by Maxwell King
Fred Rogers mined family life for ideas for the Neighborhood. Jim recalls: “There were times that I would tell Dad . . . about something that was bothering me, and six months later you’d see it on TV. . . . It was strange. Again, it’s sort of that life-in-a-fishbowl thing. But it was always honest, and it wasn’t a mockery of anything, it wasn’t a parody. . . . It was genuine and heartfelt, so I always took that as, okay, that’s a good thing, then.”39
As Dad, Fred Rogers would proclaim: “I don’t like television. We need to limit the television in this house.” The regimen was one hour of TV a day. The one show they watched as a family was The Waltons, every Thursday night at 8:00 P.M. The family even visited the show’s set in Hollywood. Sometimes Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman was also on the very limited viewing list. Later, in 1996 when the boys were grown, Fred Rogers made a guest appearance on Dr. Quinn, the only time he adopted a fictional role on television. In an episode called “Deal with the Devil,” he plays, appropriately enough, a frontier minister.
Jim Rogers recalls his father’s unusual enthusiasm for a new show that he previewed one night for the family: “I can remember being probably ten or eleven, and Dad came home from work one day with a videotape. He said, ‘I have something you have to watch.’”40
WQED was considering offering it, and program director Sam Silberman had asked for Fred Rogers’s input for a show featuring six guys from England—the first four or five episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. “Well, we just howled watching this,” Jim recalls. “It was just so up his alley.”
“As gentle as Dad was, this was one of those paradoxes. Monty Python is not particularly gentle. They think nothing of dropping a sixteen-ton weight on somebody to end a skit. For some reason, [the parrot sketch] just tickled Dad so much—a man waving a parrot around and talking about how he wanted his money back because he had bought this dead parrot.
“At the same time, he had no use for what you would call today satire or making jokes at the expense of other people. . . . He never saw anything funny in that, and yet something ridiculously silly would just put him on the floor.”
Listening to music was much more encouraged for the Rogers sons than TV viewing. Fred Rogers was attuned to both music and the lack of it. Jim Rogers describes his father as “aggressively quiet. He often spoke very softly and slowly, and it was a way, I think, of getting people to really pay attention. We would go to restaurants sometimes and there would be Muzak playing in the background. More often than not he would ask the manager . . . if they could possibly turn off the Muzak, because he felt that that undercurrent of noise took away from conversation and from communication with other people.”41
Usually when they were out in public, Fred Rogers tried to maintain a low-key profile, taking a table in restaurants off to the side or in the back. When recognized, he was too honest to deny his identity, but, said Jim, “it wasn’t that he craved the attention, but if the attention came his way, he certainly acknowledged it, and was as gracious as he could be with people.”
At some point, Fred Rogers realized that rather than give autographs, it was more meaningful to get people to write their name and address on a piece of paper, and then send them a photograph that he would take of them. This became a signature part of his typical exchange with fans, who were pleased to get photos of themselves shot by Fred Rogers.
Both sons were often asked if Fred Rogers wore his cardigan sweater around the house. John replies: “No, no, no. He wore a little jumpsuit. That’s what he wore a lot of the time. You know, he had comfy clothes. He either had those on, or he was in a suit. Dad always wore a suit: mainly either a tie and a shirt—bow tie, mainly [. . .] or a turtleneck and a jacket. He kept some of that formal feel.”42
Jim Rogers describes his father’s style: “It ran the gamut from understated elegance to the jumpsuits. They were zip-up in varying odd colors because he was color-blind and he couldn’t really tell—everything looked sort of brownish to him. He’d have these powder-blue jumpsuits: ‘Dad, what are you doing?’ But if it wasn’t the jumpsuit, then it was a pair of slacks and a shirt with a tie, a bow tie sometimes.”43
Once on an airplane, Rogers was sitting in his blazer and his bow tie when a flight attendant came over and tapped him on the shoulder and said, “I don’t mean to disturb you, but I just wanted to tell you how much I like your popcorn.” She thought he was Orville Redenbacher.
