The Good Neighbor

by Maxwell King

  “Fred made us redub the line, saying, ‘I’m going to puff this up with some air,’ because ‘blow it up’ might sound like there’s an explosion, and he didn’t want the kids to cover their ears and miss what would happen next. Sure enough, he was right.

  “The trick is to provide the context in the explanation,” Greenwald continued. “Preschoolers don’t have any context. Kids are afraid of going down the drain because all they see is stuff being sucked down the drain.” Fred Rogers even wrote a song called “You Can Never Go Down the Drain.”15

  As simple as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood may look onscreen, the process of putting the shows together was as painstaking as the above example suggests.

  Elizabeth Seamans joined the staff of the Neighborhood in 1970. After graduating from Harvard College, she took a job as reporter for the Boston Herald Traveler, but she quit when she was asked to interview the mother of a murdered three-year-old. She headed to Pittsburgh to visit her sister and look for a job. Shortly after arriving, she was offered an unpaid internship on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Soon she became a paid staff member, writing scripts and playing the onscreen wife of Mr. McFeely, though she claimed never to be completely comfortable with performing.16

  Once Seamans learned Rogers’s system for keeping the content of the program true to his standards, she was given the latitude to write scripts and review them with Dr. Margaret McFarland. Elizabeth Seamans describes one seminal episode: “Daniel has been forgotten by a certain motherly figure and he feels abandoned, so we get to talk about all those feelings about children whose mothers forgot to pick them up at daycare, or came home late.”

  Seamans strove to meet Fred Rogers’ exacting standards; she understood how serious and necessary they were: “The Neighborhood of Make-Believe . . . was scripted out like a drama, word for word for every puppet character and every real character.”17

  From 1972 until 1976, she wrote approximately fifteen scripts a year in a sixty-five-script season, in five blocks of three each. Fred Rogers would do the remaining ones in ten blocks of five—a truly daunting workload.

  In contrast to the scripted parts of the Neighborhood, the “real-life” segments with actors and special guests like Van Cliburn and Tony Bennett were more free-form. Seamans explains: “Fred liked to be on with people he trusted, because so much was ad-libbed in the unscripted segments. That’s pretty much how he vetted people.”18

  When Elizabeth Seamans was composing scripts, she’d present Fred Rogers with three possible story lines; he would pick one. Themes were often suggested by staff members with small children, or even taken from viewer mail. For his entire career, the connections Fred Rogers made with his television “neighbors” resulted in a torrent of fan mail. And he always answered, even if he needed help to handle the volume; he never wanted to miss a single chance to help a child learn.

  Producer Margy Whitmer recalls that she’d sit down with Hedda Sharapan to go through the piles of mail: “Some of the ideas from viewers were wonderful. The staff would get together to narrow down the themes: ‘We really need to do something about daycare, or the environment.’ Then we’d go over them with Fred, and he would pick what he wanted to develop.”19

  When Mister Rogers sang, “Won’t you be my neighbor?” at the start of every show, he was inviting the kids watching to share their thoughts and feelings about topics that mattered to them. Nothing was more important to him than making children in the extended “neighborhood” feel not only secure, but also “heard,” especially on topics parents might have a hard time grappling with, like the death of the family dog or sibling rivalry.

  For Rogers, the very act of asking questions, and trying to answer them honestly, was the key to growing and learning: “We can’t always know what’s behind a child’s question. But if we let a child know we respect the question, we’re letting that child know that we respect him or her. What a powerful way to say, ‘I care about you!’”20

  Once Rogers and Elizabeth Seamans had selected a theme for a script, they’d sit in his office and go over it at great length. He’d give her subtle directions on how to articulate the theme of the episode even as they were selecting it. She described it as “Let’s tease it up together. There was lengthy conversation, maybe for an hour and a half.”21

  Next up, a trip to see Margaret McFarland, in which Seamans would review developmental aspects of the script.

