by Maxwell King
Producer Margy Whitmer observes: “I guess it was about control—him not wanting to share his vulnerabilities . . . even though he flipped it around on the show. He wanted kids to talk about their angry feelings, or their sadness, or their insecurity. You know, in some way, he fiercely protected his own. When different writers would come in to interview for articles, they would often walk out and say, ‘He interviewed me.’”8
Fred Rogers also hated to have his picture taken, and preferred to take pictures of other people. According to Whitmer: “He was not in these pictures himself, so you’d have to write on the back, ‘taken by Fred Rogers.’ It was his chance to not be in the spotlight.”
“It was kind of his way of working through, ‘I’m going to take your picture before you can take mine.’ I also think it was part of him just loving to document things. But a lot of it had to do with, ‘Let me see what it’s like to be the photographer for a while.’”
When Arsenio Hall got in touch, the Neighborhood’s staff worried that Fred Rogers wouldn’t even know who he was. But after much coaxing, Rogers did the show in 1992 and was a big hit. Hall’s questions were respectful, serious, and probing. He asked Mister Rogers directly how to cope with the violence some kids experience in LA neighborhoods. In reply, Fred Rogers quoted his mother, Nancy McFeely Rogers, with advice he would repeat on several occasions of national trauma: “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”9
Later he would reiterate: “To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers—so many caring people in this world.”
Fred Rogers also tells Hall the story of George Allen, who came to live with the Rogers family when he was eleven and Fred was three, after Allen’s mother had died. When Fred was in high school, Allen taught Fred to fly a Piper aircraft, and went on to train African American airmen at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. “So you see, I had a black brother even then,” Rogers tells a surprised Hall, reaching over to grasp the host’s hand.
Later Fred Rogers dons a special jacket to match Arsenio’s, a lavishly decorated bomber with garish embellishments that couldn’t be further from his own style. But he wears it with seeming delight.10
It was the same story with the notoriously hard-bitten comedienne Joan Rivers, who was filling in for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show in 1983 when Fred Rogers observed the thirtieth anniversary of his career in public television and the publication of Mister Rogers Talks with Parents. Rivers starts a spirited and obviously affectionate repartee with Rogers with the line: “Enough with the charm—do you ever get hate mail?”11
Fred smiles and moves on to ask how many members of the studio audience grew up with the Neighborhood, as Joan’s daughter Melissa did. He gets a rousing response.
Later in their exchange, Rogers describes the effort that goes into creating the show. You don’t make children’s programming by stringing together a bunch of cartoons: “I am not a babysitter. Children are to be respected,” he says with a serious mien. The audience erupts with applause.
As they wind down, Fred Rogers sings “It’s You I Like” directly to Joan as he looks into her eyes. The caustic comedienne beams adoringly and is so nonplussed that she’s forced to pull her sweater over her head to hide her embarrassment.
The lively sequence ends with a special rendition of “Row, Row, Your Boat,” by King Friday, who substitutes hilariously pretentious “kingly” lyrics of his own, rowing “ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically; existence is but an illusion.”12
Joan Rivers invited Fred Rogers back on The Tonight Show a few years later in 1986, an appearance marked by a marvelous rendition of the song that closes every episode of the Neighborhood, “Good Feeling.” Fred and Joan join in for Johnny Costa’s jazzed-up version, with Joan snapping her fingers in unison with Fred at the conclusion.13
Rogers’s appearances on The Tonight Show with regular host Johnny Carson were less warm and fuzzy. In fact, Carson played Rogers in a 1978 parody in which he donned a bad wig and found only a dead fish in the famous tank on a simulated Neighborhood set. Instead of sneakers, Carson donned white shoes of the sort gamblers might wear in Vegas. And holding Barbie and Ken dolls, speaking in a slow and seemingly child-friendly cadence, Carson’s Mister Rogers, full of sly innuendo, shows the audience how the two dolls get under the bed covers to make a baby.14
Despite the canned laughter he elicited then, even Carson admitted the Rogers parody sketch was a dud. Years after it aired, he burned the script, in a 1984 broadcast celebrating The Tonight Show’s twenty-second anniversary. “Not all of them work out,” he admitted to Ed McMahon as the flames rose.
