by Maxwell King
Back in Latrobe, Fred’s sister, Laney, remembers Fred would often jump into the pool in back of the Rogers’ country place at Tudor Manor, where she still lives: “Swimming was always something that Fred really enjoyed doing.”4
Swimming and playing the piano became lifelong passions of the young Fred Rogers. Both gave him a chance to feel capable and in charge of his destiny.
Over forty years ago, when he was a young man, Jeff Varion was riding the bus from his family’s home in Dormont, a small town just outside Pittsburgh, when a woman traveling on the bus pointed out a newspaper ad for a position as locker-room attendant at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association in the Oakland area of the city. Varion needed a job, and he went over to the Athletic Association to apply.5 And he got the position, which gave him employment for decades and provided one of the great friendships of his life, with Fred Rogers.
As an adult, Fred Rogers arrived at the Athletic Association either at the early-morning men’s-only period, or the men’s swim session later, around noon. Swimming was almost an obsession for Rogers—his chosen way to stay fit—and he tried to find time to swim most days, even when he was traveling for productions of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood or to make a speech or appear at a conference.
Varion remembers Fred’s preference for the early morning, and that he would sometimes choose to swim naked, with just his goggles and a bathing cap. In the early-swim period, Rogers would do multiple twenty-five-yard laps for up to forty-five or fifty minutes, then shower and head to work at WQED, just up Fifth Avenue. Varion remembers Rogers as very “fit . . . he had a great body,” slim and strong from his aquatic routine.
Over time, they became good friends. Jeff Varion describes himself as “working poor” and recalls that at first it seemed remarkable to be making friends with someone famous: “I says, how can he be on TV, and he’s here swimming?” But Rogers was always open and friendly and natural, according to Varion: “And we started talking, and talking. And we became good friends, and everything.”6
Typical of Rogers’s natural affinity for people, although Varion describes Rogers as seeking privacy during his swim, he never refused to talk with those who came up to him, including parents with little children: “. . . he had a lot—when people come here with some children—‘Oh, wait, Mister Rogers!’”7
Fred was renowned for being just as likely to make friends with a locker-room attendant as the president of a local bank or the head of one of the foundations that provided funding for his program. Bill Isler, former president of Family Communications and, later, the Fred Rogers Company, tells a story about Rogers walking down the sidewalk in New York on his way to an expensive television shoot, with a union film crew waiting for him there.
Rogers happened upon a homeless man begging on the sidewalk, says Isler, and knelt down beside him to contribute a bill to the money he was collecting. And then he began to talk . . . and talk . . . and talk, all while poor Isler tried in vain to move him along to the site of the shoot.8
Fred Rogers’s friendship with Varion became so strong over the years that he invited the young man to come up to the Rogerses’ vacation home on Nantucket, where there would be good swimming for both of them in the ocean. Varion never made the trip, but he kept up his friendship with Rogers for decades.
In 2001, in a graduation speech at Marquette University, Rogers described his appreciation of Varion’s character: “Early in the morning of every workday before I even get to my office, I see someone who influences me greatly. This person has a job which many people might consider unglamorous and tediously mundane. He’s the locker-room attendant in Pittsburgh where I swim each day. His name is Jeff. We recently celebrated Jeff’s twenty-fifth anniversary working at the pool—twenty-five years cleaning sinks and sorting towels and caring about everybody. For his anniversary, some of us regulars got him a cake and a book about New York because Jeff loves New York.”9
When Rogers died two years later, Varion was one of the employees of the Pittsburgh Athletic Association who made the case for leaving Rogers’s locker vacant, with his name plate still on it, as a memorial. It had always been swimming, and their shared enthusiasm for the pool, that provided the bond for Fred and Jeff.
After the late 1950s, when Fred’s parents helped Joanne and Fred buy the Crooked House in Madaket, on Nantucket Island, Fred did much of his summertime swimming from Madaket Harbor out to the end of Smith’s Point, the westernmost tip of the island. He would write scripts and music in the morning, then go to the beach right in front of his house, clad in a brief swimsuit and a bathing cap, and plunge into the Madaket Harbor waters. Joanne recalled that Fred would swim for about forty-five minutes toward Smith Point, then wade out of the water and walk back along the beach to their house.
Sometimes the swim could take even longer; if the tide was coming into the harbor, Fred would be working against it. Even so, occasionally the walk back from Smith Point could take even longer still, depending on how many people stopped Fred along the beach to talk about Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fred couldn’t sign autographs, of course: No one had pen and paper at the beach. But that would lead to even longer conversations as beachgoers told Fred how much the Neighborhood meant to them and he responded, as he always did, by asking them about their lives and their families.
Sometimes, Rogers’s fans and others would swarm across the family’s large piece of land that surrounded the Crooked House. And once, when a local member of the Board of Selectmen said he and his family had been ordered off the beach by one of Fred’s sons, a mini controversy brewed up. Most townspeople thought the selectman was grandstanding for attention, and they sided with Rogers. Fred settled the issue by donating nineteen acres of his land and part of the beach (much of the land that went with the former Valentine Small Farm) to the Massachusetts Audubon Society.10, 11
Everyone on the island was able to enjoy a nature preserve and access to the beach next door to the Crooked House. And Fred went on swimming, and talking with all who stopped him along the beach.
