The Good Neighbor

by Maxwell King

  He believed in being as honest about the workings of the show as he was about family dynamics or children’s fears. Fascination with the practical aspects of the “television house” prompted queries such as this one from Rebecca, age four: “Does it ever rain in your neighborhood?”

  Mister Rogers responded by letter, explaining, “Dear Rebecca: Our television Neighborhood is set up inside, in a big room called a television studio. Of course, it doesn’t rain inside, but sometimes we make it look like it’s raining. It takes a lot of work to make it look like it’s raining in the studio, and we don’t do it very often. But once in a while we do. I like to talk to my television neighbors about different kinds of weather. I know it’s not always a ‘beautiful day’ outside, but I like to think we can make it a ‘beautiful day’ inside because we enjoy having a television visit together.”18

  When Meaghan, age ten, asked: “What is the purpose of feeding the fish every day? To demonstrate responsibility?” Mister Rogers wrote back, “Dear Meaghan: When we feed the fish, we’re showing that we ‘take care of’ other living things, and being taken care of is something very important to children. They know they need grown-ups to provide them with food, like the fish in our tank need us to feed them. It does have a lot to do with responsibility, as you mention. I also like to watch anything that swims!”19

  Probably the most effective theme week in the 1980s iteration of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and certainly some of the most powerful programming ever developed for children’s television, was Fred Rogers’s week on divorce. It represented the best of this new second phase in the evolution of the Neighborhood: courageously confronting one of the most pressing and complex fears of childhood—the breakup of the family.

  When Fred Rogers’s parents were growing up, divorce was a relative rarity. By the time he finished his television career in 2001, around half the marriages in America ended in divorce. Just a few years later, the US passed another watershed: Over 40 percent of babies were being born out of wedlock; and for women in their twenties—a harbinger of future trends—the percentage of babies born outside of marriage was 60 percent.20

  As someone devoted to family and community, Fred Rogers was clearly disheartened by such trends. But he was careful in his programming not to be strident or judgmental, but simply to explore and explain what this must mean and feel like for the children involved. Rogers fervently believed in the power of communities and families to help young children grow. He knew that young children learn less from books or movies or television than they do from caring adults.

  But he was not a crusader. As much as Fred Rogers worried about American trends—more geographic mobility, more emphasis on individual latitude, potentially disrupting traditional responsibility to community and family—he knew his job was to try to understand the effects of these trends on children, to understand the children themselves, and how to help them. In his conversations on the topic with Margaret McFarland, she reminded him that every time parents quarrel, children fantasize that they might separate—the children’s greatest fear.

  The first program in the Neighborhood’s weeklong special on divorce, which aired in 1981, starts with the host opening a bag of pretzels and examining the contents. The pretzels will reappear as illustrations of the idea that a group of things that may look alike—pretzels, people—can on closer examination be quite varied and different. Rogers is preparing his audience to react thoughtfully when the trolley takes them to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, and they encounter puppet characters, who, though they may seem the same, behave quite differently.

  In the make-believe segment, we see King Friday XIII, the authority figure among the puppets, succumb to a slick sales pitch from a young woman (a human) who proffers a new royal jet plane tailor-made for the King’s needs.

  She “proudly presents” the XIII Special, “designed especially for you, King Friday, through special arrangement with our top-flight engineers.”

  It’s a hard sell, the kind of advertising that usually made Fred Rogers cringe. “You and your royal family,” she says, “will be able to soar into limitless altitudes while enjoying the comfort of your own castle.” And she promises “not one, not two, but thirteen fuel tanks. Yes, sire, this is your plane.”

  Then Queen Sara Saturday arrives to remind the King that they’d decided not to purchase another plane. But King Friday says, “You may have decided, Sara, but I want to hear this person out.”

  Queen Sara turns to the saleswoman and says she thinks this sales pitch may be a big waste of time. Then the King and Queen quarrel about the fuel consumption of the new plane.

