by Maxwell King
On some of our programs I show the bathroom in my television house. It is off to the side of the kitchen. We don’t often show the bathroom of our television set because that is not my real house. I think of it as my “television house.” That is a place where I stop by during my workday to have a television visit with my friends. When I am at work, I use the bathrooms in the building where we make our programs.13
But Fred Rogers wasn’t satisfied just writing to Isaac. He also sent a letter to Isaac’s father: “Your letter was absolutely refreshing! Thank you for all that you shared with us, especially for the conversation you had with Isaac about my bodily functions. That’s such a wonderful story to attest to young children’s focus on ‘bathroom’ concerns. But what particularly struck me was the way you were so sensitive to your son’s questions and that you were willing to help him think the issues through, even with a subject that can be as sensitive as that. Your son is indeed fortunate to have a father like you.”
Rogers always seemed to bring his explanations back to the world of the child, so that the “lesson” embodied in his letters could be used in a concrete way.
An example: Joe, identified simply as “toddler,” asks, “Why aren’t there any hands on Daniel’s clock?”
Rogers replies:
Dear Joe;
. . . We decided not to have hands on Daniel’s clock because his clock is in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, and that’s a place where we pretend things can be any way we want them to be. We decided that we could pretend there was no time in Make-Believe, like the timelessness of love. If you were making up a pretend place, what kind of things would you have there? Would you have hands on your pretend clock? For your pretending, things can by any way you want them to be!”14
Even if Joe’s parents might have to fill him in on the nature of “timeless love,” he can see in Mister Rogers’s reply that he can be king of his own pretend domain.
It isn’t hard to guess how Fred Rogers would have reacted to the current plight of migrant children, for example, or the degradation of the physical environment. As he concluded the 1969 speech at Thiel College on “Encouraging Creativity,” he told the students in the audience: “You know, it may well be that our planet, Earth, is the only spot in the entire Universe which can sustain human life. Of all the worlds, we may be the only one where there has ever been—or ever will be—people! That’s sort of like someone saying to you that that there is only one square inch of soil on this Earth that can grow anything—and that square inch happens to be in your own backyard. You look at that soil of yours with infinitely greater appreciation when you become aware how rare and valuable it is.”15
At Kenyon College’s 2016 graduation, John Green, the bestselling author of young adult books such as The Fault in Our Stars, asked the new graduates to pause for ten seconds—as referenced by Rogers in an acceptance speech at the Emmys—to think about everyone who’d helped them get to that point.16 As Fred would have put it: “Who in your life has been a servant to you, enabling you to grow?”
In the May 2017 issue of the Jesuit magazine America, a teacher named David Dark, from Tennessee, wrote of the reaction of his students when he showed them the video of the 1969 Pastore hearings: “I watched this marvel of a video with most of my classes during the presidential election, and we reached the general consensus that ‘what you do with the mad that you feel?’ is probably the kind of question we would do well to put to anyone seeking public office. We are also right to put the question to ourselves as often as possible.”17
“Fred Rogers has been doing the same small good thing for a very long time . . .” This was the sub-headline of Tom Junod’s 1998 Esquire piece about Fred Rogers, American hero.18 But what is small about reaching millions of kids, day after day for decades, and shaping their views for the rest of their lives?
Even Mister Rogers’s gestures, seen by millions for years, became a form of ritual. He took off his street clothes and donned the sweater his mother had made, then took off his shoes and put on a pair of navy-blue canvas boating sneakers “at the beginning of 865 television programs, over a span of thirty-one years.” This was in 1998.19
Rogers’s simple routine was articulated in some unexpected quarters. One of Fred Rogers’s most loyal fans was Koko, a famously communicative gorilla who appeared on the Neighborhood in 1998. Since Koko had been a faithful viewer of Rogers’s program for years, Fred visited her at the Gorilla Foundation in Redwood City, California, in his sweater and sneakers. When she saw him, Koko immediately folded him in her long, black arms, as though he were a child, and took off his shoes. Then they conversed in American Sign Language, shared a hug, and took pictures of each other.
Fred was particularly delighted when Koko told him she loved him as well as loving her television visits with him.20
In a bizarre coda, Fred Rogers’s death coincided with the rise of internet culture and the proliferation of “urban myths” about this saintly seeming man. One of the most widely circulated, and the most outlandish, was that Rogers had been convicted of child molestation early in his career, and had created his show as community service as part of his sentence. Didn’t he have a character with the suggestive name of “Mr. McFeely”?
Snopes.com, “the definitive fact-checking and Internet reference source for urban legends, folklore, myths, rumors, and misinformation,” set readers right about Fred Rogers’s training at NBC and the identity of his grandfather. And as the site’s writers noted: “It stretches credulity to the breaking point to believe that the host of an extremely popular children’s program on public television could have remained in that position for thirty-three years without having been hounded off the air amidst howls of condemnation from thousands of outraged parents.”21
Another myth repeated thousands of times on the web was that Mister Rogers had in fact been a Navy SEAL sniper during the Vietnam War, and had many “kills” to his credit. Rogers never served in the military at all, let alone in a hyper-macho, elite unit.
