by Maxwell King
The Times account ends with the story of two college students who drove cross-country from Seattle to Pittsburgh to see the “real Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” Casey McNerthney, twenty, a sophomore at Western Washington University, tells the reporter: “If you grow up watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, you can really connect it with your childhood.
“The topics that Fred takes on are themes that only come up after a long car ride or after a discussion real late at night. And I think those lessons of trust and appreciation for other people can be applied to your everyday life.”
“These kids give you such hope,” said Rogers, reflecting on their visit. “Maybe they realize that you don’t have to be macho to be acceptable, and that everybody longs to be loved and feel that he or she is capable of loving. I would hope that is one of the major influences of the Neighborhood.”16
The proof of FRED Rogers’s influence is in the adult lives of the “neighbors” who grew up with the man in the grandad sweater. Over the years, Fred Rogers grew fearful that the dominance of television and the computer would overwhelm the simple human values he held most dear.
Excerpts from two university speeches he made in midcareer capture his concern: “It really has been very effectively communicated in many circles that computers and their relatives are more clever, are much quicker, make fewer mistakes and are more to be valued than human beings. But without human beings there never would have been a computer or anything else that we call advanced technology. That’s something I like to help children remember: that, no matter what the machine may be, it was people who thought it up and made it, and it’s people who make it work.
“And as we . . . find ourselves being concerned about the conditions that make life on Earth possible, we will recognize the need to make people more important than things, and we will join hands with young and old alike by putting our dominant energies into developing a sane design for living.”17
He even suggested, only somewhat tongue-in-cheek, one answer to all this complexity: Turn off the machine. In an appearance at the opening of a Fred Rogers exhibit at the Pittsburgh Children’s Museum in 1998, he said, simply: “I’ve always said the best time for our program is once it’s over and the television is turned off.”
24.
AMERICA’S FAVORITE NEIGHBOR
Eliot Daley recalls a fateful day about a year and a half after Fred Rogers’s retirement: “Every November twenty-sixth the phone would ring, wherever I was, and it would be King Friday the Thirteenth wishing me glorious felicitations on my natal day. . . . King Friday the Thirteenth was Fred’s alter ego. He was everything that Fred wasn’t: imperious, insensitive, demanding, and egotistical.
“This went on for thirty-two or -three years, I guess—unbroken. And it became a matter of pride to track the other person down. I tracked Fred down once on a boat, on a ship-to-shore telephone on a boat off Galveston Bay. And he tracked me down once in Ireland. . . .
“On November 26, 2002, I didn’t get a call from the King. And after thirty-some years, I knew something must be up.”1
In the summer of that year, Fred Rogers’s stomach distress had become so bad that his secretary at Family Communications, Elaine Lynch, had started to notice. Joanne Rogers said Fred had suffered from an upset stomach for several years, but he had always been reluctant to see a doctor. By July and August 2002, though, both women could tell it was getting worse.
Although Fred Rogers did keep up with his medical care, he just didn’t like being examined and poked and prodded and tested at the doctor’s; and he didn’t like to think he needed much attention—after all, he ate well, swam and took walks almost every day, and he kept his weight at exactly 143 pounds his whole adult life. He just didn’t think he needed to worry that much with doctors.
Also, Rogers was very busy planning for the new center at Saint Vincent College, making public appearances, and traveling. Yes, he was retired, but he was as busy as ever. He spent a good deal of time working with Archabbot Douglas Nowicki, chancellor of Saint Vincent College, making detailed plans for the children’s media center at the college. Fred intended to spend a significant part of his retirement working at the center developing programs for parents and kids that could advance his early childhood education legacy and continue his work helping families cope with the modern world.
He was looking forward to being based at the center as he continued to make public appearances around the country. When he and the Archabbot were working with the architects to design the new center building, Fred had them put in a small bathroom just off a meeting room called the “Gathering Space,” where he felt he would spend time working and meeting with students and colleagues. And he and Douglas Nowicki even talked about a sleeping room for Fred in the monastery where he could stay overnight when he didn’t want to make the hour-long drive back into Pittsburgh between workdays at the center.