  After these sessions, a follow-up would focus on specific language after the overall theme had been articulated. In between, Seamans got additional detail from Fred Rogers and developed the script further. And though she was entrusted to write the core script for the Neighborhood of Make-Believe segments, Rogers himself always wrote the openings and closings. As Seamans put it: “Word for word, the crafting of those was hugely important to him.”22

  She cites one example of Margaret McFarland’s advice that affected a script Seamans wrote that involved a child’s fear of bees: “She [Dr. McFarland] said, ‘Do you know what bees mean to young children?’”

  Danger, yes, but also “penetration, body integrity, what’s me and what’s not me inside and outside, not just ouchy bee stuff, it was way past that.”23

  Arthur Greenwald notes that the process of writing for the Neighborhood could try a staffer’s patience: “It could be exasperating. I remember Elizabeth Seamans being driven crazy by Fred. . . . She’d written a script where a telephone repairman comes to fix something in the Neighborhood, or in the TV house with Fred. She wanted to put in a bit to explain where Fred’s tools go in his belt.

  “Fred made a comment, ‘Well, we know, Betsy, why you’re concerned about that.’ It was some sort of psychoanalytic reference to women’s concerns.”24

  When Seamans had Greenwald over for dinner, she was so mad that she flicked spaghetti sauce into the air and exclaimed: “He can have a flying stick in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, but I can’t ask where a tool goes in a belt!”

  And though Fred Rogers could often seem like a perfectionist, he was never wedded to the outcome. According to the cinematographer Joe Seamans, who did camera work and production for the Neighborhood, Rogers was accepting of things in ways that often surprised his crew.25

  Once when Seamans (Elizabeth’s husband) was filming the fish in the Neighborhood fish tank eating their food, the fish wouldn’t eat. Everyone except Fred thought they would have to reshoot: “Fred had his own fish tank and he used to feed the fish, so we rehearsed it. The guy [production assistant] went back and he put all his fish food in there and all the fish came and ate. Fred looked at it and we had to get rid of the glare on the glass and stuff, so we were ready to go. So then we roll the tape; the guy goes back there and he puts the fish food in there and the fish just stare at it as it floats to the bottom of the tank. Because they were full.”

  Everyone on the set assumed they were in for a long day, shooting and reshooting, waiting for the fish to get hungry again. “Fred just looked at it,” recalls Seamans, “and he looked at the camera and said, ‘I guess the fish aren’t hungry right now; you know, sometimes we’re not hungry.’”26 Rogers understood that the very young children viewing his show would find that a perfectly sensible explanation.

  As they were filming other scenes over the ensuing years, the crew members would frequently remind themselves, as Joe Seamans puts it, “Well, do the fish really need to eat?” Seamans himself became a believer that if one is accepting, serendipity can often produce better programming for children.27

  But Fred’s intense care for shaping the program wasn’t universally admired or understood, at least by some adults. Basil Cox, a former executive with the Rogers nonprofit Family Communications, recalls that Fred Rogers always had doubters as well as supporters: “Fred was very controversial, for most of his career. There were always a significant number of people who just didn’t believe him . . . thought it was an act. Thought that he was somehow phony. That they just couldn’t buy that there was somebody who had that perso
na . . . and who just didn’t like him. You know, just really were offended by him almost.

  “He was not a saint. . . . He was recognized by some as a saint, but by the general world, he was a host of a kiddy television show, and that’s it. And he was no more sanctified than Captain Kangaroo.

  “He was constantly having to persuade people that he was real, in those days—constantly. Even later on, he always had his detractors, but—then I hesitate to say it, but I think early on they were in the majority, not the minority. He was just not believable to people.”28

  One reason Rogers felt that his television work could speak for itself was the strong faith he always put in showing reality—even harsh reality—on the screen. When he produced an entire show about death in 1970, he used careful language but didn’t spare his young viewers.

