The Good Neighbor

by Maxwell King

  In the lobby of the hall, guests could write farewell messages to Fred Rogers in suede-covered books; colored pencils were also provided. His newest grandson, Ian, slept peacefully during the service.

  An old Rogers friend, the famed violinist Itzhak Perlman, made a surprise visit to play in Fred’s memory; and renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma played via videotape since he had another performance that conflicted with the service. Speakers remembered Rogers’s love of children, devotion to his religion, enthusiasm for music, and quirks. Teresa Heinz Kerry said of Rogers, “He never condescended, just invited us into his conversation. He spoke to us as the people we were, not as the people others wished we were.”14

  Fred Rogers is interred at Unity Cemetery outside Latrobe, not far from where he grew up, and just a mile from the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media, the institution that was conceived to carry on his legacy and work, located on the campus of Saint Vincent College. Soon after he died, Joanne Rogers sent his concert grand piano back to the Steinway factory in New York to be rebuilt, then made a gift of it to the center.

  It remains there, part of the history of Fred Rogers, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and the generosity of Fred’s grandmother, “Nana” McFeely. The piano is occasionally played by one of the Saint Vincent College music students. Sometimes it is moved across the hall from the Rogers Center to a large meeting hall in the same building. There the piano rings out again with songs from the Neighborhood at special events.

  On New Year’s Day, 2004, Michael Keaton hosted a PBS special entitled Fred Rogers: America’s Favorite Neighbor. Later, to mark what would have been Fred’s eightieth birthday, the Fred Rogers Company sponsored several events to memorialize him, including “Won’t You Wear a Sweater Day,” during which fans and neighbors were asked to wear their favorite sweaters in celebration of Rogers’s life.

  Rogers received the Presidential Medal of Freedom, over forty honorary degrees, and a Peabody Award, as well as a Lifetime Achievement Emmy. He was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame, was recognized by two Congressional resolutions, and ranks No. 35 among TV Guide’s Fifty Greatest TV Stars of All Time. Several buildings and artworks in Pennsylvania are dedicated to his memory, as is the asteroid 26858 Misterrogers, named by the International Astronomical Union on May 2, 2003, by the director of the Henry Buhl Jr. Planetarium & Observatory at the Carnegie Science Center in Pittsburgh. And the science center worked with Rogers’s Family Communications, Inc., to produce a planetarium show for preschoolers called “The Sky Above Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” which plays at planetariums across the United States.15

  Some longtime staffers like Hedda Sharapan continue to work with the Fred Rogers Company and the Fred Rogers Center. In the wake of his death, she observed: “This is something kind of strange, but I use Fred’s work so much in my everyday life that he’s still here for me. Sometimes, I have trouble talking about him in the past tense.”16

  A little more than a month after Fred’s death, the Gorilla Foundation shared a tribute to Fred from Koko in a rebroadcast of their visit together.

  In a short video released by PBS a few months before Fred Rogers’s death, he says good-bye. Looking distinguished in a sharp suit and tie and glasses, he addresses his “television neighbors” directly, as he always does: “I would like to tell you what I often told you when you were much younger. I like you just the way you are. And what’s more, I’m so grateful to you for helping the children in your life to know that you’ll do everything you can to keep them safe. And to help them express their feelings in ways that will bring healing in many different neighborhoods. It’s such a good feeling to know that we’re lifelong friends.”17

  25.

  MISTER ROGERS LIVES ON

  Today, the Fred Rogers Company produces programs like Peg + Cat, Odd Squad, Through the Woods, and Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood that make use of Rogers’s techniques. They’ve all achieved critical and commercial success with approaches that incorporate some of Fred’s style and substance, as well as his emphasis on human values.

  Angela Santomero, the creator of Blue’s Clues, remembers watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood as a three-year-old and talking back to Mister Rogers on television. Later, she came back to Rogers’s work in creating her own show: “It really was paying tribute to the Mister Rogers show, because . . . I took many of the formal features he used—speaking directly to the camera, this idea that there is this intimacy of talking directly. And in having a world of imagination. Fred used the trolley to transition you to the land of the make-believe, and we used a little skidoo dance that transitioned you into a skidoo world.”1

  Like Rogers, Santomero bases her work heavily on research in the fields of education and child development. In developing Blue’s Clues, she worked closely with Dr. Alice Wilder, a leading thinker on media and child development who has a EdD in educational psychology from Columbia University. “The research piece is very important to me,” says Santomero, “so in our production budget we carved out a little bit of money just for research, which nobody had done before within a production.”2

  The creator of Wonder Pets, Josh Selig, recalls the power of Rogers’s approach and its influence on his own creative work: “There’s something about the rhythm of Fred Rogers that is very calming and soothing, and I know that this was very deliberate on his part. He really understood children’s minds and the pace at which they could receive information comfortably. Wonder Pets does have a lot of what we would call formal features, meaning that in every episode certain things always happen. . . .

