by Maxwell King
Fred engaged an eminent marine biologist, Sylvia Earle, the first female chief scientist of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. She used a device called a hydrophone to record underwater sound to accompany the film footage. It was a very expensive undertaking, involving a film crew, Earle and Rogers snorkeling together in the ocean, a marine sound team, and a lot of travel. When the shoot finally took place, the ocean looked beautiful, but there was no sound. Everything was still and quiet, with no noise whatsoever. Fred showed the segment anyway, explaining how quiet the sea can be. Later Sylvia Earle brought the hydrophone to Mister Rogers’s house to listen to the fish in the on-set aquarium, but they weren’t making any noise at all.
In another instance recounted by Sharapan, Fred begins his regular program routine by putting on his cardigan and buttoning it up, only to discover he had started at the wrong buttonhole; he was one button off. It came at the very beginning of the show, so the crew expected Fred to simply start the whole thing over. Instead, he gave Sharapan a look and then ad-libbed the dialogue, explaining to the children how easy it is to make a mistake and showing them how to correct it.32
Rogers’s embrace of reality also included breaking one of the established rules of television, a prohibition against footage that is essentially empty. While Sesame Street used fast pacing and quick-cut technique to excite and engage young viewers and keep them glued to the screen, Fred Rogers deliberately headed in the opposite direction, creating his own quiet, slow-paced, thoughtful world, which led to real learning in his view.
Elizabeth Seamans observes that on the show with guests, “Fred didn’t allow talking constantly through whatever they were doing, even if it was twirling a hula-hoop. If Yo-Yo Ma comes on, let him play. Watch his hands. Move on his body with the camera so you can get so close that you can see his hands on the fret board—not just a cutaway, but a real look.”33
Silence—Fred’s willingness, as a producer and as a person, to embrace quiet, inactivity, and empty space—and his calm demeanor were completely unexpected in television in the 1970s. They were qualities that captivated children and their parents.
As soon as the Neighborhood gained a national audience, experts in child development applauded Rogers’s approach. Dorothy G. Singer, senior research scientist in the Department of Psychology at Yale University and codirector of the Yale University Family Television Research and Consultation Center, gave credit to the combination of Fred’s direct, personal approach and the very real issues on which he focused: “I think because he dealt with issues that children were dealing with: divorce, he dealt with death . . . he dealt with jealousy. All through that little kingdom of make-believe—and that was very important—all these social and emotional issues came out. Fred was there to explain anything you didn’t understand, acting like the parent who really clarifies things for you. All of the characters really expressed their feelings—jealousy, anger. It was as if he was having a conversation with the child.
“And there was silence on the program, time for you to think about what Fred said and time for you to answer him. He really was interested in the child as a developing person. That was appealing to us because that’s what I’m interested in, in preschool children. The numbers and letters will come later.”34
A key to Rogers’s direct connection to children was his own childlike nature. A favorite saying of his was, “The child is in me still and sometimes not so still.”
Dr. Singer recalled that Fred’s manner worried some parents, who thought, “Oh, he’s a sissy. I don’t want my kids watching that.”35
He never heeded the doubters. Fred Rogers had absolute clarity about the techniques and messaging that were appropriate for his young viewers, which translated into a determination to control the content of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Given that he was the chief scriptwriter, the songwriter, the producer, the singer, the puppeteer, the host, and the creator of the show, and had to work with dozens of other actors, producers, writers, and directors to achieve his vision, it’s not surprising that most of them found him to have a strong will and a determined focus.
“When you’re an only child,” observes one of his producers, Margy Whitmer, “competition is hard. I think that he clearly had a vision of what he wanted to say and do with kids, so he didn’t want to be influenced by this ‘outside’ world, and he didn’t want to compete. He didn’t watch a lot of other children’s shows. He didn’t watch television, period.”36
Still, he maintained a friendly relationship with Bob Keeshan, Captain Kangaroo, and called him every New Year’s Day to wish him a happy New Year. And Sesame Street’s Big Bird was a guest on the Neighborhood in a charming 1981 sequence on, appropriately, “Competition.” But the episode’s lesson was about overcoming the fear of losing friends, and of being ignored when a new family member arrives.