After Johnny Carson played a little segment of a spoof called “Mister Codgers Neighborhood,” David Newell got in touch with the show’s producer, Fred De Cordova, and asked for equal time. Fred Rogers appeared in his sneakers, looking nervous. The audience started to snicker before he even got into his chair.
As described in the Washington Post by Paul Hendrickson in a November 18, 1982, article: “That’s when a funny thing happened: Carson turned protective. He seemed ashamed of his audience’s bad manners.
“It was as if some atavistic Midwestern compassion came suddenly welling up. We may be urban-cool and all, Carson seemed to be telling his audience, but in some other, deeper, feeling way, we’re all losers. During the break, Carson leaned over and told Rogers that the first show he had on TV back in Omaha . . . was a kids’ show, and that he knew you couldn’t dare be a phony, not with kids.”15
At one point, when Carson tried to get a rise out of him, Fred responded, “Most of the people I know like fun just as much as you do.” Carson kept having him back.16
Even as Fred Rogers’s staff felt protective of him, they also enjoyed the parodies of the Neighborhood, particularly the 1982 SCTV sketch in which a skinny Mister Rogers stand-in wearing black socks dukes it out with a busty Julia Child. Ultimately Mister Rogers is triumphant by bopping Child on the head with the puppet King Friday, as a Howard Cosell lookalike provides color commentary on the sidelines.
Rogers’s idiosyncrasies were at the heart of his charm. For his whole adult life, he weighed exactly 143 pounds. Chuck Aber points out: “One, four, three. It’s the number of letters in I, which has one letter; LOVE, which has four letters; and YOU, which has three letters.
“One program, Lady Elaine Fairchilde had on her Museum-Go-Round all these different streamers that we pulled out, in all these different languages: love and peace. And I believe the name Fred was on there, which was appropriate.”17
Tom Junod adds: “Fred’s email address was [email protected]. Zzz meant simply that he slept soundly at night, which he did, eight hours a night. And one hundred forty-three referred to two things.” First, “his weight. Every morning Fred weighed himself before he went to swim, and every morning he weighed one hundred forty-three pounds . . . that’s remarkable to the extent of near insanity. In another person, it would seem like obsessive-compulsive disorder, but in Fred it didn’t seem that way.
“In Fred, it seemed this remarkable willed simplicity and consistency from which he decided to make his stand to the world. One-four-three was also reference to the . . . letters it took to say I love you. One, I. Four, love. Three, you.
“That’s how Fred approached everything. His email address . . . seems simple, but it was full of all these interesting revelations.”18
Everyone at Family Communications, Inc., and in Rogers’s circle of friends came to deeply appreciate Fred-time, that slow-paced world of quiet with Rogers at its center.
When Dan Fales, an executive producer for WQED in Pittsburgh, got an emergency call from the studio two floors below his office that production was being held up on a public-service program, he was upset. Fales had two other crises to deal with and four important phone calls to return. He stalked out to the elevator and punched the call button as hard as he could. One fl
oor down, the elevator stopped, and Fred Rogers came aboard. When Rogers saw Fales’s angry face, he hit the stop button and turned to speak quietly: “Dan, remember what is important—your wonderful family, your sense of joy, and that wit that we all like. I hear that you work things out very well.” Fales left the elevator feeling calm, focused, and quite good about himself.