Fred Rogers was also much too old to have been drafted, given that the draft started in 1969, when his show was just getting established. Nor did he wear long-sleeve shirts on the Neighborhood to hide tattoos—another rumor. It’s almost as if people, afraid of the influence of such a gentle, soft-spoken, and popular man, had to turn him into his opposite—a figment of fevered imagination.
As Rogers’s former colleague Basil Cox notes, for his whole career, Fred Rogers perplexed people who couldn’t believe that he was “for real.”22
Widely disseminated images of Fred Rogers supposedly “flipping off” his audience during the taping of his final show in December 2000 were in fact taken from a program in 1967 when he was leading children through a song called “Where Is Thumbkin?” which, notes Snopes, “is traditionally accompanied by the participants’ holding up the corresponding fingers as they are each named in the song.”23
On the converse side is the story of how Mister Rogers’s old Oldsmobile was stolen from a street near WQED, but then returned by contrite thieves. According to a piece in TV Guide, Rogers filed a police report, which was picked up by every media outlet in Pittsburgh. But within a few days, the car was supposedly back in the spot from where it was taken, with a note on the dashboard that said: “If we’d known that it was yours, we never would have taken it.”24
An article in the Wall Street Journal reported: “Children aren’t the only ones with a soft spot for Mister Rogers. Two weeks ago, his Oldsmobile sedan was stolen while he was babysitting for his grandson. After looking over papers and props he had left in the car, the thieves apparently realized who the owner was. Mister Rogers found the car parked in front of his house a day or so later. All that was missing was a director’s chair with his name on it.”25
The only problem is that Fred Rogers himself never seems to have mentioned the story. Still, it’s a heartwarming notion that even thieves had a heart for the man Koko the gorilla folded so lovingly in her arms.
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THE END OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD
Fred Rogers was not motivated by many of the things that keep other people hard at work year after year. As they grew older, Fred and Joanne were less and less interested in money and what it could buy. They had sold the big brick house in Pittsburgh’s East End and moved into a three-bedroom apartment near the campus of Carnegie Mellon University. Fred drove a light-blue Honda Accord coupe and dressed in old khakis and slightly worn jackets. He seemed to ignore his staff’s comments on the shabbiness of his outfits.
Producer Margy Whitmer recalls: “He’d always been thrifty. When we went on the road, he’d tell us, ‘Look at all the money I’m saving by eating yogurt and crackers in my room for dinner.’”1
Once in Los Angeles with David Newell, Rogers found a jacket he really liked at a thrift store. Newell observes: “I think he loved the conquest of getting something as a bargain. But it was more about, you don’t need to spend a lot of money on clothes. His faith, his religion, came through in the song ‘It’s You I Like’: ‘It’s not the things you wear / It’s not the way you do your hair / But it’s you I like . . .’ He could have bought five-thousand-dollar suits, but he never did.”2
As former Family Communications executive Basil Cox notes: “Fred was . . . far from an extravagant man. But there’s nothing about Fred that’s consistent. I remember once Fred hired a jet to take him to New York. Fred had lots of money. He always lived in kind of luxurious surroundings. His apartments were very beautifully decorated, and he lived in a huge house, before he moved into an apartment. At one point, he had three houses. I think that as he got older, he probably narrowed down his expenses. He went from driving a BMW to driving a Chevrolet Celebrity.
“He dressed like a member of the upper class. He always wore a white shirt and a tie . . . if he was dressing up. His hair was always perfect—perfectly combed, and perfectly brushed.
“I think that it would not be accurate to say that Fred tried hard not to seem like a member of the upper class. Now, I don’t think he ever would have used those words. I don’t think he would think in those terms. But I don’t think that he was embarrassed by who he was . . . or by his upbringing, which was ridiculously upper class. . . . He never felt that his parents were, you know, robber barons, or . . . that he’d been brought up in ridiculous luxuriousness.”3
He and Joanne never fixed up the Crooked House, their vacation home on the western end of Nantucket. It remained a spare, unfinished, unheated wooden cottage on an island increasingly dotted with the mansions of rich traders, financiers, bankers, and fund managers from New York and Boston. (It really is crooked. The floors and walls are uneven, and the whole place seems to tilt precariously.)
Speaking about fame and fortune in an interview, Rogers once said: “How many clothes can you wear? How many cars can you drive? How big of a shelter do you really need? Some people get so caught up in the trappings of life, I feel they lose what is real.” A bit later, he added: “Deep and simple—that’s what matters.”4
On Charlie Rose’s show, he added: “Fame is a four-letter word, like tape or pain or zoom or life or love. What matters is what we do with it. People in television are in a service role, to meet the needs of those who watch. In the one life we have to live, we can choose to demean this life, or to cherish it in creative, imaginative ways.”5
As the 1990s progressed, Rogers still loved his work. Though he still enjoyed spending most of his time with the cast and crew of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, he was slowing down. Margy Whitmer recalls that in the last few years of production, Rogers’s energy level “was less and less. It became more and more important to him to get his rest.”6
Fred Rogers had been thinking about retirement for several years. Bill Isler, the former president and CEO of Family Communications, recalls: “He’d said in his early sixties that it was going to be sixty-five—a good time to go. It never happened.”7
In an interview, Joanne Rogers recalls that by the time Fred reached his sixties, he had finally become able to say “no” a bit more readily: “He got to be very good at it. He was about sixty-one or -two when he came to me, and he said, ‘You know, I just don’t like to do those programs with orchestras, where I’m entertaining.’