He put off a full doctor’s examination until October. Complicating matters was his scheduled trip early that fall to Scotland with his friends Bill Barker, a fellow Presbyterian minister, and the Archabbot. Fred had been excited about the prospect of that trip for months, and now he didn’t want to miss it. He went ahead, traveling with his friends, even though the pain in his stomach was persistent and sometimes overwhelming, according to the later accounts of both Barker and Rev. Nowicki.
When he got back at the beginning of October, both Joanne Rogers and Elaine Lynch pressed Fred hard to see a physician. When he finally agreed to go in to see his doctor and get a full examination, an endoscopy revealed stomach cancer.
Still Rogers put off treatment. He had promised to appear as a grand marshal at the January 2003 Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, California, with friends Bill Cosby and Art Linkletter, and he didn’t want to let them down. As always, Fred Rogers’s sense of duty and discipline came first.
By Christmas of that year, close friends knew something was afoot. Basil Cox remembers: “Every Christmas morning, at nine o’clock or so, there’d be a knock on the door—it would be in the middle of a blizzard—didn’t matter—and it’d be Fred, with gifts of one sort or another for the family. . . . Every Easter, at nine o’clock, would be Fred with a knock on the door, and he’d have an Easter lily . . . he never missed one.
“And even the very last Christmas of his life, when he could, I bet, barely walk from the pain of his stomach, he still trudged up the hill to our house. And it was icy. At one point, he called—I think he called on Christmas Eve, and he said, ‘You know I’m really not feeling very well, and so I may not be able to see you tomorrow. So that’ll be the first time that I haven’t been there for—you know, I just want you to know I love you all.’ But he was there anyway.”2
Cox adds: “One word that characterizes Fred almost as much as anything, or more than anything, is that discipline, that sense of duty, that sense that, I will see this list of the people that I love every Christmas and every Easter. Nothing will keep me away from that.”
After the Rose Bowl Parade in Pasadena, Bill Cosby told some of his other friends that Rogers was in such pain that he gripped Cosby’s leg throughout the parade—tightly enough to leave bruises. But he wouldn’t miss that obligation; only after the parade would Rogers go in for surgery. When Fred Rogers returned to Pittsburgh, he revealed to his associates at Family Communications that he needed surgery for cancer. But he was careful not to alarm them.
Elaine Lynch says most of them stayed optimistic: “He told us they were going to take half of his stomach. I knew a woman who sang with my mother and had half of her stomach removed. She lived fifteen or twenty years more, so Fred’s announcement didn’t hit me then.”3
Joanne Rogers recalled later that Fred seemed to worry more about the feelings of those around him than he did about himself. And she shared a note she had written to herself at the time of Fred’s scheduled surgery becoming public: “Fred . . . spoke to his staff at FCI [Family Communications, Inc.] today to let them be the first to know that he�
�ll be entering the hospital here on Monday to undergo surgery. In early December, he began a battery of tests, and a malignant, ulcerated tumor (about three centimeters in size) was located in the upper [section] of his stomach. The surgery on Monday will be exploratory in nature and will likely be a partial gastrectomy—to remove the entire area around the tumor. It is expected to give him relief from the severe discomfort he’s had lately—that is, after the initial discomfort of the surgery itself. While an endoscopy and a CT-Scan can be very effective in locating the problem, we are told that there’s no substitute for the surgeon’s eyes and hands to complete the diagnosis. There was, in addition, a bone scan which was clear and normal.”4
But the hint of potential good news in the note Joanne wrote was not to be realized. When the surgery was performed, the results were disastrous: The surgeons found that the cancer had spread beyond Rogers’s stomach, which they removed in its entirety. Dr. Bill Hirsch, a close family friend, was with Joanne when the doctors told her how far the disease had spread. When Hirsch started to cry, Joanne knew the end was probably near.
