by Maxwell King
Elizabeth Seamans found him to be an empathetic if sometimes exasperating boss: “He was not proud or arrogant. He didn’t take anything or anybody for granted, ever. He was flawed, but he was a really, really great man, and a good man.”14
David Newell—Mr. McFeely—notes that “Fred really wanted people to grow; that was a big word in his vocabulary. He was always growing—growing emotionally, growing educationally. He would never sit and twiddle his thumbs. Fred was always doing something with the finite time we have here.”15
Rogers’s office at WQED Pittsburgh famously did not have a desk, only a sofa and armchairs, because Fred Rogers thought a desk was “too much of a barrier.”
Staffers at Family Communications were told to take as much time as they needed to deal with their issues: “I can’t come into work today, my cat’s sick.” “I’ve got to leave because I’m really sad.” Fred Rogers’s respect for the people who worked for him made it a comfortable place to work.
Rogers paid his staff what was considered a fair salary, especially in public television, though he was noted for his own frugality, and for running the Neighborhood on a shoestring budget.
At Christmas, the staff received bonuses and exchanged gifts at a Christmas lunch. One year, producer Margy Whitmer got her boss’s name in the draw. She decided to give him, playfully, a salt-and-pepper-shaker snow globe from her “cheesy” collection: “The salt was the globe, and it was sitting in this chair painted to represent the moon and the stars. So I said to Fred, ‘What do you give somebody who has everything? I guess I’ll have to give you the world, and the moon and the stars.’ A couple years later, Fred got my name. What did I get? The salt-and-pepper shaker back: he regifted me. People gave him all this stuff, so it was easy for him to regift. But he was never about material things; he really just gave you himself.”16
Though Rogers made a show based on his Christian values, he never tried to impose his beliefs on staff members who were Jewish or not particularly religious. Longtime staffer Hedda Sharapan, a student of child psychology whose mentor was Margaret McFarland, comes from a family in which “My father found his own father in a concentration camp after the war was over. . . . So the Holocaust was a very important part of my family.
“Fred Rogers’s . . . faith and ministry was based in Christianity. And yet, I always felt very comfortable in his sense of spirituality and openness to Jewishness. . . . Spirituality was in the air. It was in the walls. It was in Fred’s office and it was in my office, because Fred brought it with him. And I don’t know how I would describe spirituality except as kind of goodness, thoughtfulness.
“There’s a story that when Fred walked into the studio each day, he said a silent prayer. ‘Dear Lord—let some word of this be Yours.’ I have actually taken that on as my mantra.”17
Margy Whitmer adds: “I think faith in a greater being was what’s important to Fred. And most religions have all the same tenets of kindness, and taking care of your neighbor.”
Still, she noted, “Fred wanted to surround himself with a competent staff, and he wanted them to have confidence. But we always said, ‘Whose Neighborhood is it? Not yours.’”18
Fred Rogers had the final word on any directorial decision. His range of contributions to the Neighborhood was astounding: He wrote most of the approximately nine hundred program scripts (and edited the others); he wrote all two hundred songs performed on the Neighborhood (as well as thirteen operas); he played the piano in most of the musical performances, and sang in many; he created all of the characters on the program; he played most of the major puppet roles; he played the role of host on every episode; he produced the programs; and although there were official directors of the programs, he approved every detail of every show.
In addition to very talented guests ranging from local folksinger Ella Jenkins to famous performers like Yo-Yo Ma and Wynton Marsalis, regular cast members such as François Clemmons, the first African American person to appear in a recurring role on a children’s TV series, often burst into song on the Neighborhood, frequently accompanying Mister Rogers.
Former producer Margy Whitmer observes: “Whenever we could write in a part for a woman that was traditionally a man’s part, I tried to do that. If you look at the old shows, even though the main characters are basically white people, Fred also had handicapped people, black people, Asian people in small roles. He had them on in those early shows in the late sixties and early seventies. I don’t think he gets the proper credit for that, mainly because the main neighbors were white people—the core crew. Mayor Maggie was brought in later; François Clemmons was added. It reached a plateau, and then we had to really try and crank it up, and whenever possible, get people of color.”19
Michael Long, author of Peaceful Neighbor: Discovering the Countercultural Mister Rogers, notes that by the time the Neighborhood went national in 1968, racial issues dominated the headlines: “. . . white backlash against the civil rights movement, the Black Power Movement, and urban violence had taken the form of ‘white flight.’ Against this backdrop, the first week of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood saw Mister Rogers enjoying a home visit from Mrs. Saunders, an African American teacher, and a small interracial group of her students. It was a simple visit with a hard-hitting message: Whites and blacks live, study, and play together in the Neighborhood.”20
In the 1972 episode featuring a variety show at Betty’s Little Theater, dancer Joey Hollingsworth taps up a storm to a boogie-woogie tune, dressed in a military-style jacket, and sporting a substantial Afro—not a common sight on children’s television of the era. In the same episode, African American mother and daughter Elsie and Debbie Neal recite a poem and sing, respectively. Fred Rogers’s interest in, and dedication to, music on the Neighborhood often led him to feature talented artists and performers from Pittsburgh’s black community, whose rich cultural legacy is most famously celebrated in the work of playwright August Wilson. In fact, Fred Rogers is mentioned in Wilson’s “memoir in monologue,” How I Learned What I Learned.
