by Maxwell King
Chuck Aber stresses the same point as he recalls a taping he witnessed one day in the Neighborhood’s studio: “The story line was a . . . Hansel and Gretel sort of thing. Lady Elaine Fairchilde had this little cottage in the forest, and she had taken Bert Lloyd (Mr. Allmine) . . . kidnapped him, if you will.
“Between one of the takes, I was standing with Fred, and one of the crew, Nicky Tallo, came over and showed Fred that they could get smoke to billow out of the chimney of this house in the forest.
“Without a pause, Fred said, ‘I really appreciate that. But I just want a little sliver of smoke, because I don’t want the television friend to think that she’s [Lady Elaine] cooking Bert Lloyd with her cookies.’ He was always looking at it from his television friend’s perspective.”40
14.
PUPPET WORLD
Susan Stamberg was a busy woman, host of the popular radio program All Things Considered on National Public Radio, the first woman in the US to host such a national news program. And she had a young son, Josh.
Still, when she got a call from one of Fred Rogers’s producers asking her to work with Rogers on a new television program for the Public Broadcasting Service, she was intrigued. Josh watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood regularly on PBS. Although her family’s television wasn’t often used, “I would specifically tune in so that he would have a chance to see Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, because it was so full of wonderful values. You’d see plenty of children sitting glommed in front of the television set, inert and not responding. But Josh always reacted to Fred. He was laughing and smiling, really engaged.”1
Rogers’s producer told Stamberg: “Fred’s ready to move his message to an older audience.”2 He wanted to know if she’d be interested in getting involved. He wanted Stamberg to moderate a series of discussions on a variety of topics that affect families.
As she recalls: “He’d have experts sitting on the set with him. I was to be there, too, to interview them all, and then go out into the audience with a handheld microphone and be Phil Donahue . . . to work the crowd.”
At first, Stamberg was excited about the idea. Then she got worried: “There would be a live audience. I do a live broadcast every night. I thought, ‘Oh, really?’—and then I panicked.”3
She called Rogers’s producers at WQED to tell them she just didn’t have the confidence to do live television. She didn’t think she could manage a panel of experts, interact with a live audience, follow a teleprompter for questions, and do all this in front of four cameras when she was really accustomed to radio. The producers were disappointed, but understanding.
When her phone rang a few hours later, Stamberg thought it might be Rogers calling to plead his case. But when she answered, she found herself talking with the soft voice of Daniel Striped Tiger, the famous Neighborhood puppet, who was very well known to her son.
“I can tell you’re very upset about something,” Daniel said. “I think you’re just frightened and uneasy about this. I can hear that, but I know you can do it. I know you can do this, and I will give you every possible help I can provide to you—and it will go very well.”4
Daniel Striped Tiger—Fred Rogers speaking as Daniel Striped Tiger—persuaded Stamberg to do the series of PBS specials with him. “I had seven interviews to do for that night’s radio broadcast of All Things Considered. Nonetheless I sat on the telephone listening, practically sucking my thumb. And in the end, you can guess the result. I said, ‘Okay, Daniel. I’ll do my best.’”
After Stamberg did seven of the programs, she came to appreciate Fred Rogers as much as her son did: “He can speak to our fears as he did with me on the telephone, and he can speak to our great joys, our apprehensions, our puzzlements, the things that we don’t understand.”5
It wasn’t the only time Rogers used a Neighborhood puppet to pursue something he wanted. The tactic often worked because, to a significant extent, Fred Rogers was Daniel Striped Tiger, and King Friday XIII, and Queen Sara Saturday, and Lady Elaine Fairchilde, and all the other puppets he created and performed over the years. He had inhabited many of those characters since his childhood, and each of them embodied some facet of himself.
According to Fred’s son Jim, his father identified so completely with the puppets that from time to time he would drop into a puppet persona at home. “The puppets were works of art, first of all,” says Jim. “We were allowed to look, but not to touch. I remember thinking, ‘God forbid I’m the one that knocks a chip out of King Friday’s nose.’