“For somebody that is recognized all the time, he just thought it was wonderful to be recognized as somebody else. He never got tired of telling that one,” Jim Rogers remembers.
For part of his high school years, John Rogers went to Latrobe High School, staying during the week with Fred Rogers’s cousins. But complications arose: “The Latrobe Die Casting Company, which was my grandfather’s company years prior to that, was having a strike. It was a wildcat strike, and they were burning people in effigy.” John Rogers switched schools, coming back to Pittsburgh.44
Both Rogers sons have memories of many happy times in the Crooked House on Nantucket.
When Fred Rogers was composing during the summers on Nantucket, John recalls that “you could hear the music through the windows . . . right into the garage area.” Rogers often asked his family for input on his new compositions. John’s favorite was music from the opera Josephine the Short-Neck Giraffe. He and his father collaborated on a simple song called “Tree, Tree, Tree” when John was only three.
Jim remembers his father always being confident about the music, but less so about the words: “It was the lyric that he wanted input on.”45
Though there were visits at their home in Pittsburgh from famous family friends like Bill Bixby, John describes a “pretty normal” upbringing: “Dad always raised us in a way that we didn’t have to feel like fancy people. We needed to feel like we were comfortable people. And just comfortable.”46 Despite the fact that they had help at home cleaning and cooking, “Mom got out the Hoover, once in a while. We all did.” The boys had chores, like cutting the grass at their grandparents’ home in Latrobe, and received small allowances.
Joanne notes that Jim, the older son, never mentioned his father’s television fame: “He [Fred] went to visit him at college one time—the first time he went down to visit him at college—and they were all just, you know, like that [makes a surprised face], because he hadn’t told a soul.”47
Jim tells it a little differently: “The way I treated it was it was much more about, this is what he does for a living. This is his job. Your dad’s a doctor, your dad’s a lawyer, and my dad’s on television. The only difference being you don’t get to go home and watch your dad on TV, watch him lawyering or doctoring or whatever . . . that carried on, too, as I got older.”48
When people he worked with, or went to school with, asked him why he hadn’t told them about his dad, he would say: “‘Well, I don’t know. It just sort of never came up, I guess. You didn’t tell me what your dad did, either.’
“It’s not that I wasn’t proud of him; it’s just that, again, it wasn’t who he was; it was his job. And unlike a lot of people, he was able to put a lot of who he was into his job. But it wasn’t a be-all and end-all.”
Joanne Rogers points out that though Fred was a vegetarian who swam every day (“He did so many things in a healthy way”) he didn’t know how to take a vacation “without having an agenda. He just wanted everybody to be busy, and constructively doing something. He didn’t understand about just sitting there and looking at the ocean. I’m just completely opposite . . . that’s why I think we got along, probably.”49
Jim Rogers recalled that his father feared not being as responsive to children—his own or any others—as much as they needed. Once, Ben Carson, the famed neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, asked Fred to talk on the phone with a little girl who was about to undergo surgery. Rogers did so; then after the conversation ended, impulsively he took a plane to Baltimore to comfort the child in person. Having a parent subject to such comp
ulsions must have bemused his sons on occasion, but they knew their father loved them.
When interviewed by a New York Times reporter who asked what it was like to be Fred Rogers’s son, John replied: “Well, it’s hard to make a comparison, because he’s the only father I have.”50
He added, “I thought, ‘I hope you don’t think that’s smart-alecky.’ . . . Dad’s very normal and natural. He’s not a Clint Eastwood or some high-powered actor. He’s himself. He’s himself, and he wants us all to be ourselves, and . . . to be comfortable. He’s not a fancy person.”
