The Good Neighbor

by Maxwell King

  The typical Punch and Judy puppet show is unscripted, and the narrative has evolved over the centuries as different puppeteers have advanced their own story lines. But the commonalities include fairly obnoxious characters, a lot of poor behavior on the part of Mr. Punch, and usually a violent beating of Mr. Punch by his wife, Judy, when she discovers he has failed to take care of their baby. Punch and Judy themselves are loud and unpleasant. Often the audience would jump into the action, cheering or jeering the puppets’ antics and even throwing food or other items at them.

  In one script for the show, written in 1832, Punch enters singing to the audience, followed soon thereafter by the dog Toby. Although Punch greets the dog in a friendly manner, it is not long before Toby has bitten him on the nose and, holding on, torments Punch until the puppet finally frees himself. As soon as Toby leaves, its owner, Scaramouche, comes out onto the stage and begins to beat Punch with a large stick, punishing him for supposedly mistreating his dog. Punch grabs the stick and hits Scaramouche so hard that the puppet’s head flies off.

  Punch laughs and says, “How you like that tune, my good friend? That sweet music, or sour music, eh! He! he! he!” As soon as Punch has thrown away the stick, Judy enters the stage and, getting a quick kiss from Punch, slaps him across the face.

  When Judy brings a baby onto the stage, Punch plays with the baby for a moment before it begins to cry. Punch boxes the child on the ear, and then—the crying growing louder—he suddenly throws the baby off the front of the stage into the audience, shouting, “There! There! There! How you like that? I thought I stop your squalling. Get along with you, nasty, naughty, crying child.”20

  Because of the violence, the obnoxious behavior, and the mistreatment of a child, it is a pretty good bet that Punch and Judy horrified Fred Rogers. Nonetheless, it played a seminal role in the development of many other puppet acts for hundreds of years and continues today as an important influence on puppeteering. And there is at least one similarity between Fred Rogers’s puppets and Punch and Judy: The typical Punch and Judy puppet is a fairly unsophisticated, simple figure with stationary features, as are the puppets from Fred Rogers’s Neighborhood of Make-Believe. But the behavior of the two types could not be more different.

  On television, the first successful use of puppets came several years before The Children’s Corner and, like the Corner, featured an empathetic female host talking with charming puppets. Kukla, Fran and Ollie went on air in Chicago in 1947 and gained a national audience at NBC in 1949.21 Another key characteristic it shared with the Corner was the lack of a script: The creator of Kukla, Burr Tillstrom, and the show’s host, Fran Allison, never used one during their ten years of NBC television together. They were as spontaneous and appealing to children as Fred Rogers and Josie Carey.

  Although Tillstrom won over fifty major television awards, including five Emmys, he couldn’t sustain a national television presence for Kukla, Fran and Ollie.22 The rejection of such high-quality children’s programming by commercial broadcasting seemed to ratify Fred Rogers’s early-1950s decision to move his work to educational television. Burr Tillstrom took Kukla to PBS briefly at the end of the 1960s, but it was overtaken by Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Sesame Street.

  Fred Rogers’s most important rival in the world of puppeteering and children’s television, Sesame Street’s creative genius Jim Henson, had made the same move as Fred Rogers, taking his talents from the commercial world to PBS. Sesame Street was conceived in 1965, when Lloyd Morrisett, a vice president at the Carnegie Corporation with a PhD in psychology, wondered if his daughter’s fascination with television could be harnessed to a good educational end. At a dinner party at the Manhattan apartment of Tim and Joan Ganz Cooney (a producer at PBS’s Channel Thirteen) that very question was discussed at length. After months of intense research, Ganz Cooney conceived Sesame Street as “edutainment.” Jim Henson joined the Children’s Television Workshop in 1969. His puppets provided the “delicate balance of fun and learning,” as Henson once put it.

