by Maxwell King
Rogers’s antipathy to advertising extended to anything that might be construed as fooling a child; he viewed himself as a powerful mentor who must never abuse children’s trust by pretending to be something else. He once told David Newell about a conversation he had with a network executive that went sour when the executive asked what Rogers would wear as host of a network show.
“The executive wanted some sort of costume,” says Newell. “Fred said, ‘Well, then, it looks as if this interview is over.’”10
In the spring of 1984, Burger King used Rogers’s image in a commercial featuring an actor called “Mister Rodney,” who dressed in a cardigan and sneakers to attack the product of their rival, McDonald’s. In the spot, Mister Rodney holds up a flashcard with the word “McFrying,” which is what McDonald’s does to their burgers. Mister Rodney was clearly more in favor of Burger King’s flame-broiled method.
As Fred Rogers’s former colleague Eliot Daley notes: “This guy was so good that the first time I saw it, I thought: God, they must have just pirated some videotape of Fred, and cut and stitched, and put this thing together, and did a dub, or something. Because this guy was—he was Fred. It was just chilling.”11
The executives at Burger King had not contacted Rogers’s company, FCI, before airing the ad. Once Fred Rogers’s staff told him about it, he called a press conference to state unequivocally that he did not endorse the company’s use of his character or likeness.
Daley adds: “Fred was a rabid vegetarian, and the notion of selling hot, dead cow meat to children was just—you know, it was the most distressed, I think, I’ve ever seen him.”12
Rather than suing Burger King, Fred Rogers preferred a direct approach, and contacted Don Dempsey, Burger King’s senior vice president for marketing, who produced the ad with the agency J. Walter Thompson.
As recalled by Eliot Daley: “As I understood it later from both parties, Fred opened the conversation by introducing himself, and asking this guy, ‘Are you by any chance a father?’ And the guy said yes, he is. And he says, ‘Do your children know what you do?’
“And he said, ‘Well yes, they’ve got some sense that I come here to work, and they like to go into Burger King stores,’ and so forth.
“Fred said, ‘Well that’s wonderful. It must feel great to have them know and appreciate, and be proud of what you do.’ He said, ‘What do you think it would be like if they misunderstood what you do? Actually, if they thought that what you do was something bad, or you know, harmful to people, or the food that you were selling them was not good for them? And if they lost respect for what you do?’
“They chatted on a little bit more about what a bad thing that would be. So they hung up. About ten seconds later, the phone rings at J. Walter Thompson, and it’s this guy saying, ‘Pull those damn commercials off the air. I want them erased, destroyed. I don’t ever want them seen again.’”13
Within seventy-two hours, an ad campaign that cost Burger King 150,000 dollars and had been on the air for only a week was pulled.
In 1990, Fred Rogers took a different approach, joining Family Communications, Inc., in suing the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan and three men to stop them from using tape-recorded telephone messages that imitated the theme music on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Rogers’s voice. It was one of the few times Rogers took legal action against people and organizations that used his popularity to advance their own agendas and causes.14
Fred Rogers’s refusal to abide by the rules of the marketplace, along with his gentle, slow approach to programming overall, left him open to criticism that he was coddling children and giving them unrealistic expectations of the harsh world they would someday enter.
Don Feder, a nationally syndicated columnist for the Boston Herald, summed it up: “For over twenty-five years on his PBS series, Fred Rogers has been filling the innocent heads of children with this pap. . . . Under a self-esteem regime, America is becoming a nation of feel-good mediocrities.”15
But Rogers’s critics are guilty of ignoring great volumes of his work that emphasize personal responsibility and discipline on the parts of children and their parents and teachers. Fred Rogers always believed in a balance between cognitive and emotional content, and he tried to give appropriate weight to the need for discipline and focus. In fact, he produced an entire theme week of episodes just on the topic of discipline. In all his books, his speeches, his letters to children and parents, his scripts, even the lyrics to his songs, Fred repeatedly emphasized personal responsibility.