“They were real extensions of him, and they enabled him to say some decidedly un-Mister-Rogersish things, even sitting around the dinner table. If it was something a little bit racy or risqué, he would say it in Lady Elaine’s voice.
“There was mean-spirited Lady Elaine Fairchilde, and then the shy, quiet little boy Daniel, and the blustery, self-important King Friday. They were all little pieces of him.”6
Many people assumed that Lady Elaine was based to some degree on Fred’s sister, Elaine (Laney) Rogers. Not so, according to Jim Rogers: “That’s where the name came from, I’m sure, but I think that the personality was mostly him. He would trot out her voice to say things that he felt he shouldn’t be saying.”7
In contrast, “If he [Fred Rogers] had to be the authority figure, he was King Friday, who would tell us it was time to go to bed.”
The King also appeared sometimes when Fred was mad at his sons, Jim remembers: “If it was King Friday’s voice, that meant I hadn’t really stepped too far out of bounds. If it was his own voice, that was tough: ‘I’m disappointed in you,’ or something along those lines. You didn’t want to hear that.” His father “wasn’t really as much a disciplinarian as Mom was,” Jim adds, “but when he had to, he could do pretty well.”8
The puppet characters provided useful channels for Fred to express parts of himself both at home and at work. And sometimes, as with Susan Stamberg, they could give him a tactical advantage. In the early 1980s, he needed to find a manager to be the executive director of Family Communications, Inc. (FCI), his production company. He needed a number two who would be tough enough to run the business while possessing the Neighborhood sensibility about children, plus other qualities Rogers cared about, such as kindness and consideration.
Fred Rogers thought he’d found the perfect candidate in Bill Isler, an official in the Pennsylvania Department of Education, who had a strong background in early education and family issues accompanied by a great sense of humor. Isler had the right résumé, and he had a reputation as a tough and savvy operator who could deal with little children, top business executives, and even the most jaded politicians.
Isler had gone through the interview process and discussed his potential role at FCI with Rogers. The two men were in the process of making up their minds. Then Isler got a call from the sensible, level-headed Queen Sara Saturday. It was Sara who offered him the job at Family Communications, and it was she who outlined the compelling reasons why Isler should say yes.9
The puppet Queen Sara—named for Rogers’s wife, whose full name is Sara Joanne Byrd Rogers—was very familiar to Isler from his years in Pittsburgh and his work in early childhood education. She easily persuaded him to take the job. In coming years, Isler was key in the success of Rogers’s work, and he became president of FCI.
Fred Rogers’s relationship with his puppets, and his use of their personas in his own life, began in childhood, on the small stage he created in the attic of his parents’ home in Latrobe. His schoolmate and frequent playmate Peggy Moberg McFeaters later realized she’d seen a seminal moment in the evolution of Rogers’s creative work in the puppet theater—though at the time, she thought he just wanted some company.10 He played with his puppets almost daily and wanted someone with whom he could share that experience. The puppets were essential expressions of his creativity.
By the time Fred reached high school, he was focused on music, and he set the puppets aside. When he and Joanne Byrd dated in college, he owned a ventri
loquist’s dummy—an odd creature named Hisher Boop Truck—but Joanne knew nothing about the other puppets. They weren’t gone, though. Rogers had put them in storage, and they wound up in the attic of the couple’s Pittsburgh house. Joanne was still unaware of their existence until Fred needed them at WQED.11
Hisher Boop Truck didn’t survive beyond the first year at WQED. “Truck” was to be featured in a new program being created by Josie Carey. But the dummy didn’t pass critical review. Eventually, when Rogers evolved into the role of puppeteer on The Children’s Corner, he became exclusively focused on hand puppets—to some extent because he never did master the art of “throwing” his voice as ventriloquists do.