In the wake of the riots that erupted in 1968 after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, the Neighborhood greeted a black policeman who kept everyone safe, played by accomplished opera singer Clemmons. He went on to appear on the show for twenty-five years. He also appeared as other characters in several of Rogers’s operas.
As François Clemmons told Story Corps interviewer Karl Lindholm in 2016, Fred Rogers approached Clemmons after hearing him singing in church. At first, Clemmons was reluctant to take the role as a police officer: “I grew up in the ghetto. I did not have a positive opinion of police officers. Policemen were siccing police dogs and water hoses on people. And I really had a hard time putting myself in that role. So I was not excited about being Officer Clemmons at all.”21
In due course, this accomplished artist with music degrees from Oberlin and Carnegie Mellon changed his mind. In one of his most memorable scenes, in a 1969 episode just after the first anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Officer Clemmons is invited to sit alongside Mister Rogers in a little wading pool on a hot summer day: “He invited me to come over and to rest my feet in the water with him,” Clemmons recalls. “The icon Fred Rogers not only was showing my brown skin in the tub with his white skin as two friends, but as I was getting out of that tub, he was helping me dry my feet.”22
The scene—which the two revisited in 1993 in their last episode together—touched Clemmons in a way he hadn’t expected: “I think he [Fred Rogers] was making a very strong statement. That was his way. I still was not convinced that Officer Clemmons could have a positive influence in the Neighborhood and in the real-world neighborhood, but I think I was proven wrong.”
When he traveled to help promote the Neighborhood, Clemmons heard from viewers who felt that Sesame Street, set in an urban neighborhood populated by both kids and adults of color, was more attuned to a diverse audience.23 This was partially true, and may have reflected Fred Rogers’s desire to avoid overt p
olitical expressions on the show. In addition, he was reflecting the Latrobe, Pennsylvania, he grew up in, not the New York–like cityscape of Sesame Street.
By 1975, François Clemmons had been joined by Maggie Stewart, an African American actress who played Mayor Maggie in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe’s adjoining town, Westwood. Her associate mayor was blond, blue-eyed Chuck Aber.
And as noted by producer Margy Whitmer, Rogers was not credited with adding diverse cast members because many were in smaller roles, reflecting again, perhaps, the world of Latrobe as he knew it.24
François Clemmons tried to talk Fred Rogers into casting an interracial couple in one of the operas he showcased on the Neighborhood. As Clemmons tells it, “Fred was never hostile [to the idea]. . . . He just never did it.” Clemmons assumed that Rogers was concerned about alienating socially conservative viewers.25
Married for a time when he started on the Neighborhood, Clemmons later came out as gay, though not overtly on the show. Rogers apparently encouraged Clemmons to focus on his singing career; Rogers evidently believed Clemmons would tank his career should he come out as a gay man in the late 1960s.26
As Michael Long notes in the book The Peaceful Neighbor: Discovering the Countercultural Mister Rogers: “But—and this is a crucial point—Rogers later revised his counsel to his younger friend. As countless gays came out more publicly following the Stonewall uprising, Rogers even urged Clemmons to enter into a long-term, stable gay relationship. And he always warmly welcomed Clemmons’s gay friends whenever they visited the television set in Pittsburgh.”27
This underscored the significance of another element of the 1993 “wading pool” episode, which reprised the 1969 original. At the end of the episode, when Mister Rogers takes his sneakers off and hangs up his sweater, as usual, he says, “You make every day a special day just by being you, and I like you just the way you are.”
François Clemmons looked over at Rogers as he said it. As Rogers walked over, Clemmons asked: “‘Fred were you talking to me?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I have been talking to you for years. But you heard me today.’ It was like telling me I’m okay as a human being. That was one of the most meaningful experiences I’d ever had.”28
Rogers himself was often labeled “a sissy,” or gay, in a derogatory sense. But as his longtime associate Eliot Daley put it: “Fred is one of the strongest people I have ever met in my life. So if they are saying he’s gay because . . . that’s a surrogate for saying he’s weak, that’s not right, because he’s incredibly strong.” He adds: “He wasn’t a very masculine person, he wasn’t a very feminine person; he was androgynous.”29
In a 1975 interview for the New York Times, Rogers noted drolly: “I’m not John Wayne, so consequently, for some people I’m not the model for the man in the house.”30
In conversation with one of his friends, the openly gay Dr. William Hirsch, Fred Rogers himself concluded that if sexuality was measured on a scale of one to ten: “Well, you know, I must be right smack in the middle. Because I have found women attractive, and I have found men attractive.”31
Michael Horton, the voice of Neighborhood puppets and a close Rogers-family friend for decades, notes that he is always asked first about Fred Rogers: “Was he really like that?”
“I say, ‘Do you mean, was he a nice, kind person off-camera, the way he comes across?’ The answer is always yes.”