  Jim Henson was born in Mississippi and grew up there for a while before his family moved to Hyattsville, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC, in the late 1940s. Although he was raised as a Christian Scientist and even taught Sunday school for a time, he later wrote to the church to tell them he had ceased practicing that religion. Henson graduated from the University of Maryland, where a class in applied arts introduced him to puppets. His talents were so strong that, shortly after graduation, he launched a career in puppeteering and television.

  And Henson, who remembered the arrival of television in his parents’ house as a highly important event in his young life, later said he was strongly influenced by the ventriloquist Edgar Bergen, by puppeteers Bill and Cora Baird, and by Burr Tillstrom.

  “Burr Tillstrom and the Bairds had more to do with the beginning of puppets on television than we did,” Henson said in a 1979 interview. “But they had developed their art and style to a certain extent before hitting television. Baird had done marionette shows long before he came to television. Burr Tillstrom’s puppets were basically the standard hand-puppet characters that went back to Punch and Judy. But from the beginning, we worked watching a television monitor, which is very different from working in a puppet theater.”23

  Sesame debuted on PBS in the fall of 1969, just a year and a half after the Neighborhood. But, unlike Rogers, Henson kept close ties to commerce, marketing his Sesame Muppets to children, partnering with the commercial-programming behemoth Walt Disney Company, and eventually negotiating to sell the puppets he controlled (as opposed to those controlled by Sesame) to Disney.24

  Henson’s Muppets and Rogers’s Neighborhood puppets occupied comparable niches on educational television for decades, and each attracted loyal audiences of children and their parents. But Henson clearly won the ratings competition, if there was one.

  Although the Neighborhood reached as many as seven million households during its peak years in the 1980s, Sesame Street exceeded that, with an audience of about ten million by 1985. Sesame continued to air after the Neighborhood ceased production and is now shown in more than a hundred countries around the world. After its first season, Sesame Street won three Emmys and a Peabody and was on the cover of Time magazine. Since then, there have been scores of Emmy awards among the hundreds of accolades showered on Henson and Sesame.

  The genius of Jim Henson was that his puppets—Kermit the Frog, Bert and Ernie, Miss Piggy, and all the rest—were charming, funny, and very appealing to little children and to their parents. The grown-ups watched Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood with their children because they understood the value of sharing this important experience, and because they were attracted to Rogers’s slow, childlike pacing. But they watched Sesame because its fast-paced, hip messaging was fun, and funny, for the parents, too. Somehow Henson found a universal language that seemed to draw everyone into the good times.

  Certainly, Sesame was controversial, particularly at the very beginning, because its pacing and quick-cutaway style seemed too close to the frantic world of commercial advertising. But, just as clearly, Henson had a gift for creating characters that had the charm, the authenticity, and the joy to convey learning to millions of children. Throughout the decades, millions of kids learned their numbers and their ABCs from Big Bird, Bert and Ernie, and the others.25

  When Henson died unexpectedly (from a streptococcus infection) in 1990 at the age of 53, the television world was plunged into mourning. Joan Ganz Cooney, the creative force who had organized the people, the funding, and the thinking that gave birth to Sesame Street and the Children’s Television Workshop, said at the time: “He was our era’s Charlie Chaplin, Mae West, W. C. Fields, and Marx Brothers, and indeed he drew from all of them to create a new art form that influenced popular culture around the world.”26

  Though Fred Rogers’s legacy has not been as strong and durable as that of Sesame Street and the Muppets, there is no question that Fred Rogers’s puppets were an essent
ial ingredient not only in his creative expression but also in his outreach to young viewers. His secretary Elaine Lynch recalled that, despite Rogers’s aversion to allowing children on the set while he was working (because he knew they would claim his attention), he sometimes invited a group of them from the Make-A-Wish Foundation, an organization that arranges exciting experiences for children with serious medical conditions. Many of these children would ask if they could meet Mister Rogers, and the foundation and Rogers’s staff periodically arranged for visits to the Neighborhood set while the program was being produced.