  As this episode opened, Fred looked particularly dapper in a double-breasted blue blazer and a bright red tie, a more corporate and less avuncular image than typical. He was about forty-two years old, but still looked as if he was in his late twenties: slim and fit, his face smooth and boyish, with a full head of dark hair. And he projected a perfect image of the calm, centered, Zen master of childhood: fully inhabiting the child’s world, the world of the simple, the innocent, the imaginative, and the playful. He finished singing “It’s a Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” and opened the closet door on the set to hang up the blue blazer and replace it with a baby-blue zippered cardigan sweater. He held up a small panel of wood to the camera, his four fingers and thumb emphasizing the five corners of the pentagon, and explained the meaning of this new word to the watching children.

  Then he turned to “Picture-Picture,” a screen-within-the-television-screen of the program itself, a device Rogers used to capture the attention of his viewers. Today, Picture-Picture showed a lovely, colorful, and soothing shot of swimming fish. Things were still at their usual calming, soothing pace as Fred turned to the fish tank on the set and invited his viewers to join him feeding the fish.

  Then the jolt: Floating upside down at the bottom of the tank was a dead fish—an alarming little mess that turned the tenor of the show to the ominous. Fred was quieter now, even more earnest, but he plowed ahead into an exceptional scene for three- and four-year-old children: parsing the living from the dead. What followed was a truly extraordinary exploration of death, loss, pain, and the meaning of life, all delivered simultaneously on two levels: the child’s level of innocent, sometimes agonizing questioning of the meaning of things, and a powerful existential level of inquiry that never defaults to the easy answer. It was Fred Rogers at his very best as teacher and philosopher.

  “Oh, what’s that down there?” he asked, looking deadpan into the camera to the watching children. “Do you see a dead fish? A dead fish would be one that isn’t breathing or swimming or anything at all. Look down there and see.”

  Down at the bottom of the aquarium was a small, silvery dead body lying on the pebbles. Fred got a small net and reached gingerly into the tank to lift out the dead fish. He told the children watching that he’d read that sometimes if you put a dead fish in heavily salted water, it can shock the fish back to life. He put the fish in a waterproof bag, pulled a container of salt off a shelf, and sprinkled it into the bag. Nothing.

  “I guess the salt isn’t going to help us,” he said softly. He got a paper towel, folded the body into a little origami coffin made from the paper, and retrieved a trowel from a drawer on his way back out the door to the yard. There Fred Rogers carefully dug a small hole in the soil near an evergreen, put the body in this ad hoc grave, and patted the soil down.

  Mister Rogers took his viewers on this little journey to show that even in the face of death, things move ahead. That’s the essential message as he sits by the fish grave. Rogers never told grieving children that everything will be all right: no such simplistic reassurances. Instead he shared his feelings about death and loss, and the extraordinary truth, reaffirmed repeatedly throughout the program, that life does go on. Delivered by this Presbyterian minister-educator who was so childlike himself, his message brought poignancy far beyond the trite bromides usually served to little children.

  As Mister Rogers sat next to the little pile of earth marking the grave of a dead fish, he talked shyly about a death he won’t forget from his own childhood. He described his friendship with his dog Mitzie and how “she got too old and died. She and I were good pals. And when she died, I cried. And my grandmother heard me cry.” Rogers, who never thought of himself as a performer, gave a great performance in part because it was so genuine, but also because the pacing and the tone of the storytelling were so skillful and engaging.

  “My dad said we’d have to bury Mitzie. And I didn’t want to. . . . I thought I’d just pretend that she was still alive. . . . But my dad said her body was dead, and we’d have to bury her.” Long pause. “So, we did.”

  He walked back slowly into the house on his set. “Even now, I can still remember Mitzie’s prickly fur, and her curly tail.” He brought out an old photo of Mitzie the mutt, scraggly, with floppy ears, and proudly displayed it to his viewers. And then he looked directly into the camera and sang, “Sometimes people get sad . . .”

  The message of the song is that the same people who get sad also, later, get glad. Life goes on.