The difference is that Rogers honed in on the cultivation of self-discipline rather than an emphasis on parents and teachers dropping the proverbial hammer. Fred Rogers felt very strongly—backed by the research of child-development mentors—that the most effective gift to young children is nurturing the capacity for self-discipline rather than the imposition of it. He recognized the importance, and the value, of outside discipline, but he thought lasting benefit for the child came from developing the ability to concentrate and hold yourself accountable for your own actions. Fred Rogers was committed to helping young children find and evolve their own capacities, including that of self-discipline, because he believed it would make them stronger adults.
He famously declared: “I think of discipline as the continual everyday process of helping a child learn self-discipline.”16 His Family Communications, Inc., production company even created a training workshop—complete with guides, videos, handouts, and DVDs—entitled “Learning Discipline—Connecting Discipline, Communications and Relationships.” It reflects Rogers’s layered approach to learning, always examining the connections that help children reach their own potential. His work stands as a stark contrast to the simplistic, black-and-white perspective of many of his critics.
And what of Fred Rogers’s philosophy about discipline when it came to his own children? It changed a great deal once they became teenagers—a time of life with which he was far less comfortable. Joanne Rogers’s recollection of Fred’s parenting style is that he almost always was, as he was on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, quiet and gentle and understanding with his two sons, particularly when they were very little. But as they grew into their teenage years, Fred was often mystified about how to handle them.
One day in the mid-1970s, Joanne Rogers saw a sliver of light coming from a blocked-off area in her basement where she hadn’t even known there was a space. She and Fred and the boys had moved into the big old Pittsburgh house—some would call it a mansion—on Beechwood Boulevard when they returned from Toronto. The basement seemed enormous, containing room after room. Puzzled, Joanne found her way to the small enclosure and was amazed to discover “grow lamps” installed by her teenage sons, Jim and John, for the marijuana plants they were cultivating right there in the basement.
Joanne was stunned, but also a little amused: She later speculated that at least it showed some entrepreneurial energy on the boys’ part. Their father was not so easygoing. “He was furious,” says Joanne. “It was illegal, for one thing . . . many people would have loved to have that story out there and . . . he was really, really angry and he went up and got them.”17 Fred didn’t get angry very often, and he didn’t stay angry very long. But he did make the boys clean up the basement garden and destroy the plants in the backyard.
Though Jim and John weren’t happy to lose the crop, they felt their father was fair with them.
John later recounted how angry Fred got when John—driving his girlfriend home on an icy winter night in Pittsburgh—wrecked the car his father had given him to drive himself back and forth to school. “I have never seen him that angry. I didn’t think he got angry,” said John years later.18
Fred and his son “yelled and screamed at each other for an hour,” John added. After they quieted down, Fred Rogers told his son, “You know, I feel much better now,” and the two agreed they had gotten a much-needed release of tension that had been building between them. John also said he was pleased that his father trusted him
enough to get angry.
John also got into trouble cruising in a twenty-two-foot-long black Cadillac limousine that he borrowed from an aunt and later purchased from his grandmother’s estate. While a high school senior, he and a crew of friends drove to West Virginia to buy beer. In an interview, he admitted: “We had about five, six, seven people in the thing [the limo] smoking a little bit of something. . . .
“Well, a policeman comes up and this thing is full of smoke . . . I lowered the window and the smoke went right in his face. He said, ‘You are going to have to leave now, the park is closed.’ And that’s all he did. We lucked out.”19
After another encounter with a cop when John plowed into some parked cars after he’d been drinking, John Rogers began to wonder if his luck was wearing thin.
After one or the other of the boys got into a scrape, they’d convene with Fred and Joanne for a family meeting. All four of them would sit down to hash out the offending incident. John remembers that Joanne told the boys once when they were in their early teens: “‘You know, we are just four different people living in the same house.’
