King Maxwell Evarts Perkins - The good neighbor: the life and work of Fred Rogers

For Margaret Ann King My Polestar

There are three ways to ultimate success:

The first way is to be kind.

The second way is to be kind.

The third way is to be kind.

FRED ROGERS

Fred Rogers had given some very specific instructions to David Newell, who handled public relations for the PBS childrens show Mister Rogers Neighborhood. Rogers said he wanted no childrenabsolutely noneto be present when he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago. No children? How could that be? By the mid-1980s, Rogers was an icon of childrens television, known for communicating with his young viewers in the most fundamental and profound way. Why would he want to exclude them from a program showcasing his views on how they should be understood and taught?

But Fred Rogers knew himself far better than even friends like Newell, who had worked with him for decades. He knew that if there were children in the studio audience, he wouldnt focus on Winfreys questions, he wouldnt pay heed to her legion of viewers, and he wouldnt convey the great importance of his work. The children and their needs would come first. He couldnt help it, never could help it. Decades before, Rogers had programmed himself to focus on the needs of little children, and by now he had reached a point at which he could not fail to respond to a child who asked something of himanything at all.

He asked David Newell (who also played Mr. McFeely, a central character on Rogerss program) to be clear with Winfreys staff: If there are children in the audience, Fred knows hell do a poor job of helping Oprah to make the interview a success. But the message wasnt received. When Rogers came before Winfreys studio audience on a brisk December day in 1985, he found the audience composed almost entirely of families, mainly very young children with their mothers.

Winfreys staff had decided that after she interviewed Rogers, it would be fun to have him take questions from the audience, and maybe provide some guidance to mothers. And he certainly tried, telling them that to understand children, I think the best that we can do is to think about what it was like for us. But the plan didnt succeed. As soon as the children started to ask him questions directly, he seemed to get lost in their world, slowing his responses to their pace, and even hunching in his chair as if to insinuate himself down to their level.

This wasnt good televisionat least, good adult television. Everything was going into a kind of slow motion as Fred Rogers became Mister Rogers, connecting powerfully with the smallest children present. He seemed to forget the camera as he focused on them one by one. Winfrey began to look a little worried. Although she was still about a year away from the national syndication that would make her a superstar, her program was already a big hit. And here she was losing control of it to a bunch of kids, and what looked like a slightly befuddled grandfather.

Then it got worse. In the audience, Winfrey leaned down with her microphone to ask a little blond girl if she had a question for Mister Rogers. Instead of answering, the child broke away from her mother, pushed past Winfrey, and ran down to the stage to hug him. As the only adult present not stunned by this, apparently, Fred Rogers knelt to accept her embrace.

Minutes later, he was kneeling again, this time to allay a small boys concerns about a miniature trolley installed on Winfreys stage to recall the famous one from his own show, the trolley that traveled to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. The boy was worried about the tracks, which seemed to be canted precariously at the edge of the stage. As the two conferred quietly, Winfrey stood in the audience looking more than a little lost. Seeing that the show was slipping away from her, she signaled her crew to break to an ad.

For Fred Rogers, it was always this way when he was with children, in person or on his hugely influential program. Every weekday, this soft-spoken man talked directly into the camera to address his television neighbors in the audience as he changed from his street clothes into his iconic cardigan and sneakers. Children responded so powerfully, so completely, to Rogers that everything else in their world seemed to fall away as he sang, Its a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Then his preschool-age fans knew that he was fully engaged as Mister Rogers, their adult friend who valued his viewers just the way you are.

It was an offer of unconditional loveand millions took it. Mister Rogers Neighborhood often reached 10 percent of American households, five to ten million children each day who wanted to spend time with this quiet, slightly stooped, middle-aged man with a manner so gentle as to seem a little feminine.

Over time, as new generations of parentssome of whom had grown up with the Neighborhood themselvesswelled the ranks of his admirers, Fred Rogers achieved something almost unheard of in television: He reached a huge nationwide audience with an educational program, a reach he sustained for almost four decades. Rogers became a national advocate for early education just at the time that psychologists, child-development experts, and researchers worldwide were finding that learning that takes place in the earliest yearssocial and emotional, as well as cognitiveis a crucial building block for successful and happy lives.

Mister Rogerss appeal was evident from the beginning of his career, as the managers of WGBH in Boston discovered one day in April 1967. At that point, his program aired on the Eastern Educational Network (a PBS precursor) and was called Misterogers Neighborhood. It had been shown regionally for only a year. Recognizing its popularity, the managers organized a meet-the-host event and broadcast an invitation for Rogerss young viewers to come to the station with their parents. The staff was prepared for a crowd of five hundred people.

Five thousand showed up. The line stretched down the street toward Soldiers Field, where the Harvard football team played, and created traffic slowdowns reminiscent of game days. The station quickly ran out of snacks for the children. As the line wound into the studio, Rogers insisted on kneeling to talk with each child, just as he would on Oprah Winfreys show nearly two decades later. The queue got longer and longer until it stretched past the stadium.

To Fred Rogers, every child required special attention, because every child needed assurance that he or she was someone who mattered. This was far more than the informed opinion of an expert educator; it was a profound conviction, one that had motivated Rogers from his own childhood. When Mister Rogers sang, Would you be mine... wont you be my neighbor, at the start of every episode of his show, he really meant it.

Kindness and empathetic outreach had motivated Rogers since he was a sickly, chubby boy himself, whose classmates in industrial Latrobe, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh, called him Fat Freddy and chased him home from school. The lonely only child often spent school lunch breaks in his puppet theater in the attic of his parents mansion, entertaining a friendlier classmate whod come home with him in a chauffeur-driven car. As Fred Rogers acknowledged later, the isolation of his childhood, though painful, was a key source of artistic invention that showed up in the sets, scripts, and songs on a program where he created an idealized version of his hometown.

Back in the 1930s, when Fred Rogers was growing up, living in a neighborhood meant safety, security, comfort, and help. Despite his problems, in Latrobe young Rogers had a piece of geography, a piece of the town, that was his own. He had neighbors and relatives who understood him, who helped him when his parents didnt understand, who took him into the library to find books he would care about, who rescued him when he was bullied on the street. Eventually, living in the neighborhood meant friends and classmates who valued him and wanted to share their experiences.