Like many children of well-known people, John Rogers struggled to establish his own identity. But the message from Fred Rogers was lived as well as told: “Dad was a very ‘fancy on the inside and not fancy on the outside’ type of person. One of his quotes to me [was] ‘The richer we are, the less we need,’ meaning stuff—that we’re richer if we don’t need much.”
John also cited an example of Fred Rogers’s notorious frugality: “When he could park his vehicle at a meter for twenty-five cents, versus paying two dollars and fifty cents at the parking lot at the PAA [Pittsburgh Athletic Association], where would he park? He’d park at the meter. He was the most laid-back, unfancy type of person you can think of, for being in his position.”
Fred Rogers didn’t discuss his good works or television successes with his sons. As John puts it, “Dad never talked too much about his accomplishments. He always wanted to hear about yours.”51
In New York City, Fred and Joanne Rogers owned a condo on West Fifty-Sixth Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues. Father Douglas Nowicki told John Rogers the story of how Fred looked out the window and saw a man being beaten on the street. Rogers went down to the street, and went over to the man as he was about to limp away. Fred Rogers handed the man a hundred-dollar bill and told him, “I just want you to know that somebody in this world loves you.”
John Rogers sees his family’s heritage as one of compassion: “I hear a lot of these stories about my grandmother and my grandfather, so I know that Dad got a lot of that from them. They may have been more fancy on the outside, but they also did a lot of fancy-on-the-inside stuff . . . they did some fabulous things for people.”52
Both Jim and John Rogers have sons of their own. Jim notes that Fred Rogers “loved being a grandfather. I think it was very liberating for him. I can remember him chasing Alex [one of Fred Rogers’s grandsons] around a tree when we lived in Squirrel Hill. . . . It was almost as though he was a kid again. . . .
“He always used to tell me, ‘Thank you for allowing me to remember what it’s like to be a child.’ He was reconnecting again with his childhood.”53
Whatever his personal foibles, Jim Rogers observes, his father had only one real touchstone: “Being who you are was so important to him that the only thing that would really upset him was phoniness. As long as I was being genuine and honest, he respected that.”
He adds: “I think all Dad really ever wanted for John or me was to be happy and pleased with who we are.”54
20.
FEARLESS AUTHENTICITY
In his office at Esquire magazine on Fifty-Fifth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in Manhattan, Tom Junod was working on a profile of Fred Rogers for a special 1998 issue on “new American heroes.” A self-described “bad-boy journalist” who had cultivated a reputation for controversy, Junod was uncomfortable about tackling such a goody-goody, and wasn’t sure how to approach the article.
“When I called, I heard that unmistakable voice. What was amazing about Fred was that he was the exact same person he was on TV. There was no show, no act—that was him.”1
Junod was discovering the same thing everyone did: Fred Rogers was Mister Rogers—the identical, authentic person in every setting. And he treated everyone the same, from the president of PBS to the doorman at his apartment building in New York to the little girl who stopped him on the street to get his autograph. All were met with kindness, hospitality, and respect.
But Tom Junod also discovered that Fred Rogers was not quite as simple as the man on television who spoke so slowly to preschool kids: “Though his [Rogers’s] trust was absolute, his ability to draw a person in on his own terms was an incredibly powerful thing.
“I look at Fred as a complicated person who chose simplicity, but at the same time, Fred was a powerful, powerful person. He was spiritually powerful, but he was also interpersonally powerful. It wasn’t as if Fred was continually deferring to you. It was not like that at all. Fred was very, very active in engaging you, but in the way he wanted to engage you.”2
When Junod called, Fred Rogers pointed out that he was not in Pittsburgh, but in his Manhattan apartment near the Esquire offices; why didn’t Tom just come on over? Never mind the fact that Rogers was still in his bathrobe, and no one at Family Communications, Inc., in Pittsburgh had vetted Junod.
Years later, Junod recalled that when he got to the building where Fred Rogers lived when he was in the city, “Fred was waiting at the door . . . in his [flimsy, old] bathrobe . . . with his white skinny legs and his socks pulled up, with this big smile on his face.”