  One day, said Lynch, a group of such children included a twelve-year-old boy who was autistic: “I tried to get as much information from the family as I could so Fred had an idea of what their problems were. This was a mother and father, and the autistic boy was, I think, the oldest of three. He had a sister, and he also had a younger brother, all of whom, they claimed, had never heard him speak. He grunted—‘Mmm, mmm’—what he wanted, pointed to what he wanted.”27

  Lynch noticed that the father was the one shooting video of the event, and she maneuvered herself over near him to help him get positioned properly to get the best footage.

  “But Fred, when he came out to visit with the family, had the King and Queen puppets on his hands, and he started talking to the family, and he finally got to the boy, who was almost as tall as Fred at that point. The child started speaking in full sentences to the King and Queen. Well, I don’t know whether you can imagine what the family was going through at that point, hearing their son speak for the first time. The father started blubbering to the point where he could no longer hold the camera, and I took the camera gently from him.”

  Lynch got a Neighborhood crew member to film the rest of the encounter between the puppets, the boy, and his family. Rogers said nothing as himself. He stayed in character as the voices of King Friday XIII and Queen Sara Saturday. And Lynch—who later referred to the whole exchange as a “miracle”—rushed upstairs to get the family their own King and Queen puppets from Rogers’s office.28

  PART IV

  You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.

  —FRED ROGERS

  15.

  ON HIATUS

  Fred Rogers is in a blue blazer and a dark blue tie. As he enters the room—a living room that looks similar to his “television house” on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood—soft music plays that also seems in keeping with the show’s theme. He sits down and starts sorting through the day’s mail, showing viewers some of the letters and pictures sent in from his many correspondents. Then he even shows a home movie from one of his admirers. The letters, the pictures, and the movie all illustrate the theme of this show, which is about memories—how they are made and how much they mean to us.

  Then Rogers shows pictures of his own family: the young Fred with his mother and father and grandfather. Making a subtle transition from the memories of his viewers to those from his own childhood, he features pictures of his grandfather, Fred McFeely.

  Rogers talks about his childhood: “I remember being dressed up a lot of the time.” He shows pictures of himself looking chubby and shy in a suit, with his mother and father. He tells the TV audience that he loved his grandfather because Fred McFeely let Fred relax and be natural. “He loved fun. And encouraged me to be myself.”1

  Gradually, it dawns on the viewer that this isn’t Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. This isn’t a program for children. Although it is the same soft-spoken, gentle-mannered, avuncular Fred Rogers onscreen, he is clearly talking to an adult audience. It is different from the television Fred Rogers made for children; but it is also very different from most of the television programming made for adults.

  After showing a picture of his grandfather’s house from years earlier, Rogers plays a video of himself as an adult, standing behind the ruined foundation. He explains that since his grandfather died, the house has been torn down, and all he has left are the memories. Then the viewers see Buttermilk Falls, near his grandfather’s house. Young Fred often played outside with his grandfather, he told the television audience, and the memory of Fred McFeely still sustained him. It was his grandfather who taught Fred Rogers how to enjoy the freedom to explore, and who helped him grow from a shy, hesitant boy into a more confident and accomplished young man.

  Then the video shifts to a contrived reenactment of a scene from Fred’s youth when he was climbing on a high stone wall and his mother and grandmother, fearful for his safety, admonished him. His grandfather steps in and tells the two women to let the kid climb the wall as young Fred needs to learn to do things for himself. The adult Fred tells the audience how much he loved his grandfather for the timely intervention. He goes on to offer a thought on the importance of memories: “Our memories are ours to share or not to share. We have the right to make that decision.”2

  This is painful television: By the standards of programming made for adult audiences, it seems awkward and self-conscious. The gentle, almost childlike style of Mister Rogers may have been fine when Fred was producing television for young children, but it comes across as somewhat hokey, almost, for an adult audience.

