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

To Fred Rogers, every child required special attention, because every child needed assurance that he or she was someone who mattered.

Fred Rogers was much more than his gentle, avuncular persona in the Neighborhood. He was the genius behind the most powerful, beneficial programming ever created for very young children; he was a technological innovator and entrepreneur decades before such work was popularly recognized; he was a relentless crusader for higher standards in broadcasting; he was an artist whose deep creative impulse was expressed in the music of his show; and he was a Presbyterian minister, bearing witness to the values he saw as essential in a world that often seemed to lack any ethical compass. He was a husband and father, and a loyal friend. He was also, in many ways, a driven man.

Was he a real man or a saintly character? Is there something we don’t know? What’s the story?” There is indeed a story: a difficult childhood; a quest to escape feelings of isolation engendered by his parents’ protectiveness, and by their great wealth; a struggle to remake himself in a mold of his own choosing; and after he found his vocation, a lifelong drive to meet the highest standards he could discover. Mister Rogers wasn’t a saint; he had a temper, he made bad decisions, and on occasion he was accused of bad faith. He had difficult times with his own sons when they were young. Despite his deep empathy with the tiniest children, he could, at times, be tone-deaf in relating to adults. The man who conveyed a Zen-like calm on television saw a psychiatrist for decades.

After each unspeakable tragedy, Rogers’s words, sought out on the internet, were forwarded everywhere: “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news,” Rogers had told his young viewers, “my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’ To this day, especially in times of disaster, I remember my mother’s words, and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers—so many caring people in this world.”

journalist Mary Elizabeth Williams put it on Salon.com in 2012, on what would have been Fred Rogers’s eighty-fourth birthday: “One of the most radical figures of contemporary history never ran a country or led a battle. . . . He became a legend by wearing a cardigan and taking off his shoes. . . . Rogers was a genius of empathy . . . fearless enough to be kind.”

Fred Rogers never—ever—let the urgency of work or life impede his focus on what he saw as basic human values: integrity, respect, responsibility, fairness and compassion, and of course his signature value, kindness.

In many ways, he was ahead of his time. 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.

When asked how he coped with increasing fame, he observed, “You don’t set out to be rich and famous; you set out to be helpful.”

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

It always helps to have people we love beside us when we have to do difficult things in life. —FRED ROGERS

“Nothing can replace the influence of unconditional love in the life of a child. . . . Children love to belong, they long to belong.”

The Rogers family philanthropy and the religious basis for it became two of the most important strands in young Fred Rogers’s life. For Nancy, the centerpiece of her giving was the Latrobe Presbyterian Church: the Scots-Irish Rogers and McFeely clans were staunch members of the church, located on Main Street in the center of town.

Nancy Rogers also organized a consortium of several Latrobe churches—including the Presbyterian, Lutheran, Methodist, and Episcopal—into a network of ministers and volunteers called “Fish,”

His elders advised him to meet bullying with indifference: “The advice I got from the grown-ups was, ‘Just let on you don’t care, then nobody will bother you.’”36 But he did care; more than anything in the world, Fred Rogers cared. It was caring that defined the character of his mother, and it was caring that increasingly influenced the evolving character of this shy but resolute young boy. Fred never accepted the advice that pretending not to care would alleviate his loneliness and pain.

Remarkably, by the time Fred Rogers was a teenager, he was very different from the ten-year-old who had spent the summer in Paul’s air-conditioned bedroom. In his high school years, Rogers became extraordinarily effective. Before he graduated and headed off to an Ivy League college, he had developed into the star of the Latrobe school system: student council president, editor of the Latrobean, finalist in the Rotary Oratorical Contest, actor in high school theatrical productions. He was a serious, accomplished scholar who was inducted into the National Honor Society.8 And he was showing signs of the mental toughness that were hallmarks of his character as an adult.

How did young Fred Rogers transform himself from a shy, sickly kid into a confident high schooler, and then adult? Looking back over Fred’s long life through the lenses provided by his friends and associates, his family and his own writings, it’s clear that the support of his parents and grandparents was concentrated in three key areas that came together to help Fred find himself and develop his extraordinary artistic and creative persona: faith, independence, and music.

Fred always had a lot of questions, even during the sermon, but his mother never shushed him up. She would always answer, quietly and respectfully, treating the little boy’s concerns as seriously as those of an adult.

Although he was a strong figure in the family, Jim Rogers was tolerant and always very careful not to bully Fred. He treated his son with respect and support, no matter their differences.

Nancy Rogers almost never communicated the harsher side of Presbyterianism to her son. In her son, she imbued the delights of Christian service. Fred took great pleasure in everyday acts of thoughtfulness and kindliness;

Rogers’s favorite quotation, which he often cited and which he kept framed near his desk in his office, came from The Little Prince, by the French author, airplane pilot, and war hero Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.” In English translation, the full passage reads: “And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Their jokes, and their shared sense of life as an adventure that is made more exciting if you don’t take yourself too seriously all forged the bonds of their relationship.