As soon as he had smoothly defused the crisis in the studio, he looked over to floor manager Nicky Tallo to see if the crew was ready to proceed. Tallo winked and whispered to Fales, “Pure Fred—it works every time.”19
Fred Rogers, writer Tom Junod concludes “was about grace. Fred was about bringing grace to people’s lives, everybody that he met that I can tell. And more amazingly, and . . . through much greater difficulty, and against much higher odds, through the medium of television, a graceless medium if there ever was one—and Fred insisted that this could be a medium of grace. That’s revolutionary.”20
Though Tom Junod had interviewed famous people of all stripes, Fred Rogers was something special: “I’ve met a lot of interesting people. I’ve met great actors. I’ve met great writers. I’ve met great this, great that. But Fred’s the only person that I would call a great man.”
Junod observes that when you saw Fred Rogers on TV, you could tell that “he was looking to have a relationship with the people who watched it. I don’t think it was that he ever meant to be this abstracted figure on high. He was as human on TV as he was in his life, because I think that Fred understood that if there is to be grace, it begins right in this space, and I think what Fred was really brave about was that he decided that this space could exist from an electronic medium, that this space was holy space, and that that’s where it all happened. And that’s Fred, and he did it with children. He did that with everybody he met. Anybody who sort of ventured into this space was in for a ride.”
Junod also notes that “Fred liked to shock people.” Indeed, Junod’s piece for Esquire begins with Fred Rogers completely disrobing in front of his interviewer at the pool where he swims. “Well, Tom,” he says, “I guess you’ve already gotten a deeper glimpse into my daily routine than most people have.”21
In fact, this is both a show of the ultimate vulnerability and a dare—a seemingly passive aggressive act, even, preempting the journalist’s curious gaze.
Fred Rogers wasn’t perfect: Sometimes he failed the expectations of his associates. In 1979 and 1980, during a long and bitter strike at a company that had been owned by his family, he wrote a public letter to Latrobe’s residents denying rumors he was the owner of the company. In fact, though, he was chairman of the board of Latrobe Die Casting, and president of the McFeely-Rogers Foundation, which did own the company. Some of the residents of Latrobe felt betrayed by what they saw as Rogers’s disingenuous message.
Still, Fred Rogers was that unique television star with a real spiritual life. His values came to him not only through his Christianity but also through his careful study of other religions and cultures.
As his colleague Elizabeth Seamans describes it, “Fred was willing to float in what psychoanalysts describe as the place between sleep and wakefulness, which allows for a kind of a listening beyond literal listening. This breathing with the unseen viewer comes from trusting himself, trusting his own creativity; it was deeply original.”22
As time went on, this characteristic became more telling in distinguishing Rogers’s work from that of others in television or other media. While communication technology proliferated, becoming ever faster and more complex, Rogers used it in ways that were slow, thoughtful, and nuanced. Among the values he represented to viewers was the unusual one of patience.
He told Charlie Rose of PBS in a penetrating 1994 interview: “The white spaces between words are more important than the text, because they give you time to think about what you’ve read.”23 All his career, he emphasized the importance of listening; he felt that silence is a gift, as is what he called “graceful receiving.” He worried about the lack of silence in a noisy world, and pondered how those in the field of television could encourage reflection. Today these ideas may seem quaint, yet they can also be seen as radical and more pressing than ever.
Rogers’s views were the culmination of years of study. Beside his bed in his Pittsburgh apartment was a tall revolving bookcase with several shelves of books he wanted handy to read and reread either in the evening or in the early morning, when he also read the Bible before starting his day. The titles reflected his broad interest in religion and spirituality: The Book of Common Worship of the Presbyterian Church; Zen Lessons: The Art of Leadership; The Way of Chuang Tzu; Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha; The Ragamuffin Gospel; A Grammatical Analysis of the Greek New Testament; The Loving and Beloved Superego in Freud’s Structural Theory; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Three Scientists and Their Gods.
Though Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister devoted to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, he was equally a spiritualist, in the sense that he had a broad, inclusive view of the human spirit and how to reach it.