Dr. Hirsch took time off from his work to be with Joanne and Fred once Fred came home. He later recalled: “He [Fred] had the surgery, and I can remember when the surgeon came out partway through the operation and he said, well, you know, it’s so advanced, we don’t really have to take his stomach out. And Joanne said, well I think Fred really wants it out. . . . So they went on and completed the surgery then, in the hospital.”5
Hirsch added that because Fred was struggling with pain when he and Joanne got him back to the Rogers apartment, he had to strictly limit the number of people who could visit: “He was just so exhausted. And he said I hope they don’t think I’m being elitist to not have them visiting; and he cried when he said that because he didn’t want to hurt their feelings, but he just didn’t have much to give at that point. There were certain individuals that I think he wanted to email, but he would start writing an email and he would just fall asleep or something. It was very, very frustrating for him. . . . Joanne sat on the bed once and said, ‘Fred, I know the boys are going to be okay. I’ll try to be,’ she said. And he said ‘Oh, Joanne, you don’t know what a relief that is for me to hear that.’”6
Family friend Michael Horton was one of the ones who saw Fred Rogers right before he died. He reflects on what he learned from Rogers: “One time I said something unkind about someone. . . . And I said, ‘Oh, I’m sorry. I’m horrible.’
“And he’d say, ‘No, you’re not horrible. What you said is not horrible. Nothing about you is horrible—except how you treat others. What you do.’
“Fred believed in the goodness in everyone. . . . Really, Fred and Joanne were the most marvelous people—the most loving, and giving, people I’ve ever met in my life.”7
According to Dr. Hirsch, one of Fred’s major preoccupations in his final days was making sure he was not a bother to anyone else at the end of his life. He told Hirsch he was relieved to get a catheter, so he would not have to wake up Bill or Joanne to help him get to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Often, when he would wake up at night, he would sit by himself and read one of the numerous books on his nightstand that dealt with many of the world’s religions—Fred reminding himself of the spiritual things that were dearest to him.
The three of them struggled to get the pain medication just right, to balance Fred’s need for relief with his wish to be alert enough to make contact with people.
Hirsch recalled: “He wanted to have his thinking clear. He wanted that because there were so many people he wanted to talk to, but he was in terrible pain. So we did this thing for a couple of weeks where we were trying to give him just enough to relieve the pain, and then he would have an hour or two where he was coherent, but it didn’t work. Basically, it was too far along . . . then he would be in such pain and so distressed. Then you would give him the painkiller, and then he was asleep.”8
After days upon days of nursing Fred and working with hospice services, Joanne and Bill were exhausted by the awful burden of helping their friend and trying to skillfully manage his medications. One day in the kitchen, Joanne recalls, they were almost giddy with weariness, working out the right dosage of Fred’s powerful pain medicine. “I said to Bill, ‘Well, they said to give him such and such. And he said, ‘Oh, do you think that much?’
“I said, ‘Well, they said he really needs a lot.’ Then I looked at Bill and said, ‘The worst it could do is to kill him.’
“Then we sat on the floor, and laughed and laughed. It was the most painful thing I can remember. . . . And yet, it was funny.”9
When Joanne was helping Fred get back in bed, and trying to make him comfortable, sometimes he would smile sheepishly and ask for a hug. Joanne recalled later that as she gave Fred a heartfelt hug, it seemed so poignantly sad to her that she could hardly bear it.
Their younger son, John, recalls his last visit with his father: “I felt terrible for him near the end. I’m glad it didn’t last too long, because here’s a guy who never took a drug or a drink in his whole life and swam every day from age forty on. He can’t swim anymore. He’s having to wear these patches so that he’s not in complete pain, and at first, I think he was hallucinating. . . . He just wasn’t Dad anymore. But you have to make people comfortable. It’s the only right thing to do.”10
Fred Rogers died on February 27, 2003, just a month before he would have turned seventy-five. He was in his own bed, in his apartment, in Pittsburgh, the city where he had made children’s television programming for half a century.