Television appalled and attracted him at the same time. Fred instinctively understood the extraordinary power of the medium, even as others saw it merely as a diversion or a minor entertainment. And he also understood its potential for education, perhaps more fully than anyone else at the time.

Right away, he could see what he’d like to offer on a television program: “I’d love to have guests and present a whole smorgasbord of ways for the children to choose. Some child might choose painting, some child might choose playing the cello. There are so many ways of saying who we are, and how we feel. Ways that don’t hurt anybody. And it seems to me that this is a great gift.”

The real issue in life is not how many blessings we have, but what we do with our blessings. Some people have many blessings and hoard them. Some have few and give everything away. —FRED ROGERS

“When I heard that educational television—which is now called public television—was going to be starting in Pittsburgh, only forty miles from where I grew up, I told some of my friends at NBC that I thought I’d put my name in and apply for the station. They said, ‘You are nuts, that place isn’t even on the air yet, and you’re in line to be a producer or a director or anything you want to be here.’ And I said, ‘No, I have the feeling that educational television might be, at least for me, the way of the future.’”

“I knew that the decision to leave New York and to come to Pittsburgh and launch in this place nobody had ever heard of was the correct one for me. It gave me a chance to use all the talents that I had ever been given. You know, I loved children, I loved drama, I loved music, I loved whimsy, I loved puppetry.”

Fred Rogers would stand for the right thing for children, no matter what. He had gotten into television to make it better, to make it more appropriate and educational for young children. The slapstick, pie-in-the-face quality of early television was just what he wanted to change. Later in his career, he let his sense of humor come out more on air, especially when he wanted to show children that adults make mistakes, too.

There were hard divisions between the very conservative United Presbyterian Church and the more liberal and progressive practitioners of the faith, and their battles were so hard-fought that they finally caused the seminary to appoint a special commission to release a set of recommendations to heal the divisions within the faculty and the institution.8 Rogers was always on the liberal side of this equation, and he later became a parishioner and sometime preacher at Pittsburgh’s Sixth Presbyterian Church, a famous bastion of the progressive. The Sixth Church emphasized inclusion, and it was known in part for welcoming gay and lesbian parishioners, a position that was wholeheartedly supported by Joanne and Fred Rogers: “Fred was very happy in our [Sixth] Presbyterian Church because there are no exclusions,” recalls Joanne. “There’s no exclusivity. If there had been a church called ‘Reconciliation,’ I think he would have joined it.” Joanne emphasizes Fred’s belief that religious faith should bring all sorts of people together, not pull them apart.

The Presbyterian values—hard work, responsibility and caring for others, parsimony, duty to family, ethical clarity, a strong sense of mission, and a relentless sense of service to God—drove every moment of Fred Rogers’s life. Though an artist at heart—writing scripts, operas, musical scores, creating puppets and tales of fantasy—he could never escape a life of duty. The miracle is that he so wonderfully, so successfully, put the two together.

“For Fred, Dr. Orr was one of the great mentors of his life, because Dr. Orr, a world-renowned Biblical scholar, one of the top theologians and professors in the seminary, was one of the most humble, approachable, loving people you could find. Fred’s life was like Will Orr’s life: great things, but never self-centered or self-aggrandizing, or self-anything. Father to son, in one sense; but brother to brother—older brother to younger brother—in another.”

The elders relented, and somewhat reluctantly approved Fred’s plan to try to build his own Presbyterian ministry through television. At the time, it was the most unusual plan for a young minister to come out of any local Presbytery in the United States.

All these giants in the field of human development revered McFarland. Erikson once said, “Margaret McFarland knew more than anyone in this world about families with young children.”

When Fred Rogers’s teachers at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary had the good sense to send him over to Margaret McFarland, he found the perfect environment in which to marry his creative work with high academic standards. Rogers took the teachings of McFarland, Spock, Erikson, and Brazelton and gave them a practical role in the real world of early childhood education. He gave their research immediacy and currency by thrusting it into the new world of television and popular culture. Eventually, it was Fred Rogers who taught multiple generations of American parents how very critical the first few years of human life could be, and how social and emotional learning is more important at that age than cognitive learning. More than any other popular voice in American culture, Fred Rogers taught this powerful lesson to parents, teachers, and to children themselves through his gentle, slow-paced but richly textured programming.

McFarland and Rogers shared this sensitivity to the feelings of other people. And they shared a great sensitivity to the impact of specific language, particularly with impressionable young children.

Rogers brought an intense creativity and a worldly connection to the fields of television and entertainment. McFarland brought an academic rigor and authority that Rogers desperately wanted as the underpinning for his programming.

“because Fred was so totally honest, a naturally honest person—I don’t mean that acting is not honest. He just couldn’t be anything but himself. He managed that very, very comfortably and easily, once he found that what he did was accepted by the people around him. The studio people found it difficult at first—Fred seemed almost too good to be true—but they very quickly discovered that he was as true as he seemed. He was so focused on doing the right thing by his audience that he wasn’t anxious.”