The Reverend Clark Kerr, pastor at Latrobe Presbyterian Church, saw Rogers as having gained both strength and humility from the breadth of his studies: “He was revered at the seminary and [by] professors who had come into contact with him. I think it was for his gentleness and his humility, his kindness . . . You know they say the meek shall inherit the earth? I think Jesus meant people like Fred.”24
One of Rogers’s greatest friends, and one of his favorite thinkers, was the Catholic theologian and author Henri Nouwen. Rogers frequently visited Nouwen, a charismatic Dutch-born priest who wrote thirty-nine books about spirituality and had a large and loyal following internationally. The two enjoyed extended discussions about God and the human condition.
Joan Kroc, heir to the fortune of Ray Kroc, the founder of McDonald’s, also sought spiritual guidance from the very thoughtful and highly sensitive Henri Nouwen. In fact, Rogers once joined Nouwen on a trip to California to visit Joan Kroc. Both of these very spiritual men hoped Kroc might support some of Nouwen’s philanthropic work with disadvantaged and disabled populations, but the trip was not productive.
Despite Rogers’s religious studies and his devotion to human spirituality, he was sometimes seized by terrible doubts about his work, human nature, and the course of events. In 1979, struggling to write a script for a weeklong series on “Going to School,” he wrote in a note to himself: “Am I kidding myself that I’m able to write a script again? Am I really just whistling Dixie? I wonder. Why don’t I trust myself? Really that’s what it’s all about . . . that and not wanting to go through the agony of creation. AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, IT’S JUST AS BAD AS EVER. I wonder if every creative artist goes through the tortures of the damned trying to create? GET TO IT, FRED! But don’t let anybody ever tell anybody else that it was easy. It wasn’t.”25
Producer Margy Whitmer remembers coming into his office one day when Family Communications was filming public-service messages for PBS during the first Gulf War, in 1990: “I went to bring him down to the studios, and he was almost in tears. He said, ‘Why am I doing this? What good is this going to do?’
“Fred was a father figure to so many people. Now the roles were reversed as I took him in my arms to support him.
“I said, ‘Fred, think of all the people who watch this show—all the people who love you. How can you not think this is going to make an impression?’ He carried so much responsibility on his shoulders. Though I didn’t say this, I was thinking, ‘It’s not up to you to save the world. But you can certainly help people get through this time.’”26
21.
SWIMMING
Fred Rogers’s goal of keeping his weight to 143 was of course tied to his lifelong avocation for the water. And swimming was an important part of the strong sense of self-discipline he cultivated. In his theme week on discipline on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, he tried to create a contrast for children between self-discipline and the imposition of outs
ide discipline, so they could see the values of each in action.
In one 1982 segment, he shows young viewers where he swims each day and explains that this physical routine is part of the structure and self-discipline of his regular day.1 A 1997 show features Mister Rogers swimming with a teenage Paralympian; the two glide through the water with equal grace. In the later Neighborhood of Make-Believe segment, King Friday goes swimming and loses his crown.2
Fred Rogers got up every morning between 4:30 and 5:30 A.M. to read the Bible and prepare himself for the day before he went to the Pittsburgh Athletic Association to swim. But Rogers’s preparation was not so much professional as it was spiritual: He would study passages of interest from the Bible, and then he would visualize who he would be seeing that day, so that he would be prepared to be as caring and giving as he could be. Fred’s prayers in those early morning sessions were not for success or accomplishment, but rather for the goodness of heart to be the best person he could be in each of the encounters he would have that day.
Rogers’s first experiences with swimming were with his family at their weekend and vacation home outside Latrobe on the side of Chestnut Ridge, where the family had a pool. But he developed his aquatic skills on the many winter trips his family made to Florida when he was a boy. His sister, Laney, recalls, “he was a very proficient swimmer as a young boy. Of course, we had gone to Florida every winter for many, many years . . . we went to a hotel. The swimming teacher was Mr. Wetherell.”3
Austin Wetherell had qualified as a swimming competitor for the 1928 Olympic Games in Amsterdam, but opted not to go so he could marry his fiancée, and then became a swimming teacher at one of the hotels that the Rogers family frequented in Florida.