The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers

by Maxwell King

When Mister Rogers sang, “Won’t you be my neighbor?” at the start of every show, he was inviting the kids watching to share their thoughts and feelings about topics that mattered to them. Nothing was more important to him than making children in the extended “neighborhood” feel not only secure, but also “heard,” especially on topics parents might have a hard time grappling with, like the death of the family dog or sibling rivalry.

For Rogers, the very act of asking questions, and trying to answer them honestly, was the key to growing and learning: “We can’t always know what’s behind a child’s question. But if we let a child know we respect the question, we’re letting that child know that we respect him or her. What a powerful way to say, ‘I care about you!’”

Though working to Fred Rogers’s exacting standards had challenges, Seamans and others found him an empowering boss, despite his flaws—self-absorption and stubbornness among them. His staff also respected him as a bold leader. Arthur Greenwald observed that Rogers’s wealth gave him a certain “level of security. . . . He chose to dedicate himself to making the world better. He was always focused on ‘What good can come of this? Where do people need help?’ “There’s a consistent theme in Fred’s career of people underestimating him. I don’t think that it’s widely understood . . . what a powerful intellect he had, and . . . for lack of a better term, what a tough guy he was. He had a passion about helping children that his famous gentle manner belied, and he had a really steely core.”13 Elizabeth Seamans found him to be an empathetic if sometimes exasperating boss: “He was not proud or arrogant. He didn’t take anything or anybody for granted, ever. He was flawed, but he was a really, really great man, and a good man.”

Rogers had the final word on any directorial decision. His range of contributions to the Neighborhood was astounding: He wrote most of the approximately nine hundred program scripts (and edited the others); he was the lead writer on all two hundred songs performed on the Neighborhood (as well as thirteen operas); he played the piano in most of the musical performances, and sang in many; he created all of the characters on the program; he played most of the major puppet roles; he played the role of host on every episode; he produced the programs; and although there were official directors of the programs, he approved every detail of every show.

“It’s really quite simple: The man you saw on the show, that’s who he was. His respect and passion for children was real. . . . What he put out to the world was so important to us. It struck a real note in our hearts and our souls.

He really helped me think about other people and get a bigger global perspective. He taught me to think about my neighbor . . . to step outside of myself and embrace otherness, and always try and think about what the other person’s going through.” She remembers: “Fred wanted to nurture, and set an example as a caring adult. That was always the message.”

“They were real extensions of him, and they enabled him to say some decidedly un-Mister-Rogersish things, even sitting around the dinner table. If it was something a little bit racy or risqué, he would say it in Lady Elaine’s voice. “There was mean-spirited Lady Elaine Fairchilde, and then the shy, quiet little boy Daniel, and the blustery, self-important King Friday. They were all little pieces of him.”

“In Fred’s hands, with love and gentleness, the puppets draw forth the underside of childhood. By ‘underside,’ I don’t mean macabre, warped, or seamy; they tap into the vein of fear, anger, and awkwardness, and unadulterated self-centeredness that lies beneath the sunny surface of childhood. “In direct contrast to most of the other puppets and fantasy creatures seen on children’s television, the inhabitants of the Neighborhood of Make-Believe are complex, complicated, and utterly honest beings housed in rather rudimentary bodies.”

children’s television advocate Peggy Charren has been quoted as saying that the first time she saw Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, she said to herself, “Oh, a singing psychologist for children!”

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

He summarizes his holiday message as he thinks about a gift for all of his television neighbors: “I suppose the thing I’d like most to be able to give you is hope. Hope that through your own doing and your own living with others, you’ll be able to find what best fits for you in this life. . . . I, for one, wish you good memories of this holiday. And I hope you’ll be able to look for all the different ways that people have of showing that they love you.”

Rogers fervently believed in the power of communities and families to help young children grow. He knew that young children learn less from books or movies or television than they do from caring adults. But he was not a crusader. As much as Fred Rogers worried about American trends—more geographic mobility, more emphasis on individual latitude, potentially disrupting traditional responsibility to community and family—he knew his job was to try to understand the effects of these trends on children, to understand the children themselves, and how to help them.