  The King fumes, “Well, it’s purple, and it has thirteens all over it.” Suddenly he says, “Well, I’m the King.”

  Queen Sara replies, “Well, I’m the Queen.” She storms away, and the King seems temporarily flummoxed. He excuses himself, saying, “Perhaps I should speak further with the Queen.” He seems to slink away in uncertainty.

  Then the saleswoman and Lady Aberlin, a human (rather than a puppet) figure who sometimes plays the role of hostess on make-believe segments, hear crying in the background. It is Prince Tuesday, who comes out from a hiding place to say, “I don’t like it when my mom and dad are mad at each other.” He asks, “Is it my fault . . . that they’re fighting?”

  The Prince confesses that he once wished he had a jet airplane, but he didn’t say anything about it. Suddenly he says, “I sure wish I didn’t have any feelings,” afraid that his feelings have caused upset in the family. After everyone leaves, we see Prince Tuesday lift a small suitcase over the wall and carry it under the trolley tracks; he is running away. Soon, everyone in the Neighborhood is scurrying around frantically looking for the missing little boy.

  Then the trolley takes the viewers back from the land of make-believe to Mister Rogers’s house. Fred tells his young viewers: “Prince Tuesday is afraid that his mother and dad’s fighting is all his fault. A lot of Prince Tuesday’s worries are on the inside. Do you suppose his mother and dad know that he’s worried? They might not know if he doesn’t tell them.”

  At the end of this program, Rogers carefully puts the different-size pretzels away, feeds his fish, and sings good-bye to his viewers. He changes into his jacket and shoes, picks up his pretzel tin and starts to leave. Then he pauses and says, “Sometimes children wonder if other people know what they’re thinking. People don’t know what you’re thinking if you don’t tell them. So, if you’re worried about something, it can really help to tell the people you love what you’re worried about.”

  Each person is different; like the pretzels, they may look the same, but they are individual and distinct. If you want someone else to understand what you are thinking and feeling, you must tell them. He waves good-bye. “We’ll have time to do more things tomorrow.”

  This is vintage Mister Rogers: detailed, consistent, gently spaced and timed, richly interwoven with narrative, fantasy, a touch of the lecture—a mix of great storytelling, parable, and gentle explication.

  The rest of the weeklong series on divorce follows the same pattern. Rogers even brings in an expert on the effects of divorce on young children to help him explore the meaning and the feelings of things. Fred was always hopeful that parents would watch with their children, and the thoughts of this expert—Dr. Earl Grollman, author of books on divorce and grief and feelings—seem aimed as much at the parents as the kids.21

  Finally, the week ends on a high note, with King Friday and Queen Sara Saturday and Prince Tuesday reconciled, and Rogers himself singing to his viewers about the critical importance of being able to talk about one’s feelings with others. This is what has helped Prince Tuesday resolve his situation, and Mister Rogers gently explains that the pain of divorce is real, that there is nothing magic that will make it disappear, but that the ability to talk with those we love about feelings will bring us through something difficult. As usual, Fred Rogers offers no easy, quick fixes, and his message for children is that
their feelings will be okay if they can share them.

  This theme week, like most of the others, has delivered a surprising amount of information and cognitive learning, but has done so in ways that are always processing opportunities for social and emotional learning as well. It is the distinctive Rogers blend, and it came to be deeply appreciated by millions of children, as well as many experts on communications and education. As George Gerbner, dean emeritus of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a 1996 essay about Fred Rogers and his work:

  “His dreams, his stories, offer ways to control the chaotic life of the streets and neighborhoods in which many children live. Children are starving for story, the kind that builds on hope, the kind that echoes for a lifetime. We need story in our lives, not dreams based on greed. Mister Rogers turns to the viewer and says quietly, ‘Believe you. It is your story that is important. It is your mind and heart that can make things possible—just because of who you are.’”22

  Fred Rogers had made the leap to addressing issues in the world around him that affected kids, thereby ensuring the Neighborhood’s run through to the end of the century, and cementing his reputation as the most thoughtful, sensitive, and courageous creator of children’s television.