  Although Fred still has the direct openness that makes him so appealing, the content, the format, and the tone of the show seem to fall somewhere between children’s television and the sort of earnest programming that might appear in an educational film made for a high school audience. The pacing and the overly simplistic messaging just don’t seem to work for adults, even back in the mid-1970s.

  What we are watching here is something called Old Friends . . . New Friends, a public television series written and produced by Fred Rogers after he abruptly dropped Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in 1975. After seven years of producing the most popular show on PBS, Fred had decided that he had covered much of the terrain he thought was important for young children, and he was ready for something else.3 According to those who knew and worked with Fred back then, that something else was intended to include television programming for adults and perhaps even a radio talk show.4

  David Newell, who played the part of Mr. McFeely on the Neighborhood, remembers that Rogers was inspired in part by the knowledge that many older viewers watched and enjoyed Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood; Fred felt that these older viewers might form the base for a larger audience for his proposed programming for grown-ups.5

  His former producer Margy Whitmer explains: “Fred loved to interview people. But he was quite troubled by what was happening in this country in terms of taking care of children. That was when drive-bys and gangs were prominent in the news. He was troubled by this whole breakdown. He said, ‘But there’s got to be people out there who are taking care of kids. Who are those people? They are the people that should be on television. You know, we always hear all the bad news. What about the good news?’ I think that was really where that came from.”6

  This is the same impulse behind today’s CNN Heroes, the original People magazine, and NBC News’s “Making a Difference” segment. As usual, Fred Rogers was ahead of the curve.

  And perhaps Fred Rogers just needed a new challenge. In a May 8, 1975, interview with Kenneth Briggs of the New York Times entitled “Mr. Rogers Decides It’s Time to Head for New Neighborhoods,” Rogers says he is looking forward to his “first respite in twenty years,” and a chance to write new operas as well as shows for adults. He explains that he would still commune with his television neighbors, but in reruns, as he pares down 455 episodes of the Neighborhood to comprise a “well-rounded cycle” to run on the 237 PBS stations that carried his show then.7

  On the last day of taping the Neighborhood, Rogers tells Briggs, “I think this has been a good vehicle, and I won’t say we won’t use it again.” Fred Rogers goes on to note that writing and producing the Neighborhood has also helped him “become more comfortable with who I have become. For a time, I had real difficulty with the little boy
who had so many limits inside.”8

  One can conjecture that this newfound comfort also fueled Rogers’s desire to reach out in new directions.

  This move by Fred Rogers—abandoning the themes that had made him such a success on public television and delivering a surprising segue into adult fare—caught many of his coworkers and supporters off guard.

  According to Basil Cox, the manager of Family Communications, Inc. (FCI) back then, the decision was made entirely by Fred Rogers: “I don’t really remember the genesis of it. But he wanted to talk to families. He wanted to talk to adults. He wanted to explore what that would feel like to him, I think, and what kind of television that would make.”9

  Basil Cox adds: “The decision to stop producing children’s programming left everyone at the production company questioning each other about the future. “What’s next? You know: What are we doing next?” was the common refrain.

  “There was some—there was a feeling of anxiety, I think, for sure. . . . So there was a certain amount of shuffling off of people. We became a smaller company. We’re not making as many programs. I don’t actually remember what the difference in revenue was, but [it] probably shrank by a million dollars a year, or something like that.”10

  In addition to the documentary series Old Friends . . . New Friends (1978), there were special programs and another PBS series, Fred Rogers’ Heroes (1994), portraits of a wide and wild variety of people from across the country. Margy Whitmer produced and directed both: “My favorite was about sculptor Edgar Tolson, one of the great American folk artists of the last century. The days we spent with him and his family in rural Kentucky—including introducing Edgar to Fred Rogers and seeing them take each other’s measure—were among the most memorable of my life.

  “One of our specials got wonderful reviews, but it aired on some weird night, like Labor Day. We couldn’t get them to schedule it at a better time. People were coming back from vacation, or getting ready for back to school.”11