After this totally disarming introduction, Junod unexpectedly found himself at the other end of the interviewing process. Successful journalists try to get people to reflect on themselves, but Fred Rogers had other ideas: “Fred was incredibly artful at deflecting questions. . . . It was impossible to get him to answer a question. He always threw it back to you.”
Soon Tom Junod was telling Fred Rogers about Old Rabbit, his “special friend” when Junod was a kid. Then Joanne Rogers called. Fred introduced Junod to her on the phone, and Junod had his picture taken by the man he was supposed to be profiling: “All of a sudden, it was as if I was a character on one of Fred’s shows.”3
By the time Junod had finished a long series of interviews with Rogers and everyone around him, he was ready to write the most positive profile he’d ever written about anyone—one of the most positive Esquire ever published.
At the end of their time together, Junod concluded in a later interview: “People, I think, spoke of Fred as a childlike person. I don’t think so. I think that Fred was very, very grown up in that he protected that childlike aspect of him. He was obviously not an unsophisticated man by any stretch of the imagination, but I think there was a vulnerable side of Fred . . . that was always off to the side. It informed and empowered what Fred did, and the so-called childlike side of Fred’s personality that he allowed you to see sort of protected that other side of his personality.”
In the end, the hotshot “bad-boy” journalist concluded that Rogers had agreed to the interview for Fred Rogers’s own reasons: “Once I sort of got in his sights, I think that he was looking to minister to me.”
For the Esquire piece, Junod observed the on-set activity on the Neighborhood. In a later interview, he noted of longtime cast members: “In their way, they were strangely kind of vulnerable folks, too. I mean, they were kind of total local Pittsburgh people who had really settled in and had had their artistic and creative home there. Yet their artistic and creative home was doing this show for very young children, and they had stayed there for a long time doing that. There was an acceptance of limitation there. It wasn’t like they were out there fulfilling their own wild ambitions doing that show. It was not that at all. It was like they were there because they had found a home there.”4
Joe Negri notes that a musician of Johnny Costa’s talent could have gone anywhere, as Negri could have. For a time, Costa worked in New York City, as did Negri. After leaving the Neighborhood, Betty Aberlin appeared in several films by the noted indie director Kevin Smith.
In the end, Costa and Negri preferred Pittsburgh. Negri says: “I’ve just remained here. And I’ve been happy with it. I made a good living. . . . All in all, I have great memories of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. It was fun. I enjoyed the people; we all got along beautifully.”5
Tom Junod saw the way Rogers’s perfectionism affected
the staff overall: “Fred, of course, was an amazing perfectionist who didn’t—I wouldn’t say drove those people, that’s the wrong word—but absolutely knew what he wanted when he wanted [it] and would not leave that day until he saw it.
“Fred’s vision was always, always about what a child would grasp and understand, and I didn’t know the brilliance of that and the power of that until I had a child of my own.”6
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood won four Emmy awards, and Rogers himself was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1997 Daytime Emmys, a scene that Junod describes movingly in his profile. After Fred Rogers went onstage to accept the award, he bowed and said into the microphone, “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are? . . . Ten seconds of silence.”
Then, as Tom Junod recounted, “He lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, ‘I’ll watch the time,’ and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn’t kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked . . . and so they did.
“One second, two seconds, three seconds . . . and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, ‘May God be with you’ to all his vanquished children.”7
Rogers’s unique brand of authenticity was an anomaly in show business. He wouldn’t engage in derogatory or even slightly mean or cynical comments; he mirrored back something far more decent and caring and loving. Despite Rogers’s reluctance to be interviewed on television talk shows, usually he would charm the host with his quick wit and ability to ad-lib on a moment’s notice. His ability to remain adamantly himself, even out of his Mister Rogers “costume,” showed both his stubbornness and a flair for the dramatic, no matter how low-key.