  17.

  BEHIND THE SCENES IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD

  In 1975, Jeffrey Erlanger, a five-year-old boy from Madison, Wisconsin, confined to a wheelchair, asked his parents, Howard and Pam, if he could meet Mister Rogers rather than going to Disneyland. It was the family’s own version of “Make-A-Wish,” proposed on the eve of major surgery to fuse Jeff’s spine. When asked in an interview why Jeff chose Fred Rogers, Howard and Pam explained that their son “always said that Mister Rogers told him that he was special and that he was just fine the way he was, and it gave him confidence and it made him feel good, and Mister Rogers just seemed to love him.”1

  Jeff and his sister, Lisa, both watched the Neighborhood so often that they knew all the words to Fred Rogers’s songs. Pam and Howard Erlanger wrote a letter to the television star about Jeff’s desire to meet him, and they got a handwritten answer that led to a breakfast meeting at a hotel in Milwaukee, where Fred Rogers was visiting to promote the local PBS station. Later they continued to correspond; Mister Rogers wrote to say how glad he was that Jeff’s surgery had gone well.

  The years passed, and even if the growing Jeff didn’t watch the Neighborhood quite as often as he had when he was younger, he kept a place in his heart for Mister Rogers. Then in 1980, Fred Rogers decided he wanted to have a child in a wheelchair on the show for a theme week on all things mechanical and electrical:

  “He remembered Jeff, and he told his staff to get Jeff. The staff said, ‘There’re handicapped kids in Pittsburgh. We don’t have to fly somebody here from Wisconsin and go through all that. We could just go down the block.’ No. Fred insisted it had to be Jeff,” recalled Pam and Howard Erlanger.2

  Reasonably enough, the staff at the Neighborhood thought the family lived in Milwaukee, not in Madison. And Fred Rogers remembered them as the Ehrlingers. When they couldn’t be located, Rogers instructed the staff to put the project on hold. But in cleaning out some files, the Neighborhood’s staff found letters from the Erlangers about their older daughter, Lisa, not Jeff. Lisa was worried about the fact that in her mind, the show “didn’t have any strong female role models.”

  Rogers had written to say that the Neighborhood was made of modules, and some of the segments dated from the 1960s; he was trying to remedy the situation. In fact, a song from a very early show included these lyrics: “My daddy’s strong and drives a car and my mommy’s pretty and cooks.” For all his humanistic impulses, Fred Rogers was also a man of his times.3

  Once the Erlanger family had been located, they were all flown to Pittsburgh for the taping. Jeff was now a preternaturally intelligent nine-year-old. When asked if there was any special preparation for Jeff, his mother, Pam, said: “Absolutely not. The first time Jeff heard anything about what was going to happen was when we arrived on the set a few minutes before they started rolling the cameras. At that point Fred said to him, ‘Jeff, I’m just going to ask you some questions, and then we’ll sing a song together.’ He did say, ‘Remember, we’re talking to very young children so don’t use any words that are too big.’”4

  Jeff Erlanger didn’t quite heed Mister Rogers words. In one of the Neighborhood’s most memorable broadcasts in 1981, Mister Rogers asks Jeff straightforwardly about the mechanics of his wheelchair, and how he wound up in it. The young boy explains his medical condition (resulting from a spinal tumor) in sophisticated detail, including even his urinary functions.

  Mister Rogers listens intently and says simply: “Your parents must be very proud of you.”5

  This was the Zen of Fred Rogers’s radical acceptance: There was no topic he wouldn’t address on air, no matter how difficult. “We don’t fudge things,” he said once when asked about the sources of the show’s popularity. “People long to be in touch with honesty.”