On the new show, Rogers began to build his repertory company of puppets: “I think the puppets saved us,” he said later. “Daniel made his appearance that very first day, but after a while he became such a part of the show because he and Josie would [talk]. So the next one we tried was a king. I had this king puppet at home. The king was very sad because he had lost his country.”12
King Friday XIII was born, and the children and parents who watched The Children’s Corner helped him find a new home and a name for his new country. Others followed: Queen Saturday, Prince Tuesday, X the Owl—all of them combinations of Rogers’s childhood inventiveness and his grown-up imagination about television.13
Over the years, on The Children’s Corner, on Misterogers in Canada, and on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Rogers brought to life a host of puppet characters. They inhabited the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, the home of storytelling and fantasy in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and included an extraordinary variety of personalities.
Fred Rogers’s longtime associate Hedda Sharapan notes that Rogers kept his puppets simple and unchanging over the years on purpose: “They are simple. They are rather crude. I think Fred also wanted to make the point that they don’t have to be magnificent puppets for you to have your own puppet stories.
“He brought the puppets now and then to his television house and said, ‘Here’s how I do King Friday. And here’s how I do Daniel.’ . . . Fred has said, ‘These puppets are all facets of us.’
“So it wasn’t the outer stuff that was resonating with people. It was the personalities and the way they handled situations. . . . They must have all been important parts of Fred’s personality for him to have made them so believable.”14
Daniel Striped Tiger was the first and is in many ways the most important puppet. Voiced by Rogers, Daniel lives in a large, nonfunctioning clock, out of which he pops to announce the time. He represents the shy and anxious side of his creator, but is also the source of a great deal of wisdom and common sense.
Hedda Sharapan recalls the seminal program in the week about mistakes: “Daniel sings to Betty [Lady Aberlin], ‘Sometimes I wonder if I’m a mistake / I’m not supposed to be scared, am I? / Sometimes I cry. / Sometimes I shake, wondering, isn’t it true that the strong never break? / I’m not like anyone else I know.’ We wept in the studio . . . and the whole place broke out into applause.”15
At the center of things is King Friday XIII, the rather temperamental and imperious monarch of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. The King is often autocratic and peremptory, but he isn’t really a bad ruler, and he can become more tractable, particularly when influenced by his wife. He is given to pomposity and long-winded speeches, but is likable anyway.
Queen Sara Saturday is as reasonable and even-keeled as her husband is not. She is thoughtful and caring in ways reminiscent of Rogers’s mother and his wife. Sara first appeared as a commoner, and it was a big Neighborhood moment when she and the King were married. The King and the Queen were both voiced by Rogers.
Their son Prince Tuesday came along in the third season of the Neighborhood and is named for the day of the week on which he was born. He is always interested in learning about whatever is going on, but he worries sometimes about family dynamics and growing up. Prince Tuesday was voiced by a number of performers over the years, but not by Rogers.
X the Owl was the third puppet introduced on The Children’s Corner. Along with Daniel Striped Tiger and the King and Queen, X is one of the four puppets who most closely embody Rogers’s creative psyche and who play critically instructive roles on the Neighborhood. Voiced by Rogers, X displays an adolescent personality; he is cheerful and willing but can be a bit tentative and bashful. He lives in an oak tree and was a favorite of many young viewers of the show.
Perhaps the most unusual of the puppets is Lady Elaine Fairchilde, who can be devious, scheming, and difficult. When there’s trouble in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, Lady Elaine usually makes it. She provides much of the drama and conflict. The success of other puppets in dealing with Lady Elaine and instructing her provides the basis for some of the important emotional education in Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. As Jim Rogers explains, Lady Elaine is a window into the more mischievous side of Fred Rogers, who provided her voice.
The fourth puppet to appear was Henrietta Pussycat, also voiced by Rogers. She serves as governess for several mice, who live with her in a small yellow-and-orange schoolhouse supported by the same tree in which X the Owl lives. Henrietta can be anxious, even jealous, but she has a charming side as well.
And then there is Cornflake S. Pecially, who looks like a beaver and operates a factory that makes rocking chairs as well as other things like dolls and trolleys. “Corny,” who was introduced on Misterogers in Canada, became a staple of Rogers’s educational programming. The Platypus Family, early arrivals in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, include Dr. Bill Platypus, voiced by Rogers’s close friend Rev. William Barker in a rich Scottish brogue, and his wife, Elsie Jean Platypus, also voiced by Barker.