George Gerbner, dean emeritus of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, wrote in a 1996 essay about Fred Rogers and his work: “His dreams, his stories, offer ways to control the chaotic life of the streets and neighborhoods in which many children live. Children are starving for story, the kind that builds on hope, the kind that echoes for a lifetime. We need story in our lives, not dreams based on greed. Mister Rogers turns to the viewer and says quietly, ‘Believe you. It is your story that is important. It is your mind and heart that can make things possible—just because of who you are.’”

Rogers once replied to a young viewer’s letter with an explanation of how important managing one’s feelings can be: “You wondered if I ever get angry. “Of course I do; everybody gets angry sometimes. But, Alex, each person has his and her way of showing angry feelings. Usually, if I’m angry, I play loud and angry sounds on the piano. . . . I think that finding ways of showing our feelings—ways that don’t hurt ourselves or anybody else—is one of the most important things we can learn to do.”

“The operas were Fred at his whimsical best. The operas still focused on the beautiful themes that were pertinent to children, but Fred was allowed to be more expressive. For some reason or another, he said that PBS was not so fond of them, but I thought they were it. I loved them.”

Critic Joyce Millman noted on Salon.com in 1999: “These trippy productions about windstorms in Bubbleland and Wicked Knife and Fork Man’s tormenting of the happy Spoon people were a cross between the innocently disjointed imaginings of a preschooler and some avant-garde opus by John Adams.”

Whimsical, often hilarious, the week’s story lines all circle back to a basic theme: You can be a master of “the mad that you feel” by expressing your special talent, whatever it may be. Mister Rogers wants you to know, as always, that he likes you just the way you are—bass violin specialist or not.

Rogers’s ban on commercials sprang from the teaching of Margaret McFarland; the immorality of advertising to young children became one of his ironclad beliefs. He never allowed advertising on the Neighborhood that targeted kids,

Rogers’s aversion to turning children into consumers was unique in American television.

Rogers’s integrity barred him for the rest of his life from profiting from any enterprise that involved selling directly to children. According to Joanne Rogers, even though Fred was courted several times by national television networks, the talk ended as soon as the network executives “knew how he felt about selling cereal.”

Rogers’s refusal to abide by the rules of the marketplace, along with his gentle, slow approach to programming overall, left him open to criticism that he was coddling children and giving them unrealistic expectations of the harsh world they would someday enter. Don Feder, a nationally syndicated columnist for the Boston Herald, summed it up: “For over twenty-five years on his PBS series, Fred Rogers has been filling the innocent heads of children with this pap. . . . Under a self-esteem regime, America is becoming a nation of feel-good mediocrities.”15 But Rogers’s critics are guilty of ignoring great volumes of his work that emphasize personal responsibility and discipline on the parts of children and their parents and teachers. Fred Rogers always believed in a balance between cognitive and emotional content, and he tried to give appropriate weight to the need for discipline and focus. In fact, he produced an entire theme week of episodes just on the topic of discipline. In all his books, his speeches, his letters to children and parents, his scripts, even the lyrics to his songs, Fred repeatedly emphasized personal responsibility. The difference is that Rogers honed in on the cultivation of self-discipline rather than an emphasis on parents and teachers dropping the proverbial hammer. Fred Rogers felt very strongly—backed by the research of child-development mentors—that the most effective gift to young children is nurturing the capacity for self-discipline rather than ...

When asked about the misconceptions people may have had about Fred Rogers, Jim cites the mistaken impression that his father was in any way intellectually slow, because of his manner of speech as Mister Rogers: “I think he can come off sounding slow, almost simple, if you will, and yet he was one of the most quick-witted people I’ve ever known. People always say, ‘Boy, is he really like that when he comes home?’ “And for the most part, ‘Yeah, what you see is what you get, except that he’s not talking to a three-year-old anymore now; now he’s talking with us.’ He was very quick-witted, very funny, very down to earth.”

“Dad never talked too much about his accomplishments. He always wanted to hear about yours.”