Fred Rogers seldom got angry. But his associates at Family Communications, Inc., later reported more than one incident in which he became absolutely furious if he thought he observed hospital staff being thoughtless and insensitive with young children.

All our lives, we rework the things from our childhood, like feeling good about ourselves, managing our angry feelings, being able to say good-bye to people we love. —FRED ROGERS

“I really feel that [in] the opening reality of the program,” Fred explained in an interview, “we deal with the stuff that dreams are made of. And then in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, we deal with it as if it were a dream. And then when it comes back to me (at the end), we deal with a simple interpretation of the dream. . . . Anything can happen in make-believe, and we can talk about anything in reality. Margaret used to say, ‘Whatever is mentionable is manageable.’”

Only a year after the 1968 debut of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on NET, Fred Rogers had achieved such credibility that he was selected to testify before Congress on behalf of educational television.

In what is still considered one of the most powerful pieces of testimony ever offered before Congress, and one of the most powerful pieces of video persuasion ever filmed, the mild-mannered Fred Rogers employed his gentle demeanor and soft voice to dominate the proceedings, silence a roomful of politicians, and nearly bring the gruff committee chairman to tears. It has been studied ever since by both academics and marketers.

when the money ran out, people in Boston and Pittsburgh and Chicago all came to the fore and said we’ve got to have more of this neighborhood expression of care. And this is what—this is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child, to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying, ‘You’ve made this day a special day, by just your being you. There’s no person in the whole world like you, and I like you, just the way you are.’

“And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health. I think that it’s much more dramatic that two men could be working out their feelings of anger—much more dramatic than showing something of gunfire. I’m constantly concerned about what our children are seeing, and for fifteen years I’ve tried in this country, and Canada, to present what I feel is a meaningful expression of care.”

before a silent hearing room, Fred Rogers recites the words of a children’s song, one that he considers very important, one that “has to do with that good feeling of control which I feel that children need to know is there. And it starts out, ‘What do you do with the mad that you feel?’ And that first line came straight from a child. I work with children doing puppets in—in very personal communication with small groups

What do you do with the mad that you feel / When you feel so mad you could bite / When the whole wide world seems oh so wrong, and nothing you do seems very right / What do you do / Do you punch a bag / Do you pound some clay or some dough / Do you round up friends for a game of tag or see how fast you can go / It’s great to be able to stop when you’ve planned a thing that’s wrong / And be able to do something else instead—and think this song— “‘I can stop when I want to / Can stop when I wish / Can stop, stop, stop anytime / And what a good feeling to feel like this / And know that the feeling is really mine / Know that there’s something deep inside that helps us become what we can / For a girl can be someday a lady, and a boy can be someday a man.’” Senator Pastore’s dramatic and very famous closing line: “I think it’s wonderful. I think it’s wonderful. Looks like you just earned the twenty million dollars.”

Fred Rogers achieved this impact by simply demonstrating who he was—Mister Rogers, the earnest, authentic, consciously moral person he had set out to be decades earlier. In place of the formal stuffiness typical of congressional testimony, he was personal, informal, and direct, talking about human feelings and relationships without using the language of sociology or psychology.

“Speaking in ‘Freddish,’” said Greenwald in an interview, was about anticipating “how the young audience might misunderstand, and preventing that misunderstanding by providing the right piece of information. What Fred understood and was very direct and articulate about was that the inner life of children was deadly serious to them.”

nine steps to Freddish translation: First, “State the idea you wish to express as clearly as possible, and in terms preschoolers can understand.” Example: “It is dangerous to play in the street.” Second, “Rephrase in a positive manner,” as in “It is good to play where it is safe.” Third, “Rephrase the idea, bearing in mind that preschoolers cannot yet make subtle distinctions and need to be redirected to authorities they trust.” As in, “Ask your parents where it is safe to play.” Fourth, “Rephrase your idea to eliminate all elements that could be considered prescriptive, directive, or instructive.” (i.e., ask): “Your parents will tell you where it is safe to play.” Fifth, “Rephrase any element that suggests certainty.” (i.e., will): “Your parents CAN tell you where it is safe to play.” Sixth, “Rephrase your idea to eliminate any element that may not apply to All children (as in, having PARENTS): “Your favorite GROWN-UPS can tell you where it is safe to play.” Seventh, “Add a simple motivational idea that gives preschoolers a reason to follow your advice”: “Your favorite GROWN-UPS can tell you where it is SAFE to play. It is good to listen to them.” Eighth, “Rephrase your new statement, repeating Step One (i.e., GOOD as a personal value judgment): “Your favorite GROWNUPS can tell you where it is SAFE to play. It is important to try to listen to them.” Ninth, “Rephrase your idea a final time, relating it to some phase of development a preschooler can understand (i.e., growin...

As simple as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood may look onscreen, the process of putting the shows together was as painstaking