  “That level of predictability, I think, is very comforting to young children. Similarly, Mister Rogers had certain structures, but within that there was always a lot of originality.”3

  Like Rogers, Selig decided to incorporate live music into his show, and he wove operatic themes into the program in ways that are reminiscent of Rogers’s use of opera and song: “I’d learned from years watching Fred that music has power in storytelling. I see this as almost a child’s interpretation of opera. It shouldn’t be sophisticated opera that’s going to leave them behind, but a very playful way of singing dialogue that helps the child understand the emotion of a scene or the arc of the whole show.”4

  Selig and Santomero have received numerous accolades. Selig was awarded a Daytime Emmy for Wonder Pets, as well as numerous other nominations. Santomero’s work was also nominated several times for Daytime Emmys. In addition, Santomero won a Peabody Award for Blue’s Clues.

  One of the fundamental things that Fred Rogers understood, that brought the sort of power to his work that attracted Selig and Santomero and others, is that it is perfectly appropriate for children to be utterly different from grown-ups. They are not little adults, just like their parents, but smaller. They have a unique perspective, and they have a special job to do: learning. But this idea—that children have an utterly different and completely important place separate from adults—didn’t begin to germinate until the nineteenth century, and then it grew slowly as research into childhood advanced.

  In 1996, Lynette Friedrich Cofer, a professor of psychology at the University of New Mexico, wrote that since she conducted a 1975 study of the effects of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on young viewers with a colleague at Penn State, Aletha Huston-Stein, things had gotten much worse in content aimed at young children: “Children’s television is . . . strewn with war toys, insipid cartoons, and over-sweetened cereals. We seem unable to halt a technological and commercial expansion that has invaded the lives of children and families.”5

  She looks back with regret at how little Fred Rogers’s power has been appreciated: “And what of the children who saw the quiet and complex Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood programs? They showed significant changes in behaviors that require self-control: increased persistence or the amount of time spent concentrating on projects, greater ability to carry out responsibility without adult intervention in tasks like helping with cleanup, and greater patien
ce waiting to take their turn or to be served at juice time. We also found significant changes for children from lower social-class homes in the quality of their play with other children—increased cooperation, ability to express feelings, and sympathy and help for others.”6

  Fred Rogers appeared before audiences of millions of young children and their parents, grandparents, and teachers over a forty-year period, including long after the Neighborhood finished production three years before the death of its creator. At the height of its appeal in the mid-1980s, nearly 10 percent of American households tuned into the show.

  Historian and bestselling author David McCullough notes: “Mister Rogers was the greatest teacher of all times. He taught more students than anyone else in history.”7

  To aid parents and teachers, the Fred Rogers Company now also maintains an online store that offers instructional materials on topics such as what to do when your baby cries or how to protect the environment (activity books along with DVDs). There is even a book and workshop on what to do with “mad feelings,” and a compilation of four episodes of the Neighborhood that deal with kids with autism. In addition, the company sells branded merchandise featuring beloved Neighborhood characters like Mr. McFeely, plush versions of popular new characters like the animated Daniel, and materials to encourage creativity in children (such as the book A Piece of Red Paper, about using construction paper).

  Fred Rogers’s work shaped not only television in new and exciting ways; he also left his mark on the technology that drives it by testifying before the Supreme Court in 1983. Universal Studios, backed by the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) had sued the Sony Corporation, manufacturers of the VCR (MPAA head Jack Valenti called the ability to record TV shows “savagery”). Fred Rogers testified on Sony’s behalf, saying he had no objection to the taping of his shows because, “I just feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life, in a healthy way, is important.”8 The Supreme Court ruled in Sony’s favor, and the case would later serve as precedent for similar technologies such as Netflix and Hulu.

  Ironically, the computer that worried Rogers has in fact given him, and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, a new lease on life. After the 2016 election, Fred Rogers’s now-adult “neighbors” looked for a voice of kindness and compassion. In May 2017, Twitch, a video platform for gamers, mounted a Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood marathon of all 886 episodes that garnered over a million views in the first few days of streaming. The marathon was repeated in late May 2018.

  In turn, Twitter “blew up” (over ten thousand “likes” in a matter of days, retweeted by caustic comedian Sarah Silverman, among others) with a story by Anthony Breznican, a senior writer at Entertainment Weekly (EW), later reprinted in EW and even picked up by USA Today. In it, he agonized about what to tell his four-year-old son in the wake of the bombing in Manchester, England, that endangered so many innocent children and young adults.9 Then he recounts a seminal incident from years earlier, when he encountered Rogers in an elevator at the University of Pittsburgh. When they got off together, Breznican broke down and told Rogers about the recent death of his grandfather. Fred Rogers comforted the young man with a story about how much he was affected by the death of his own grandfather. Yes, concludes Anthony Breznican, Rogers personified the “helping” ethos his mother taught him. All over the internet, the “meme” of Fred Rogers encouraging his viewers to “look for the helpers” offers solace.

  Fred Rogers continues to elicit as much interest as he did when he was alive, and he seems as current, as relevant, and even as controversial as at any time in his career: when education is discussed, when the rearing of children is considered, when the uses of technology or the value of funding for public television are debated, and whenever another spasm of violence shakes the world.