Sesame debuted on PBS in the fall of 1969, just a year and a half after the Neighborhood. Fred Rogers was always very careful not to criticize Sesame Street’s more fast-paced, high-intensity approach in any public way. In fact, Mister Rogers himself appeared on Sesame in 1974, looking dapper in a white suit.
On the relationship between two of the most influential children’s shows ever produced, “Speedy Delivery” mailman and longtime Rogers associate David Newell notes: “Sesame Street had a much bigger budget. We were more of an intimate show, though our budget increased over the years. They were sort of hip, and we were sort of . . . geeky. But Fred stuck to his guns.”37
Neighborhood guest Wynton Marsalis points out the futility of comparisons between numbers for Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street: “I was once complaining to a mentor of mine about how little our music is listened to, and how much anything that has ignorance or minstrel-show imagery and degrades black people—how many millions of people love that. They might have fifty thousand people, and we only have a thousand.
“He listened to me complain, and when I got finished complaining, he said: ‘Who are the thousand?’
“Sesame Street came on, and it was a phenomenal show, deserving of the praise. And Mister Rogers, he had his show; he had his concept. People who looked at that show (the Neighborhood), they were informed by it. They were more productive in their lives. Sesame Street had impact of one kind; Mister Rogers had his own impact.
“[Comparing them], it’s like telling me, ‘Man, my grandmother can cook. And there’s a great restaurant in my neighborhood, and I can go eat at it.’ And I tell you, ‘Well, McDonald’s can serve twenty million.’
“That’s not even a good analogy, because, okay, Sesame Street is better than McDonald’s. But it’s like saying you like Five Guys, or whatever it is that you like. And then someone else might say, ‘Yeah, I like Five Guys, but I also like Hamburger Heaven. But they don’t sell as much as McDonald’s.’ I’m not telling you they did.
“Fred Rogers was fantastic; he was not fantastic in relation to what? He was fantastic to himself.”38
13.
MISTER ROGERS, BOSS AND TEACHER
Once in the early years of the Neighborhood, Mister Rogers opened the closet door to hang up his jacket; but instead of his cardigan sweater, he discovered a blow-up sex doll. Michael Keaton, who started his television and movie career on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and was an indefatigable prankster, had put the doll in the closet to throw Fred into confusion. The producers and crew, in on the joke, thought they’d have a good laugh and then reshoot the scene.
But Fred surprised them, grabbing the doll in his arms and waltzing out of the closet to a Fred Astaire dance routine across the set. He never missed a beat, dancing the doll back to the closet and closing the door. Then he emerged from the closet and pulled his crew back together for a reshoot. No one was more surprised, or more delighted, than Keaton, a stagehand who was also part of a troupe of stunt performers on the Neighborhood called The Flying Zookeeni Brothers Daredevil Circus.1
In a taped interview, Fred Rogers also looked back at a moment wh
en the young Keaton was operating the machine behind “Picture, Picture.” As Mister Rogers reached in to put a tape into the opening, a suspiciously familiar voice told him: “I’m ready to hear your confession, my son!”2
In addition to displaying a good sense of humor, Fred Rogers was artful in drawing from his own life to provide the substance and detail of the Neighborhood. The zip-up cardigan sweaters he always wore on the program came from his mother; she had knitted them for years for Fred, and kept giving him a new one each year for Christmas. The sneakers he put on at the beginning of each show derived from his experience on The Children’s Corner, where he had learned to wear sneakers so he could run from the piano to the puppet stage without making distracting noises.
Most importantly, the sweaters and the sneakers and the whole notion of changing his attire at the beginning of each program was a way of expressing Margaret McFarland’s rule of providing clear transitions for young children so they could absorb and adapt to the action (a rule not followed by most competing children’s programs). The transition was also incorporated into the show by the trolley that transported viewers and players on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood from the reality part of the program to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Fred and Dr. McFarland wanted each child to be very clear about where reality ended and playful make-believe picked up.