“I was thinking, yes, you are probably right. Of course, then my brother and I would go out on the roof and smoke and things.”20
Joanne was the parent who delivered punishment in the Rogers family. “Fred would be very, very patient,” recalls Joanne, “and I wasn’t.”21 She adds that she was not opposed to spanking when the boys were young. Both Rogers boys went to private schools: both to St. Edmund’s Academy in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where the family lived, then Jim to Shady Side Academy outside Pittsburgh, and John to Sewickley Academy in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, after a stint in the public schools of Latrobe.
Joanne reports that although Fred never blamed her or himself for the boys’ struggles in adolescence, “I think he saw this as, well, they’re adolescents, and what are you going to do about it.”22 When Jim went off to college, to Rollins, he stopped communicating with his parents for a time.
The rift became public knowledge when an article appeared in People magazine in May 1978 under the headline, “Fred Rogers Moves into a New Neighborhood—and So Does His Rebellious Son.”
It noted: “Most kids rebel against their parents sooner or later. But Jim Rogers is having a harder time than other 18-year-olds telling his father to buzz off. Jim’s pop is not just any Mister Rogers. He’s the Mister Rogers, for 24 years the gentle host of public TV’s Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and a paragon of parental understanding. A freshman at his dad’s alma mater, Rollins College in Florida, Jim has stopped writing his folks or even returning their phone calls. ‘He’s flown the coop,’ sighs his father.”23
Joanne saw Jim’s behavior as a continuation of adolescent rebellion: “It’s been a difficult year. There’s real hostility.”24
But Fred, always the intellectual when it came to children and parenting, sought to support his son. “It’s been painful, and it’s rough on Jamie,” he said. “But if we don’t allow him to go off and have this time for himself, he’ll never come back to the nest.”25
Neither Rogers son finished college, but both have grown up to be family men as committed to their children as Fred and Joanne were.
Fred Rogers always did his best to be an involved parent, despite his rigorous schedule. When he was just starting out in television, he took great pains to be home for supper. His older son, Jim, remembers that sometimes Fred was so rushed that he came in still wearing his pancake makeup. As his sons grew, though, he often had to travel, and both boys missed him. Joanne reported that later in life he worried he’d let them down by being so absorbed in his work. Staffers also worried about the amount of time Fred Rogers gave to people they called “birds with broken wings,” needy people who took up a lot of his time.
Joanne Rogers observes that for Fred, “The work never ended. He had three or four people who called . . . oftentimes they were young people that he felt might need his advice, and they were almost always long-winded. Needy people were attracted to him; I do think that that was part of his ministry.”26
Dr. William Hirsch, a great family friend who often had holiday dinners with the family, recalls that Fred once confided in him, “My life would have been so different if the boys had just had a more easy time going through that part of their life.”27 (Rogers was referring to his sons’ adolescent years.)
Fred Rogers put in long hours at the studio. Joanne observes: “It was hard work. And he would be very tired by the time he got home. And I, of course, had been driving the kids, and running around with them. So I would be pretty worn-out, too.”28
Jim Rogers recalls the family’s routine: “When Dad was in the studio, that would be hectic in the evening because he was rushing home from work, in order to sit down with us for dinner. But on days that he wasn’t in the studio, he would come home from the office around five o’clock and that would be quiet time, and we all went to our rooms and Dad took a nap. We were told, ‘You don’t have to take a nap; it’s not nap time, it’s just quiet time. You can do whatever you want, but you do it quietly.’