PART V
When I was a boy I used to think that strong meant having big muscles, great physical power; but the longer I live, the more I realize that real strength has much more to do with what is not seen. Real strength has to do with helping others.
—FRED ROGERS
22.
THE LEGACY
Fred Rogers articulated his philosophy in written form, as well as in broadcasts. He wrote, coauthored, or contributed to almost three dozen books published during his life, and a few that were released immediately after his death in 2003. Many were service books meant to help parents and children (The New Baby, 1996; Making Friends, 1996; Going to the Potty, 1997; Going to the Hospital, 1997; When a Pet Dies, 1998; Let’s Talk About It: Divorce, 1998).
But some of the later books were the offerings of a sage: You Are Special: Words of Wisdom from America’s Most Beloved Neighbor, 1994; The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember, 2003; and Many Ways to Say I Love You: Wisdom for Parents and Children from Mister Rogers, 2006. Many of these are still in print and available online through the Fred Rogers Company website and in major retail outlets.
The Giving Box (2000), which taught children lessons of generosity and community, came packaged with a tin bank in which kids could save coins to donate. The book contains fables from around the world that convey a tradition of giving (e.g., the Hebrew tale “The Brothers,” about two siblings who secretly help each other without the other’s knowledge, and Aesop’s “The Lion and the Mouse”).
In his writing, Rogers was homespun in his wisdom and quite elegant in his wording, sometimes simultaneously. The art that won him honors for homiletics at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary often shines through.
Former Family Communications, Inc., executive Basil Cox observes: “My theory . . . is that Fred became an iconic figure . . . when people began to experience him through words—written words, rather than through his spoken words.
When people started to write extensively about him, and write at length about the genius of the man, and when his own books started to come out for adults, with his own words on the page, to be read, not to be heard.
“You can’t read that stuff without thinking: My God, this is amazing. I mean this is so true. . . . I’m sure many think that: I can’t believe that that guy [Mister Rogers] wrote this. This is what he’s been saying all along, you know. It was kind of a huge eye-opener, I think, for people who just could not ever get through that persona that he had—just couldn’t ever buy it, just never—never could penetrate it, never could believe it, never could accept it.”1
Rogers gave scores of interviews over the years and made about one hundred fifty major speeches. For decades, invitations for speaking engagements poured into the offices of Family Communications: Would Mister Rogers speak, preach, make a brief appearance, cut a ribbon, give a blessing, or receive an honorary degree?
A perfectionist, Rogers accepted only a few such invitations each year, and devoted weeks and weeks to his drafts. “He would agonize over a speech,” says David Newell.2
“There wasn’t a spontaneous bone in that man’s body,” observes Elizabeth Seamans. “He really hated to go into anything unprepared.”3
Yet ironically, it was often in his speeches that he was most unguarded in a public forum. Many of the speeches were about children, education, and television; but many others focused on his view of the world, and how to make it a better place. Though his tone always remained quiet and informal, something in his manner commanded attention. Some of his associates remember when he spoke to an audience of PBS administrators and station managers in 1989. At first the audience was loud and distracted, with dozens of conversations going on throughout the hall. But as Rogers spoke, the crowd gradually quieted until all that could be heard in the hall was his singsong, nasal twang.
He explained why he felt so strongly about presenting himself as a real person on television: “We found out that what makes television accessible to its viewers is a human being . . . a person who believes in—who loves—what he or she is doing and wants to share it with somebody else.”4
In many of Rogers’s commencement speeches, he talked about the way his quest for self-knowledge ultimately brought an exhilarating kind of freedom and focus: “I’ll never forget the sense of wholeness I felt when I finally realized what I was—songwriter, telecommunicator, student of human development, language buff—but that all those things and more could be used in the service of children’s healthy growing. The directions weren’t written in invisible ink on the back of my diploma. They came ever so slowly for me; and ever so firmly I trusted that they would emerge. All I can say is, it’s worth the struggle to discover who you really are.”5
In his last commencement address, to the faculty, students, and parents of Dartmouth—the college he had dropped out of half a century earlier—he said: “I’m very much interested in choices, and what it is and who it is that enable us human beings to make the choices we make all though our lives. What choices lead to ethnic cleansing? What choices lead to healing? What choices lead to the destruction of the environment, the erosion of the Sabbath, suicide bombings, or teenagers shooting teachers? What choices encourage heroism in the midst of chaos?”6
These were the same questions he’d tried to address in his programs for adults in the four years that the Neighborhood was on hiatus. Even if those shows didn’t reach a large audience, Fred Rogers continued to engage with vital questions of how to live a life with meaning. Above all, he stressed the need to allow children to express their creativity.