  Producer Margy Whitmer recalls Jeff Erlanger’s appearance on the Neighborhood: “It was one of the most stunning moments. . . . Here’s this child who has multiple disabilities, and Fred said, ‘Talk to me about that wheelchair. Talk to me about what’s wrong with you.’ And this extraordinary kid talked about it in a matter-of-fact way. Fred . . . presented it to kids watching the show, as ‘this is just the way he is.’”6

  Jeff’s parents felt completely comfortable allowing their son to speak this way on television because, as Howard Erlanger explained: “In our own way, we felt totally analogous to how the kids felt, that Fred Rogers was part of our family, that he was just a regular person. And we saw that everything that happened on the show was very warm and nurturing and supporting, so whatever it was that Jeff was going to do was going to be nurturing and supporting. There was no risk whatsoever that there could be anything that would be embarrassing or that we would be unhappy.

  “We just felt totally comfortable, like we were going to a relative’s for an evening.”7

  Jeff Erlanger and Fred Rogers didn’t meet again until nearly twenty years later, when Fred Rogers was being inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999. When Jeff rolls onstage to surprise him, Rogers runs up to the stage and hugs him as if they are the only two people in the auditorium. “On behalf of millions of children and grown-ups,” says Jeff to Fred Rogers, “It’s you I like.”8

  There wasn’t a dry eye in the well-dressed house.

  The second iteration of the Neighborhood, which showcased the Erlanger episode in 1981, was in production three seasons of the year: fall, winter, and spring. The scripts for the Neighborhood of Make-Believe were comprised of individual dramas that began on Monday and had to be resolved by Friday. Fred Rogers continued to incorporate daily life into scripts, as he always had.

  Chuck Aber (Neighbor Aber) recalls: “Sometimes you had to be careful what you said to Fred, because it would end up in the program. One of my favorite theme weeks . . . was ‘Alike and Different.’ Somewhere along the line, I guess I mentioned . . . that I had this 1958 Corvette, a beautiful car. . . .

  “Next thing I know, I got a script, and [in it] there was going to be a car show up at Idlewild Park, which is near Latrobe, where Fred grew up. My car is in that program.

  “Fred comes along, and I’m cleaning my car for the show. He’s already shown the television viewer that this other car has a wooden steering wheel and spoked wheels. Then he gets to mine, and it has a plastic steering wheel and metal wheels. So they’re alike, but they’re very different at the same time.

  “That’s an example of where you innocently mention something to Fred, and next thing you know, it’s in the program.”9

  Every summer Fred Rogers went to Nantucket on his yearly sojourn with his family. But he was still working: The staff would give him ideas about themes and segments to work on while he was away. Rogers’s longtime secretary Elaine Lynch describes the proc
ess: “Fred enjoyed Nantucket, but he also had a private office up there, and a piano. He did have a typewriter, but he didn’t use it much. He still liked handwriting the scripts on eight-and-a-half-by-fourteen legal pads, and he would use a whole pad for five programs. Most of the time he’d mail them back to me from Nantucket, and I would start typing them. . . .

  “Then I would mail him a copy of the typed scripts, and after he had checked them, he would call me and say, ‘Go ahead and distribute them’ to the . . . crew. Then they would start doing what they needed to do to make the production happen when he got back.”10

  A production period for five programs, one week’s programming, was about four weeks. Location pieces were shot first, as the art crew was simultaneously making props for interior shoots. A segment on visiting a crayon factory, or Chef Brockett in his bakery, for example, might come to just over six minutes after editing.

  Budgets were always modest. Betty Aberlin notes: “It was so low-budget, in a way, it was as close to live TV as you’ve got. There was no rehearsal time, so you basically learned your lines and then sometimes you had to do something tricky with a puppet or a prop. At which time you got the prop and puppet, and the lines went out of your head. I mean, we did our own hair, our own makeup, we miked ourselves, we dressed in a toilet—a very nice toilet, but still, the toilet.”11

  On a typical day in the studio, the crew would arrive at 8:00 or 8:30 A.M. The Neighborhood of Make-Believe was taped first, in equally timed segments for all five programs. Rogers always found the Neighborhood of Make-Believe part of the show easier because he was behind the scenes, manipulating the puppets.