“And I said to him, ‘If you don’t like it, then the audience is not going to like it. And I think you’ve done your bit. And if that’s something you don’t like, quit doing it. . . .
“He never felt like an entertainer. He felt much more like an educator. And he was. He was very, very good with people, and was able to be very entertaining. . . . He had produced a lot of things that were entertaining. But that wasn’t who he was, essentially.”8
It suddenly became clear to Fred Rogers when he was just over seventy that the moment to retire had really arrived. Isler observes: “He said, ‘An opera singer knows when it’s time. I really think it’s time, so we should think about how to handle this.’”9 Rogers brought in an old friend, advertising executive George Hill, who’d helped him find funding for the Neighborhood in the earliest days of the program. Now Hill helped create elaborate public relations plans. Still, once the 2001 retirement was announced, Rogers and his crew at Family Communications were overwhelmed by hundreds of requests for interviews. Rogers tried to shift the focus from his retirement to the durability of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. In an earlier interview, he’d said: “These programs are timeless, sort of like The Wizard of Oz. They can be seen in any epoch.”10
In fact, after his retirement, the programs were broadcast less and less often; parents who wanted their children exposed to the Neighborhood had to buy it on DVD, or download episodes from the web. Joanne Rogers recalls that Fred was somewhat depressed after he left the production company, and he lamented that he missed his friends there.
After production on the show had ceased, Fred wasn’t spending as much time at Family Communications with his staff. Joanne was worried that he seemed uncharacteristically unsure of himself, and full of doubts. But over time, particularly when he read a good deal about religion and spirituality, he recovered his spirits and reengaged more with life after work. And eventually, he became increasingly enthusiastic about a project that would carry on his legacy: working with Archabbot Douglas Nowicki, the chancellor of nearby Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, on plans for a children’s media center that would bear his name.
The final episode of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood aired on August 31, 2001, in the thirty-third season of the show. This season was the shortest, comprised of only five episodes, entitled, appropriately, “Celebrate the Arts.” In the final episode, Mr. McFeely shakes Mister Rogers’s hand before he exits the stage, something he’d never done before. David Newell explains: “That handshake is for me. I was saying a lot to Fred in that handshake. Thank you, and it’s just been wonderful knowing you for thirty-five years.”11
In an interview for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, television critic Rob Owen asked Fred Rogers why he decided to end the program. “It was a fairly simple, straightforward decision,” Fred Rogers replied. “Of course, I prayed about it.”
“I don’t like to be spooky about stuff, but I do think that sometimes you feel inspired to make certain decisions,” Rogers added. “I’ve never tried to make a decision that had to do with selfishness. I think we certainly have done the kind of work I have wanted to do for children and one of the avenues has been the Neighborhood. That will always be a part of who I am, and I trust it will always be a part of those who have grown up with it, and will continue to.”12
Fred Rogers explained that he didn’t plan to retire, but to focus on new developments at Family Communications: “When I started, television was the new medium . . . well, there are some new media now and they’re taking more and more of my time.” He was referring to his company’s website. Later in the interview, Rogers pointed to a photo on the wall, showing his favorite sign at Rollins College, “Life is for Service,” the one he once jokingly altered to read
“Life is for vice.”
He concluded: “Those of us in broadcasting have a special calling to give whatever we feel is the most nourishing that we can for our audience. We are servants of those who watch and listen.”13
After the last taped show was aired that summer, the plan was to recycle it, along with three hundred others of the seventeen hundred Rogers made, in an endless loop. In his “retirement” office, Fred Rogers had fifteen employees, including such longtime stalwarts as David Newell. In the spring of 2001, New York Times reporter Doreen Carvajal found Fred Rogers in his office in WQED, with a “familiar pair of blue sneakers . . . tacked [to the wall] like a rare butterfly in a plexiglass shrine.”14
Carjaval reports that when Roger and his wife, Joanne, took a stroll around their “real-life” Pittsburgh neighborhood, strangers greeted them with spontaneous renditions of “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood”—something that also happened to Rogers when he rode the New York City subway.
Joanne Rogers observed: “He doesn’t miss the show. I think he misses the Neighborhood of Make-Believe because he enjoyed working with people around him. He really loves all of them, and he’ll keep in touch. But he did not enjoy what he called ‘interiors,’ the beginning and endings of the program. He had gotten where he had really dreaded it so.”15
Rogers had grown to loathe wearing makeup and contact lenses for the segments. As he explained, “I don’t know why. It has something to do with I like to give myself as I am. In the early days, you could do that.”
Fred Rogers had been contemplating retirement ever since Johnny Costa’s death in 1996, but kept going out of concern for longtime staff and cast members. Hedda Sharapan, then an employee for thirty-three years, described how Rogers went with her when she had to put her cat to sleep.