ensure excellence, and still Fred was worried that something wasn’t perfect.
So Rogers committed a cardinal sin in the highly expensive world of television production: He stopped work, left a high-paid crew in the studio cooling their heels, and went back to Pitt to consult Margaret McFarland again. Many of the crew were union members, and the clock was still running while Fred headed down Fifth Avenue to find McFarland. This was costing FCI a pretty penny (which would bother Fred; he was known to be a parsimonious manager), but it had become a second religion to Rogers that in matters having to do with television for children, excellence was the only acceptable standard. He was back in about an hour, McFarland correction in hand, and the show went on.
This adherence to the highest standards had become even more of a concern to Rogers over the years, from the earliest, slapstick days of The Children’s Corner, through his studies with McFarland when he was a student at the seminary, to his leadership of FCI, the nonprofit production company he had founded to make Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
As television (and later the internet) infiltrated almost every home in America, it offered marketers and commercial enterprises an extraordinary opportunity to exploit young children, and Fred became the icon of protecting them. He did this through the example of his own program and its high standards, but he also did it by championing the importance of childhood itself. From his own struggles as a child, he had formed a powerful sensitivity to the feelings of young children.
Later, as a public figure, Rogers’s shyness and modesty would take him to extremes to avoid adults who sought him out because of his notoriety (once, when he was receiving an award from a local Pittsburgh church, he had the seminary official who was escorting him take him down to the catacombs and passages under the old church to help him escape the crowd that awaited him at the front entrance).2 But whenever he encountered a child, in any circumstances, he felt it a sacred duty to respond and protect.
Nancy Gruner, who worked in the early years at WQED as Fred’s “girl Friday,” remembers a time when she and Joanne and Fred went to dinner at the Hotel Saxonburg, north of Pittsburgh, one of Fred’s favorite spots because he could count on an undisturbed evening. In the middle of the meal, a little boy appeared at the table, his head just below the tabletop at Fred’s side. Fred looked down.
“My dog died,” said the boy, simply, and in an instant Rogers was kneeling on the floor with the boy talking about pets and death and a little child’s struggle to understand.3
Early on, Eliot Daley helped with scripts for the Neighborhood as well as overseeing business matters at Small World Enterprises: “Rogers didn’t want other people to get writing credits. His stated objection was that he was uncomfortable with having a viewing child think that somebody was putting words in his mouth—which I understood.”4
Key to the scriptwriting process was consultation with Margaret McFarland, sessions that might run up to three hours. In advance of his appointment, Daley would tell Dr. McFarland which theme he wanted to explore, such as children’s fear of the dark. He observes: “Margaret was a very kind of a wispy, bird-like woman; very, very slender, very frail looking—tough, but very frail looking. And had a kind of a squeaky voice.
“Margaret would just start talking . . . I couldn’t figure out what the heck she was talking about; she was just sort of all over the place, and meandering about, you know, this visit that she had with her cousin in Kansas. . . . It was totally disconnected stuff . . . and I’d think, Oh god, is she losing it?
“For an hour, I would just be marinating in this miasma of inchoate, disconnected thought. And then it would be sort of like if you could imagine that you were standing point blank in front of a pointillist painting, and then somebody drew it away from you. . . .
