The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers

by Maxwell King

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

In the 1970s, he became a vegetarian, famously saying he couldn’t eat anything that had a mother, and in the mid-1980s he became co-owner of Vegetarian Times, a popular magazine filled with recipes and features. He also signed his name to a statement protesting the wearing of animal furs.

His lesson is as simple and direct as Fred was: Human kindness will always make life better.

The next year Nancy lied about her age to get a driver’s license so she could help local hospitals and doctors’ offices during the terrible flu epidemic of 1918.6

The Rogers’s home, a three-story brick mansion at 737 Weldon Street, was in the affluent area of Latrobe

Fred himself said little about Dartmouth, except that he was miserable there, and that his attraction to Romance languages may have piqued his interest in the school, which had, and still has, a fine language program.

Dartmouth, famous throughout the Ivy League in those days as a beer-soaked, jockstrap party school, might be a poor fit.

Fred’s sister, Laney, remembers that his roommates were “footballers,” that there were frat parties all the time, and that the completely unathletic and teetotaling Fred Rogers was very uncomfortable there. This was predictable, given Dartmouth’s reputation as a sports-oriented and very macho school (it was still all male, and didn’t go coed until more than twenty years after Fred left)

Fred Rogers did so well in his studies that he graduated magna cum laude from Rollins in 1951, with a bachelor of music degree.

In effect, he began his career as a composer at Rollins, a career that would include the composition of about two hundred songs and fourteen operas.

But even though Fred Rogers had the foresight to see the potential of the new medium, he was also sickened by the crass, low-grade humor of the television he saw. “And I thought: This could be a wonderful tool for education, why is it being used this way? And so I said to my parents, ‘You know, I don’t think I’ll go to seminary right away; I think maybe I’ll go into television. . . . Let’s see what we can do with this.”36

McCullough, who grew up in the same time, region, and culture as Fred, adds that a key to understanding Rogers is the western Pennsylvania work ethic: “The Pittsburgh work ethic is not a Puritan work ethic. In Pittsburgh, if you were a good worker, you were respected, you were welcome.”

This notion of “guided drift,” that we’re guided by our principles but are also free to embrace the flow of life, was one Fred Rogers made his own and shared with friends for the rest of his life. It strongly influenced his willingness to experiment and take chances in his career.

truly believe he was one of the most authentic and Christlike people that I have ever known in my life. Just his manner. His ability to listen. . . . Everyone you talk to that had any encounter with him: It was a real moment in their lives.”

For Jesus, the greatest sin was hypocrisy. He always seemed to hold out much greater hope for a person who really knew the truth about himself or herself even though that person was a prostitute or a crooked tax collector. Jesus had much greater hope for someone like that than for someone who always pretended to be something he wasn’t.”23

You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are. —FRED ROGERS

Children raised on the ethic of the Neighborhood, though less likely to make millions on an innovative hedge-fund scheme on Wall Street, are more likely to grow up with the kind of social and emotional understanding that can lead to a happily balanced life.

19 He also notes the method in what seemed to be Fred Rogers’s over-the-top whimsy. In Grandad for Daniel, Daniel’s father is a professional polisher of the dusty leaves of plants: “Polishing, polishing, I’m polishing in the jungle,” goes one of the songs. Horton recalls: “At the time, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, he [Fred] is really out there.’ I’d never heard of anyone polishing leaves in the jungle. Well, up until last year, my partner and I owned a flower shop in western Maryland. We learned very quickly that all leaves have to be polished! I immediately thought back to the opera and Fred, when I thought that was crazy. I’d just

Even Jim Henson, creator of Sesame Street’s Muppets, made a deal with the Walt Disney Company to market his characters to kids. Sesame Street spun off a variety of products. As Basil Cox notes: “Nothing that Sesame Street did commercially was offensive. It was just much more successful,

“Fred was a rabid vegetarian, and the notion of selling hot, dead cow meat to children was just—you know, it was the most distressed, I think, I’ve ever seen him.”12 Rather than suing Burger King, Fred Rogers preferred a direct approach, and contacted Don Dempsey, Burger King’s senior vice president for marketing, who produced the ad with the agency J. Walter Thompson.

Fred Rogers did not force his vegetarianism on the rest of the family. Jim recalls: “We had a woman who cooked for us for years, Dolores Johnson, and I know that she would tear her hair out every time he’d come up with something else that he didn’t want to eat. . . . But she got to be quite a wizard with the tofu.

In his office at Esquire magazine on Fifty-Fifth Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues in Manhattan, Tom Junod was working on a profile of Fred Rogers for a special 1998 issue on “new American heroes.” A self-described “bad-boy journalist” who had cultivated a reputation for controversy, Junod was uncomfortable about tackling such a goody-goody, and wasn’t sure how to approach the article.

But Rogers’s preparation was not so much professional as it was spiritual: He would study passages of interest from the Bible, and then he would visualize who he would be seeing that day, so that he would be prepared to be as caring and giving as he could be. Fred’s prayers in those early morning sessions were not for success or accomplishment, but rather for the goodness of heart to be the best person he could be in each of the encounters he would have that day.

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

Tom Junod’s story about his friendship with Rogers is now being made into a feature film starring Tom Hanks as Fred.