“That would last, as I say, from about five o’clock till about six o’clock, and then it would be dinnertime. And then we’d be just as raucous as we wanted to be until it was bedtime. But that was a staple in the house, quiet time.”29
Dinner could sometimes be less than quiet, especially from Joanne Rogers’s perspective: “At dinner, I think they [their sons] knew exactly which buttons to push, and they would say, ‘Yuck,’ when they saw the food.”30
Fred Rogers did not force his vegetarianism on the rest of the family. Jim recalls: “We had a woman who cooked for us for years, Dolores Johnson, and I know that she would tear her hair out every time he’d come up with something else that he didn’t want to eat. . . . But she got to be quite a wizard with the tofu. Dolores would cook one thing for Mom and John and me and then something else for Dad.”31 Fred Rogers did have a sweet tooth, and he was a fan of the plum pudding (prune whip) at Stouffer’s as well as ice cream at Baskin-Robbins.
Never having had siblings, Joanne had no way to gauge if her sons’ behavior at the dinner table was particularly bad for two young boys less than two years apart in age. She notes: “I thought sometimes they were going to kill each other. They tussled, and roughhoused so much. . . . And they could get me right down to their level sometimes. But Fred was so patient with them. He was extremely patient.”32
Joanne would wait to see if Fred Rogers would chide the boys for their behavior: “It didn’t come, and I’d end up saying, ‘OK, that’s it, you’ve had it.’ Or worse.”
Jim Rogers, who saw his paternal grandfather as a “stern, kind of austere man,” speculates that Fred Rogers’s own upbringing had a lot to do with his unwillingness to crack down more on his sons: “I guarantee you that the way he was treated growing up, was, ‘Say hello to the nice people and then go back upstairs.’ You didn’t hear about a whole lot of horseplay in that household.”33
Ironically, John Rogers, the younger son, observed in an interview that “Maybe there was a little too much self-discipline in our family, for my brother and me. Meaning that we weren’t ready for the self-discipline that maybe was exuded upon us. . . . I often feel that—I don’t know if we want to use the term—the hammer should have come down a little harder; more limits should have been set.”34
Overall, “I consider them both good parents, and both parents that were involved in their kids’ lives. And of course, Dad was very busy. But he was also around a lot, and Mom was around a lot.”
Growing up, the two Rogers sons dealt with their father’s notoriety in somewhat different ways. When they were little, Jim and John Rogers would see their father on television and point to the set and say, “Other Daddy.”
As Joanne Rogers describes it, “John, the younger one, was always very ready to tell people who his daddy was.”35
John has happy memories of “going to the studio to watch them tape the show. I
knew the whole staff there. It was a like a big family, a huge family.”36 He recalls visiting the set of the Neighborhood often from around ages eight to fifteen, and sometimes wondering how his dad could stand the heat from the lights on set. Henrietta Pussycat was his favorite puppet.
Jim Rogers notes that the two boys could differentiate the television Mister Rogers from their father since they could see what went into making the Neighborhood: “I saw it much more as, ‘This is my dad at home. That’s my dad at work.’ It’s all so seamless when you watch the episode on television, and yet if you go to the studio and you see them screaming, ‘Cut,’ every five minutes . . . and everything being shot out of sequence. . . . From a very early age, I realized this is my dad working. Watching it on television, it would be the final product of the work.”37
Jim’s favorite part of visiting the set was looking at the miniature model of the town shown at the start of every episode: “It was about, I would say, four feet by four feet and was up on a table. It had all these little cardboard houses . . . and little, tiny Matchbox cars on the little streets.”
He remembers moving the miniature cars from one side of the model street to the other: “Being small . . . it was kind of like being a giant . . . a sort of Godzilla feeling.”
When asked about the misconceptions people may have had about Fred Rogers, Jim cites the mistaken impression that his father was in any way intellectually slow, because of his manner of speech as Mister Rogers: “I think he can come off sounding slow, almost simple, if you will, and yet he was one of the most quick-witted people I’ve ever known. People always say, ‘Boy, is he really like that when he comes home?’
“And for the most part, ‘Yeah, what you see is what you get, except that he’s not talking to a three-year-old anymore now; now he’s talking with us.’ He was very quick-witted, very funny, very down to earth.”38
At home, the whole family often watched Rogers’s older shows, such as The Children’s Corner, on sixteen-millimeter film.