Over time, many other puppets came to inhabit Fred Rogers’s television world, including Grandpere Tiger (voiced by Rogers), Harriet Elizabeth Cow, Edgar Cooke (the castle chef), H. J. Elephant III (a reference to Rogers’s friend Sen. H. John Heinz III), Betty Okonak Templeton-Jones (Betty Okonak was Fred’s cousin and friend, voiced by Michael Horton), James Michael Jones (also voiced by Horton), Carrie Dell Okonak Templeton-Jones, Old Goat and New Goat, Hilda Dingle-border, Donkey Hodie (his name, a reference to Don Quixote, is one of several wordplays in the Neighborhood that only parents would understand), the Frogg Family, Audrey Duck, and Mr. Skunk.
Susan Linn, a psychologist at the Harvard Medical School and the cofounder and director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, is an accomplished puppeteer in her own right (as well as the voice of Audrey Duck). She points to the psychological power of puppetry: “The freedom we get from speaking through this creature that is us and not us at the same time makes [puppets] such incredibly powerful tools for therapy. Children—and adults—say things with puppets they absolutely wouldn’t say otherwise.”16
When Linn appeared on the Neighborhood early in the evolution of the program, Rogers had only one suggestion for her: “Somehow you must remember what it was like to be a child.”
She marveled at how effectively Rogers’s puppets carried a childhood connection into their relationship with the program’s viewers: “In Fred’s hands, with love and gentleness, the puppets draw forth the underside of childhood. By ‘underside,’ I don’t mean macabre, warped, or seamy; they tap into the vein of fear, anger, and awkwardness, and unadulterated self-centeredness that lies beneath the sunny surface of childhood.
“In direct contrast to most of the other puppets and fantasy creatures seen on children’s television, the inhabitants of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe are complex, complicated, and utterly honest beings housed in rather rudimentary bodies.”17
As illustration, she recalls the episode in which Lady Aberlin (a human) tells Daniel Striped Tiger that the Neighborhood of Make-Believe is about to get a visit from Santa Claus. Daniel is not thrilled; he is alarmed. He has heard the lyrics to songs about Santa, and he is afraid of someone who knows so much: when you’re sleeping and when you’re awake, when you’ve been good o
r bad.
“Santa Claus? What’s he going to do to us?” Daniel asks. “Oh, I try to be good. But I’m not always good. I think I’m afraid of Santa Claus. I wish he weren’t coming here.”
Lady Aberlin does not dismiss Daniel’s feelings; she takes the boy tiger seriously. Then when Santa Claus does come, and Daniel blurts that he is not always good, Santa replies, “Good people aren’t always good. They just try to be.”
When Daniel finds the courage to ask Santa if he can see people when they’re sleeping and learn whether they’re good or bad, Santa is surprisingly direct: “Of course not. Someone made that up about me. I’m not a spy.”18 The exchange tellingly illustrates Rogers’s capacity for empathy and his ability to use the puppet theater to speak bluntly to children’s real fears.
Indeed, children’s television advocate Peggy Charren has been quoted as saying that the first time she saw Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, she said to herself, “Oh, a singing psychologist for children!”19
Rogers used the lyrics of his songs to deliver lessons for children. The song “Fancy on the Outside” (“Some are fancy on the outside / Some are fancy on the inside”) deals with children’s sexual interest and gender awareness. Timid Daniel Tiger’s song in which he wonders about being a mistake lets kids know it’s okay to be yourself. When Prince Tuesday sings to his mother, Queen Sara, that he’s going to marry her, she gently responds, “You’re going to marry somebody like me.” “What Do You Do?” offers a list of anger management tools for all ages.
Puppeteering is an ancient art. We can easily imagine an early hominid crouching in the flickering light of a cave fire, hand wrapped in a small animal skin, playing out some ancient parable for small children huddled in the cave. Perhaps the most famous puppet theater is Punch and Judy, an English form that dates to the seventeenth century. Italian antecedents go back to a time well before that.