Johnny Costa’s beautiful, light tinkling music that floods the screen when Mister Rogers feeds the fish is just one example of the musical “triggers” that alerted kids to a segment they anticipated in the routines of their television neighbor. Then the music would help young viewers transition easily to the next segment. In “talking” as the trolley, for instance, the music is in effect another actor on the show.
Cast members both participated in the “real” segments of the program and interacted with the puppets in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Fred Rogers had a keen eye for local talent. One of the first members of a de facto Neighborhood repertory company was Don Brockett, who played Chef Brockett of Brockett’s Bakery, a key stop in many a “real world” segment on the Neighborhood, which also highlighted trips to Bob Trow’s multifaceted repair shop and Joe Negri’s music shop. Most of the actors in the “real world” segments of the show were very skilled musicians or singers.
Joe Negri observes: “Occasionally Fred would want me to walk through the Neighborhood with a guitar wrapped around my neck; but that’s not the kind of musician that I am. I was a jazz musician then, as I am now. I used to leave the show and go play musical jobs—jazz jobs, you know. I wasn’t a handyman in real life by any means.”3
Negri, who appeared in three hundred episodes of the Neighborhood over thirty-five years, notes with amusement that he is not handy at all: “My wife is handier than I am. When Fred called me and asked, ‘How would you like to be a handyman?’ I said to him, ‘you gotta be kiddin’. You’re picking the wrong guy here, because I’m not handy at all.’”
Rogers assured him that “It’s just going to be pretend.”
“So that’s the way we did it. I really wasn’t an actor,” Negri says, “and I never tried to be one. I just played myself. I remember once reading about Spencer Tracy: He said, ‘I just play myself.’ And I thought, ‘That’s what I do, too.’”
He adds: “We had a couple of funny incidents where the plumbing, everything, in the Neighborhood got messed up. King Friday put me on the job, and I had to call real plumbers. I thought, ‘Whoa, this is getting a bit heavy for me.’ The plumbers and electricians would come on and wind up talking to King Friday about their occupations.”
Joe Negri did enjoy the music shop: “That was a kind of a natural for me because since I was six or seven years old, I’d been going to music shops and taking guitar lessons. It was something I was very familiar with.”4
Fred Rogers, son of an industrialist and a successful businessman, maintained a lifelong—some would say childlike—sense of curiosity about how things worked, which seeped into various aspects of the strolls Mister Rogers took around the Neighborhood once he left his living room or his front porch. His sister, Laney, observes: “He was like a sponge. He could just get interested in something, and want to know all about it. He encouraged that in other people, too.”5
She recalls her mystification about her older brother’s whereabouts on a trip she took to Paris with Fred and Joanne when she was thirteen or fourteen years old. Every day, Fred would disappear with no explanation.
“Finally, on the last day before we left, he said, ‘I will take you and show you what I’ve been doing with my vacation.’ And he had found a man on the Left Bank who was teaching him how to bind books. We went up into this turret with the old French gentleman [who] had very large pieces of equipment, and he was teaching Fred how to manipulate the papers and things. . . . Throughout his life, [Fred] was inquisitive about how to do things, and what more there was to learn.”6
Rogers made such operations a highlight of early Neighborhood programs. In addition to Brockett’s Bakery, Betty’s Little Theater showcased shows within the Neighborhood, organized by fresh-faced, sweet-voiced ingenue Betty Aberlin, dubbed Lady Aberlin for the Make-Believe segments of the program. New York native Aberlin was a mainstay of the program from 1968 to the year the Neighborhood went off the air, 2001—a thirty-three-year run. Her tender exchanges with the puppet Daniel Striped Tiger are some of the most-watched and most-loved episodes in the Neighborhood’s archives.