Then the follow up: “People don’t say to me, ‘Was he gay,’ but ‘Isn’t he gay?’ To me, that’s very revealing in a way, because of how presumptuous people can be. In other words, ‘Isn’t he gay?’ sort of leads you to think that maybe Fred had a double life or something.”32
There was no double life. And without exception, close associates concluded that Fred Rogers was absolutely faithful to his marriage vows.
In exposing children to art forms like opera, in addressing serious social issues, and in integrating Margaret McFarland’s child-development research into a program for preschoolers, Fred Rogers changed the landscape of children’s programming and strongly influenced the television medium itself. Ellen Wartella, professor of communication studies and psychology at Northwestern University and a leading scholar of the role of media in children’s development, explains: “Fred Rogers and the educational shows on public television were able to demonstrate that [television was not inherently bad], that there was a market for quality children’s television, and now you see a lot more quality.”33
Wartella adds that, at the point at which Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street came on screen, there was great concern over the impact of violent programming on children, and the medium itself was seen to hold little educational value. Only a few years earlier, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Newton Minow had described television as a “vast wasteland.”
Rogers and Sesame Street, according to Wartella, helped restore the medium’s reputation: “There wasn’t inherently anything in the medium that required TV to be violent to attract an audience . . . and concern about the audience, particularly the child audience, from someone who had Fred Rogers’s understanding of developmental psychology, his inherently compassionate nature, and his concern about taking care of children—that he would produce a program that would be an icon of a different model of TV at the same moment that violence was so much the topic of discussion about television—it’s really quite remarkable.”34
Wartella also emphasizes the importance of Rogers’s distinctive approach to social and emotional learning: “It’s not that he didn’t introduce knowledge—all those tours of how you make ice cream—and there were lots of things that he had that were very important in introducing children to the world. But he did it within a context that he was very much concerned with the social and emotional wellbeing of children, and that was in contradistinction to the time.”35
This emphasis came, of course, from Fred’s work with McFarland and the Arsenal Center. She and Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson and the other researchers there had been learning that very young children simply don’t learn very well in a cognitive sense unless their social and emotional development is advancing effectively. Sesame Street, by contrast, focused initially on learning words and numbers. It was decades before the field of early education and children’s television caught up to Rogers.
Though not persuasive to some, for the most part Fred Rogers’s gentle, childish qualities came across well to parents. And his presentation was applauded by experts in education and child development.
In a 2007 interview, Ellen Galinsky, president of the Families and Work Institute and author of Mind in the Making, said: “He’s authentic. He’s genuine. He connects on an intellectual and a social and emotional level all at once. He does care about people. That song about ‘you’re special’ is real for him. He retained his childlike self. Particularly for teachers that’s very important, because they care about that childlike self in themselves. He told stories. He would get louder, softer, pause. He was not afraid of silence. . . . That really brought you in emotionally.
“He would tell a story from different perspectives. If he was doing something on superheroes, he’d bring a superhero there and show how they got into their costume, and ask them what it was like for them. He shared the grown-up world with [children]. . . . He had a way of weaving in a subject that was an exercise in learning.
“What Fred did was include the things kids need to learn, but the subject was integrated into real stories. [This] process of engaged learning was fundamental to him.”36
As Rogers himself put it: “There are many people in the world who want to make children into performing seals. And as long as children can perform well, those adults will applaud. But I would much rather help a child to be able to say who he or she is.”37
Fred Rogers’s brand of magic, though understated by comparison to Sesame Street, was very powerful. Elizabeth Seamans reflects on “an enormous gift” he gave his staff: “Permission to step back the typical vocabulary of televisi
on, and to say there can be a whole other vocabulary, a whole other pace, even a whole other relationship to the camera. You can think carefully about an audience, and meet the needs and the pace and the interests of that audience very narrowly, and still have an enormous impact and an enormous viewership.
“Fred Rogers was absolutely unfazed by expectations about television. What drove a lot of television in general was anxiety and the fear that viewers would turn away. We’d continually show things that are not necessarily interesting, but riveting because they are scary. Artists like Fred Rogers dredge into the light what we all acknowledge and recognize, but are too busy barreling down the road of life. There was no barrier to what Fred was willing to think about or accept.”38
Margy Whitmer sums up the appeal of the man in the cardigan sweater: “It’s really quite simple: The man you saw on the show, that’s who he was. His respect and passion for children was real. . . . What he put out to the world was so important to us. It struck a real note in our hearts and our souls.
“Everything he set out to do, he set out to do the best way possible. There’s a poem he liked called ‘Be the Best of What You Are.’ If you’re a janitor, be the best janitor—or whoever you are. Whatever you do, do it the best way you know how.
“He encouraged me to speak my mind. He was like a father figure who allowed me to blossom and be creative. He really helped me think about other people and get a bigger global perspective. He taught me to think about my neighbor . . . to step outside of myself and embrace otherness, and always try and think about what the other person’s going through.”
She remembers: “Fred wanted to nurture, and set an example as a caring adult. That was always the message.”39