“She would lift you back away from it, and you would suddenly see that every darn thing she’d been talking about was woven together as a thread in this tapestry . . . that just revealed to you everything about a child in darkness. . . . She was just incredible.”5
Then Rogers would vet the script. His secretary Elaine Lynch remembered how careful he was with each word. When one script referred to putting a pet “to sleep,” Rogers excised it for fear that children would be worried about going to sleep themselves.6
Dr. Daniel R. Anderson of the University of Massachusetts, who worked with Fred, remembered a speaking trip to Germany at which some members of an academic audience raised questions about Rogers’s direct approach on television: They were concerned that it could lead to false expectations from children of personal support from a televised figure. Anderson was impressed with the depth of Rogers’s reaction, and with the fact that he went back to production carefully screening scripts for any hint of language that could confuse children in that way.7
According to David Newell, Fred would constantly go back to review the lyrics of his songs to make sure nothing might mislead children. Among other changes, he provided new lyrics for the “Tomorrow” song that ended each show to ensure that children watching on Friday wouldn’t look for a show on Saturday that wasn’t there.8
Hedda Sharapan recalls that Fred halted taping of a show when a cast member told the puppet Henrietta Pussycat not to cry. Rogers came out from behind the puppet set to make clear that his show would never suggest to children that they not cry.9
The eye doctor Fred Rogers recruited to help him show children what happens when they have their eyes examined, Dr. Bernard “Pepper” Mallinger, reports that Rogers had an almost uncanny ability to think what little children were thinking and to formulate their questions when making Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.10 As Rogers and Dr. Mallinger taped an exam of Fred’s eyes—part of a series of programs to help children understand what medical care is all about—Fred surprised Mallinger with a question as the doctor peered into his eyes with his ophthalmoscope.
“He said, ‘Can you see what I’m thinking?’” recalled Mallinger. “It would have never, absolutely never, entered my mind. But he realized what children thought about. And of course, I explained that I can only see the inside of the eye, and cannot see any of his thoughts . . . or fears, or concerns.”11 Rogers knew how to conceive of, and anticipate, the concerns of his young viewers.
Rogers was so exacting about language that he even inspired his own on-air “language.” In 1977, while on a break, Arthur Greenwald and fellow writer Barry Head cracked open a bottle of Scotch, and to blow off steam, coined the term “Freddish” to describe the grammatical rules in writing for Fred Rogers. Head and Greenwald, also a talented cartoonist, even created an illustrated manual called “Let’s Talk About Freddish,” a loving parody of the demanding process of getting all the words just right for Rogers.12
They’d been working long hours on a projected three-part video series to prepare children for the experience of going to the hospital, a subject near and dear to Fred Rogers’s heart. Both were accustomed to Rogers’s multipart process: “I spent hours talking with Fred and taking notes,” says Arthur Greenwald, “then hours talking with Margaret McFarland before I went off and wrote the scripts. Then Fred made them better.”
“Speaking in ‘Freddish,’” said Greenwald in an interview, was about anticipating “how the young audience might misunderstand, and preventing that misunderstanding by providing the right piece of information. What Fred understood and was very direct and articulate about was that the inner life of children was deadly serious to them.”13
There were nine steps to Freddish translation:
First, “Stat
e the idea you wish to express as clearly as possible, and in terms preschoolers can understand.” Example: “It is dangerous to play in the street.”
Second, “Rephrase in a positive manner,” as in “It is good to play where it is safe.”
Third, “Rephrase the idea, bearing in mind that preschoolers cannot yet make subtle distinctions and need to be redirected to authorities they trust.” As in, “Ask your parents where it is safe to play.”
Fourth, “Rephrase your idea to eliminate all elements that could be considered prescriptive, directive, or instructive.” (i.e., ask): “Your parents will tell you where it is safe to play.”
Fifth, “Rephrase any element that suggests certainty.” (i.e., will): “Your parents CAN tell you where it is safe to play.”
Sixth, “Rephrase your idea to eliminate any element that may not apply to All children (as in, having PARENTS): “Your favorite GROWN-UPS can tell you where it is safe to play.”
Seventh, “Add a simple motivational idea that gives preschoolers a reason to follow your advice”: “Your favorite GROWN-UPS can tell you where it is SAFE to play. It is good to listen to them.”
Eighth, “Rephrase your new statement, repeating Step One (i.e., GOOD as a personal value judgment): “Your favorite GROWNUPS can tell you where it is SAFE to play. It is important to try to listen to them.”
Ninth, “Rephrase your idea a final time, relating it to some phase of development a preschooler can understand (i.e., growing): “Your favorite GROWN-UPS can tell you where it is SAFE to play. It is important to try to listen to them. And listening is an important part of growing.”14
Arthur Greenwald adds another subtle example of Freddish from his video work: “Fred saw a rough cut of one of the film sections we did for a hospital video that included a scene where the nurse was inflating the blood pressure cuff and said, ‘I’m going to blow this up.’