Rogers’s eclectic embrace of religion served him to the very end. As he lay comatose shortly before he died, his friend Archabbot Douglas Nowicki, chancellor of Saint Vincent College, came to the Rogerses’ apartment in Pittsburgh to administer the last rites of the Catholic Church.
How would Rogers have felt about that? Joanne later explained that because of Fred’s embrace of all faiths—he frequently prayed with those of other faiths—he would have been pleased to receive Catholic last rites just before dying as a Presbyterian.
Right after he died, the presents started arriving at the homes and offices of his friends and associates. During the last few months of his life, Rogers had thought about which of his personal belongings would be right to give to each of his many friends. Archabbot Nowicki got a pair of cufflinks. The journalist Tim Madigan, author of I’m Proud of You: My Friendship with Fred Rogers, got photographs commemorating their association. Jeannine Morrison, a college friend from Rollins, got a check, which she and her husband used to buy a car—a Honda, like Fred’s.
Rogers had arranged for his cousin Jim Okonak, executive director of the McFeely-Rogers Foundation, to mail these gifts out after his death. There was very little written communication. In effect, the gift itself was the message: a note of caring, kindness, and thoughtfulness from the master of benevolence.
While he was mustering his gift list, Rogers worried he might die before he had done everything he could to be a good person. His doubts caught up with him, and he worried that he had somehow let down his God. But then he consulted with Joanne and his sister, Laney, and with Archabbot Nowicki, and he prayed. He came to the conclusion that he’d used his gifts to the best of his ability. And Fred decided that, imperfect though he knew himself to be, he really had done his best, and that God, to whom he had dedicated his life, would accept him into heaven.
Eliot Daley, Fred Rogers’s old friend and former executive at Small World Enterprises, says: “I would describe him as the ultimate ‘what you see is what you get,’ with one exception. What most people couldn’t see in Fred was his enormous power. Power. Capital P. Fred is the most powerful person I have ever known in my whole life. . . . I’ve dealt with a lot of people whom the world regards as powerful. None of them could hold a candle to Fred’s power. . . .
“His power derived from a really unique place. It was his absolute self-possession, which is very different from self-interest or se
lf-satisfaction, or selfishness. He didn’t need anything from you or from me. He welcomed it, but he didn’t need it.”11
Joanne Rogers adds: “Fred was a wonderful husband. And he was interesting and fun, and loving. I can’t think of ever having a better relationship. And I do miss him. Whenever I do miss him, I think about the times when he was so sick. And I think: No, I wouldn’t have wanted him to stay on in that condition. In a way—you know, we were fortunate that his illness was not that extended, although it seemed like ten years, even if it was only two months.
“I knew that he was ready any time. Some of us, when we talk about him, you’d think sainthood wouldn’t even be good enough. But he was a very special person. Very special. The most special person I ever knew.”12
Michael Horton reflects on his long friendship with Fred Rogers: “One word that defines my friendship with Fred is laughter. All of our phone calls, all of our visits, all of our interactions non-studio, non-work, were full of laughter. His sense of whimsy was unparalleled. Early on, I asked him to write a couple of letters of recommendation for me; and even those were just wonderful.
“I miss him so much; I need that laughter. He gave unconditional love—no matter what you did or what you said. He always loved you. I can make my husband cry to this day by singing ‘It’s You I Like.’ He’ll never let me finish. I never quite get to the end of it because I don’t want to cry.”13
Fred Rogers’s death was such a significant event that the next day, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette devoted the entire front page of the paper to him. His longtime friend Rev. Bill Barker presided over a public memorial at Heinz Hall in Pittsburgh on May 3, 2003, attended by over twenty-seven hundred people, including former Good Morning America host David Hartman, Teresa Heinz Kerry, philanthropist Elsie Hillman, PBS President Pat Mitchell, Arthur creator Marc Brown, and The Very Hungry Caterpillar author-illustrator Eric Carle.