Michael Horton, who voiced puppets on the show, observes: “In the scenes with Betty and Daniel, Betty was the mother and Daniel was the child. I think that Fred never really grew up. The things that affect most children never affected him. And the things that affected him never affected most children.”7
One charming early episode (1972) featured Betty Aberlin as the host of a variety show at “BLT,” as she called Betty’s Little Theater. Among other memorable acts, Mister Rogers appears in a tux and plays an accordion duet with Johnny Costa, and Betty herself performs a Chaplin-esque silent hide-and-seek with Bob Trow. Mr. and Mrs. McFeely join local tap-dance whiz Joey Hollingsworth for a concluding dance number.
Aberlin also contributed ideas to many scripts. Michael Horton observes: “It would never have occurred to me to say anything to Fred during the taping of the show—to interject something. We were extremely, extremely close friends. I knew I’d be eating dinner with him and his family that night. I was also very young.
“Betty was the one who spoke up. She knew the characters much more than I did. Betty Aberlin is a brilliant person; the program would not have worked without her. There were a couple of times when Betty felt that she knew Fred enough to say, ‘This might be offensive to handicapped people,’ ‘This might be offensive to women,’ ‘This might be offensive to gay people.’”8
Michael Horton was a young man from Alabama with a fundamentalist Christian background when he first met Fred Rogers through a friend who was the organ master at the church where the Rogers family worshipped. “Fred wanted to help me. I remember that he said to me one time, when we were just joking around in his living room: ‘You have a talent.’ No one had ever said that to me before.”9
Neighborhood stalwart Don Brockett was a local impresario with a notably ribald sense of humor who wrote, produced, and directed revues and industrial shows at a time when Pittsburgh was the third-largest corporate headquarters in America, behind New York and Chicago, with companies like Alcoa, Mellon Bank, US Steel, and Westinghouse.
In a Pittsburgh summer-stock production of a revue called Berlin to Broadway with Kurt Weill, Fred Rogers first saw Chuck Aber, whom Fred later dubbed Neighbor Aber. Rogers had come to see Betty Aberlin, who was in the show, too. Chuck Aber was also employed in several of Don Brockett’s industrial productions. One thing—or person—led to another in the world of the arts in late 1960s and early 1970s in Pittsburgh. By 1972 Aber, who started on the Neighborhood as a puppeteer, was a regular, like Brockett and Aberlin. Eventually Aber was cast as assistant mayor to
Maggie Stewart, the mayor of Westwood, a neighborhood adjoining the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. He notes: “It was really kind of ahead of its time, to have a female mayor—let alone a woman of color.”10
Former producer Margy Whitmer, who joined the program later, observes that the show’s topics evolved to reflect changes in society: “In Fred’s perfect world, there would be a mother and father and kids—the nuclear family. We really had to convince him that it was important to do materials on childcare, because kids were going to daycare. And before I started, they did a week about divorce. That was something he really didn’t want to touch with a ten-foot pole, but reality made it so that he had to.”11
And sometimes, Whitmer recalls, Rogers would take things he observed in daily life and work them into the show: “Our computer guy who would come in and do tech stuff gave Fred one of those laser pointers as a present. He wrote it into a script. A year or two later, we found out that they can blind you, so we had to redo that segment.”
Though Elizabeth Seamans donned a wig and played Mrs. McFeely in addition to writing scripts, she never felt comfortable as an actor. Fred Rogers was disappointed when she quit not once, but twice: “It’s a complicated thing, talking through these characters that are in someone else’s head. They have their own vocabulary, they have their own syntax, they have their complete personalities. Creatively, you can’t do that forever if they aren’t your characters.”12
Though working to Fred Rogers’s exacting standards had challenges, Seamans and others found him an empowering boss, despite his flaws—self-absorption and stubbornness among them.
His staff also respected him as a bold leader. Arthur Greenwald observed that Rogers’s wealth gave him a certain “level of security. . . . He chose to dedicate himself to making the world better. He was always focused on ‘What good can come of this? Where do people need help?’
“There’s a consistent theme in Fred’s career of people underestimating him. I don’t think that it’s widely understood . . . what a powerful intellect he had, and . . . for lack of a better term, what a tough guy he was. He had a passion about helping children that his famous gentle manner belied, and he had a really steely core.”13