In a 1969 speech at Thiel College in Greenville, Pennsylvania, entitled “Encouraging Creativity,” he told the audience about his delight in a letter he’d received from a PBS station manager in Dallas, Texas. Attached were eleven pages of music paper containing an opera by a six-year-old who’d been inspired by the ones he saw on the Neighborhood. The boy’s story line concerned an owl and a king and an archaeologist who finds out that what others thought was a monster was just a blinking flashlight found in a tunnel.7
“Most children don’t write operas,” observes Rogers. “Nevertheless, each child is born with a unique endowment which gives him an opportunity to make something entirely different from anyone else in the world.” He goes on to decry anything that would hold kids back from self-expression: “Children, like laboratory rats, can learn quickly not to experiment with wrong answers.”
Finally, Fred Rogers states his central thesis: “One of the major goals of education must be to help students discover a greater awareness of their own unique selves, in order to increase their feelings of personal worth, responsibility, and freedom.”8
For all his long career, Rogers reveled in his relationship with his young audience. In nearly four decades on television, Mister Rogers heard from thousands of viewers. And he always answered.
Hedda Sharapan, who helped him answer many of the letters, observes: “What I loved about the fan mail was what people gave to us about how their lives were enriched by the program. And to think that a half hour of this simple communication, this loving, simple communication, could help people, who are still writing to us and saying the power of what he said and how he said it has stayed with them and that—to think that he’s become an icon and that this legacy has lasted and people are still using it and working on it. That’s just remarkable.”9
Such was the depth and strength of Fred Rogers’s commitment to his audience that he started out answering every letter by hand when the CBC was producing and hosting the precursor to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood in Toronto. Because he wanted to personally answer every single letter—and the trickle of letters was turning into a stream—he and his wife Joanne devoted themselves to long evenings at the kitchen table after their sons were in bed, poring over missives from children and parents, and handwriting the responses.
By the time Rogers got back to WQED in Pittsburgh, and the Neighborhood had gone national on educational television, the stream was a torrent. He couldn’t keep up, so he hired Hedda Sharapan to help him; but he never let the answers go out without reading and editing and signing each one, acting out a pastoral duty of sorts in addressing themes that covered every aspect of a child’s life, especially those that might seem scary as he or she ventures beyond the immediate world of home and family.
These included going to daycare; going to the doctor or dentist, or to the hospital; what to do when your best friend moves; imaginary friends; taking a trip on an airplane; managing feelings like anger; why it’s okay to cry; and even joyful themes, such as why grandparents are so special. Nothing affecting the lives of children was off the table.
Hedda Sharapan explains the sensitivity of Mister Rogers’s method in writing back to Neighborhood viewers, his perspective honed during long and extensive conversations with child-development specialists like Dr. Margaret McFarland: “If a parent wrote, Fred would send something for the child. If a child wrote, Fred would sometimes send something to the parent, also. One of my most treasured mothers was one who’d written to us just before Christmas one year saying that her teenagers and she and her husband lived in a trailer. They had no money and really needed help with Christmas presents; could Fred autograph pictures for her kids?
“Fred sent back the autographed pictures and a letter saying, ‘How fortunate your children are to have such a caring mother.’ She wrote back a letter that was so incredibly touching, how she cried because she never thought of her children as being fortunate to have her as a mother.”10
In 1996, Rogers published a volume of letters called Dear Mister Rogers, Does It Ever Rain in Your Neighborhood? In one, five-year-old Timmy was puzzled. He couldn’t figure out the truth about Mister Rogers, one of his favorite television figures.
Mister Rogers, are you for real, or are you under a mask or costume, like Big Bird? For my birthday wish, I want to know if you are for real.
Mister Rogers replied:
“Dear Timmy: I am a real person, just the way you are. There are some things on television that aren’t real—the monsters and scary things. Your television set is a special way that you can see the picture of me and hear my voice. I can’t look through the television set to see or hear my television friends, but I think of them whenever we make our television visits.”11
One young man wrote to say that as a boy, he’d once run around to the back of his TV at the end of an episode of the Neighborhood and cupped his hands under the set, hoping to catch Mister Rogers as he came out. And Nicholas, age three, wrote: “Dear Mister Rogers: I wish you could be on Earth.”12
Viewer confusion about Mister Rogers, television presence, and Fred Rogers the man was also at the heart of one of the funniest letters he ever received:
Dear Mister Rogers,
While putting [my son] to bed last night, he said, “Mister Rogers doesn’t poop.” I said that of course you did. He denied it vehemently. I asked where his certainty came from and he said, “Well, I’ve never seen him poop.” I pointed out that there were lots of people he hadn’t seen poop, and they all still did. He accepted that others [adults and kids did], but denied it about you. I kissed him goodnight and left the room. Five minutes later I was summoned to his bedside.
“Daddy, I know Mister Rogers doesn’t poop.”
“How?” I asked.
“Because I’ve seen his house and he just has a closet, a living room, a kitchen and a yard.”
Sincerely,
Isaac’s father
Fred Rogers wrote back:
Dear Isaac,
Your father told me you had an interesting talk with him about whether I “poop.” It’s good that you and he were talking about that. I know it can be hard to understand that I do. I am a real person. And one thing for certain is that all real people “poop.” That is an important part of how our bodies work. Little by little as you grow, you will learn more about how our bodies work. And it is good that you are thinking about that now.