  After a respite that takes the viewers to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe segment of the show, we’re back in the house for a visit from Fred’s neighbor Bob Trow, a skilled carpenter. They make a grave marker out of the pentagonal piece of wood from the show’s opening—everything comes together on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—then go outside and place it on the fish’s grave.

  Then Fred Rogers sings about all the other questions, beyond death and sadness and the loss of a pet or a friend, that inhabit the life of the child: “Why does it have to get dark? Why won’t the day always stay? . . . Someday, oh someday, I’ll know what to say.”

  Mister Rogers speaks directly into the camera to the little children who are quietly, intently watching: “It helps to say that you’re sad. Often it even helps to cry . . . let people know how you feel.” This is Rogers’s signature message: feelings are all right, whatever is mentionable is manageable, however confusing and scary life may become. Even with death and loss and pain, it’s okay to feel all of it, and then go on.

  A program for preschoolers exploring the question of death was a radical departure in 1970s television. Eliot Daley posits: “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood could never get on the air today, because it’s too subtle. But fortunately, it came along at a time when the medium was hungry for programming. Fred was able to self-fund a lot of his own dedication, because he had some independent wealth, and people weren’t being very critical, and there weren’t a lot of watchdog groups.

  “But I suspect that today it’d be different. There’d be people who would say: This is nothing but pediatric psychotherapy. And they’re messing with our children’s minds, you know. Get them off the air.”29

  Following Margaret McFarland’s dictum that “anything mentionable is manageable,” Fred Rogers tackled difficult topics not addressed on most shows for adults, let alone children. For example, he wrote a special segment of the Neighborhood literally overnight after Robert Kennedy’s assassination, an episode that aired on June 7, 1968, in black and white. In it, Mister Rogers is in his house at the outset, and dressed in a suit. He never changes into his sweater and sneakers.

  Most striking, he seems to be speaking not only to his young “neighbors,” but also to their parents, about his concerns about the graphic displays of violence shown on mass media: He pleads for “your protection and support of your young children. There is just so much that a very young child can take without it being overwhelming.”

  In the Neighborhood of Make-Believe segment (no trolley this time), the kindhearted Lady Aberlin (Betty Aberlin) talks about a shooting with Lady Elaine and X the Owl (both puppets). She suggests that the man who did the shooting was very angry a
bout something; but she assures X that the angry wishes he may have harbored about people didn’t come true. Later in the show, Daniel asks her what “assassination” means—amazing subject matter on a show for children.

  Toward the end of the program, Mister Rogers talks about the need to grapple with anger, and he sings “What Do You Do with the Mad that You Feel?” He stresses that some families might be comforted by watching the funeral on TV, but that for others, a long walk in the woods might be the best way to cope.

  In a speech to a National Symposium on Children and Television in Chicago in October 1971, Rogers explained: “When President Kennedy, Dr. King, and Senator Kennedy were assassinated, I felt that I had to speak to the families of our country about grief. So many families and children were taking these catastrophes personally. Among many things, my main point in mounting such a program was to present a plea for families to include children in their own ways of coping with grief—a plea not to leave the children isolated and at the mercy of their own fantasies of loss and destruction, which tend to be much more frightening than any reality. On the Emmy citation for that particular program it is written that ‘Mister Rogers was the only one on television to think of the children’s needs at this time of national mourning.’ What does that say about our industry?”30

  Hedda Sharapan remembers how strong Fred’s instinct was to stick with reality, no matter how challenging. On a series of shows about noise, for which she was a producer, part of the production involved the noise of garbage trucks and how disruptive that can be in a neighborhood.31 Lady Elaine, the sharp-tongued puppet who always acted as a provocateur, suggested that the noise could be avoided by just dumping the garbage in the ocean. Fred wanted to show how beautiful the ocean is and how horrible it would be to dump garbage in it. But the theme was “Noise,” so he also wanted to produce footage that included underwater noise of the sea.