  Whenever a great tragedy strikes—war, famine, mass shootings, or even an outbreak of populist rage—millions of people turn to Fred’s messages about life. Then the web is filled with his words and images. With fascinating frequency, his written messages and video clips surge across the internet, reaching hundreds of thousands of people who, confronted with a tough issue or an ominous development, open themselves to Rogers’s messages of quiet contemplation, of simplicity, of active listening and the practice of human kindness.

  Still, the question of Fred’s legacy is not so easily resolved by a biography, or the work of the Fred Rogers Center, or the productions of the Fred Rogers Company. Rogers remains controversial to some who think of him as too soft, too likely to coddle the young and weaken their moral and intellectual fiber. In July 2007, Jeffrey Zaslow (most famous for later coauthoring the book The Last Lecture with dying Carnegie Mellon University professor Randy Pausch) wrote in the Wall Street Journal: “As educators and researchers struggle to define the new parameters of parenting, circa 2007, some are revisiting the language of child ego-boosting.”10

  Though Zaslow criticized Rogers directly for being too undemanding in his support of children, he was relatively measured in his commentary. But not all who followed suit were so genteel. In the spring of 2010, the Fox News Channel devoted part of its daily newscast to a segment entitled “Is Mr. [sic] Rogers Ruining Kids?” Fox & Friends took it all the way, describing Rogers as “this evil man” who taught kids that they are special, thereby sapping their will to work hard in school, or to improve themselves.11

  A highly publicized and notably controversial shot in this philosophical war was the 2011 publication of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua, professor of law at Yale Law School, who humorously and thoroughly explores the implications of a very tough, demanding style of parenting.12

  Like many other writers before her, Professor Chua sees virtue in the role of a very exacting parent who emphasizes hard work and discipline. Her book rekindled the debate, with some criticizing her for advocating a harsh parental regimen, and others applauding this shot across the bow of wimps like Rogers. In fact, philosophers of parenting like Fred Rogers and Professor Chua are almost always far more nuanced and thoughtfully balanced than their provocative critics would have us believe. Professor Chua’s book is full of humor and self-deprecation, and the approach she advocates, while demanding of her children, is not nearly so draconian as her critics would suggest.

  The fact that the internet—and popular culture—continues today to resonate with so much interest in Fred Rogers and his message is less puzzling when we consider what he represents in the context of our times. On one level, Fred is a gentle, reserved old man in a fading cardigan sweater whose principal contribution to society has been in the field of childcare. But on another level—and this is the level on which he is so often appreciated today—he is a powerful cultural avatar in an age that seems sick with rage and conflict.

  Whether it is the overwhelming pace of change, the baffling complexity of communications technology, the disruptive force of a globalizing economy, or the rise of populist political anger, Fred Rogers offers a counterpoint.

  After all, the dominant trend of our time is the steady, relentless increase to the pace of change, the inexorable drive toward complexity in all aspects of our lives: in communication, information, technology, commerce, education, employment, even warfare. The pace of change is unyielding, and its ability to disrupt our lives in myriad ways is equally relentless. Of course, change can—and does—make life better in so many ways. But even when it is delivering improvement, it can be disruptive and unsettling.

  Inevitably, we look for someone or something to blame: It must be government, interfering with our lives and putting chocks under our wheels. Or we blame the other: those other countries or peoples or ethnic groups that are not like us and may be competing for advantage.

  Fred Rogers doesn’t offer an answer to today’s profound dilemmas, nor does he offer an escape from them. But he does offer a philosophy, an approach, that can enable us to better manage through the struggle. He offers the idea of slowing down . . . way down to Fre
d-time . . . to get to a calmer place from which to work. He offers the idea of simplicity: of reducing things to their most constructive and most elemental, to Freddish—a base from which to build understanding. He urges us to value our global citizens “just the way they are,” no matter their skin color or religious affiliation.

  Looking back on his career in his retirement, he said in a speech: “In our makeshift ways, those of us who were producing felt that what we were doing was somehow a gift. We felt that by way of educational television, we were giving a life-enriching gift. If that sounds lofty to you, remember we were a little band of ecstatic pioneers—you know, to be ‘ecstatic’ literally means ‘to be outside of a static place.’ Well, we were on the move, and we had to feel that our work was a valuable gift; otherwise, we couldn’t have produced all the hours and days and months and years of television that we did.”13

  EPILOGUE: A PERSONAL NOTE ON THE IMPORTANCE OF FRED ROGERS

  Fred Rogers and I were sitting in his office at Family Communications, Inc., in the WQED building on Fifth Avenue in Pittsburgh. His staff had arranged for the two of us to get together and talk, back when I was president of the Heinz Endowments, one of the larger foundations in the country, chaired by Fred’s longtime friend and supporter Teresa Heinz. But we didn’t talk about the foundation or funding; we talked about everything else: Fred’s grandchildren, Pittsburgh, journalism, and our vacation houses on Nantucket Island.

  Fred sat on a large sofa along one wall, and I sat in a big, comfortable easy chair facing him. Over Fred’s head was a needlepoint picture of Nantucket. When I remarked on it, we discovered that we each owned a small, run-down, unheated fisherman’s shack on the island, Fred’s at the western end in Madaket, and mine to the east in Wauwinet. Fred explained that the needlepoint map of Nantucket had been done by his mother.