“Being who you are was so important to him that the only thing that would really upset him was phoniness. As long as I was being genuine and honest, he respected that.”

Junod was discovering the same thing everyone did: Fred Rogers was Mister Rogers—the identical, authentic person in every setting. And he treated everyone the same, from the president of PBS to the doorman at his apartment building in New York to the little girl who stopped him on the street to get his autograph. All were met with kindness, hospitality, and respect. But Tom Junod also discovered that Fred Rogers was not quite as simple as the man on television who spoke so slowly to preschool kids: “Though his [Rogers’s] trust was absolute, his ability to draw a person in on his own terms was an incredibly powerful thing. “I look at Fred as a complicated person who chose simplicity, but at the same time, Fred was a powerful, powerful person. He was spiritually powerful, but he was also interpersonally powerful. It wasn’t as if Fred was continually deferring to you. It was not like that at all. Fred was very, very active in engaging you, but in the way he wanted to engage you.”

By the time Junod had finished a long series of interviews with Rogers and everyone around him, he was ready to write the most positive profile he’d ever written about anyone—one of the most positive Esquire ever published. At the end of their time together, Junod concluded in a later interview: “People, I think, spoke of Fred as a childlike person. I don’t think so. I think that Fred was very, very grown up in that he protected that childlike aspect of him. He was obviously not an unsophisticated man by any stretch of the imagination, but I think there was a vulnerable side of Fred . . . that was always off to the side. It informed and empowered what Fred did, and the so-called childlike side of Fred’s personality that he allowed you to see sort of protected that other side of his personality.”

“Fred, of course, was an amazing perfectionist who didn’t—I wouldn’t say drove those people, that’s the wrong word—but absolutely knew what he wanted when he wanted [it] and would not leave that day until he saw it. “Fred’s vision was always, always about what a child would grasp and understand, and I didn’t know the brilliance of that and the power of that until I had a child of my own.”

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood won four Emmy awards, and Rogers himself was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1997 Daytime Emmys, a scene that Junod describes movingly in his profile. After Fred Rogers went onstage to accept the award, he bowed and said into the microphone, “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are? . . . Ten seconds of silence.” Then, as Tom Junod recounted, “He lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, ‘I’ll watch the time,’ and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn’t kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked . . . and so they did. “One second, two seconds, three seconds . . . and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, ‘May God be with you’ to all his vanquished children.”

Fred Rogers, writer Tom Junod concludes “was about grace. Fred was about bringing grace to people’s lives, everybody that he met that I can tell. And more amazingly, and . . . through much greater difficulty, and against much higher odds, through the medium of television, a graceless medium if there ever was one—and Fred insisted that this could be a medium of grace. That’s revolutionary.”20 Though Tom Junod had interviewed famous people of all stripes, Fred Rogers was something special: “I’ve met a lot of interesting people. I’ve met great actors. I’ve met great writers. I’ve met great this, great that. But Fred’s the only person that I would call a great man.”

Junod observes that when you saw Fred Rogers on TV, you could tell that “he was looking to have a relationship with the people who watched it. I don’t think it was that he ever meant to be this abstracted figure on high. He was as human on TV as he was in his life, because I think that Fred understood that if there is to be grace, it begins right in this space, and I think what Fred was really brave about was that he decided that this space could exist from an electronic medium, that this space was holy space, and that that’s where it all happened. And that’s Fred, and he did it with children. He did that with everybody he met. Anybody who sort of ventured into this space was in for a ride.”

He told Charlie Rose of PBS in a penetrating 1994 interview: “The white spaces between words are more important than the text, because they give you time to think about what you’ve read.”23 All his career, he emphasized the importance of listening; he felt that silence is a gift, as is what he called “graceful receiving.” He worried about the lack of silence in a noisy world, and pondered how those in the field of television could encourage reflection. Today these ideas may seem quaint, yet they can also be seen as radical and more pressing than ever.

Rogers’s views were the culmination of years of study. Beside his bed in his Pittsburgh apartment was a tall revolving bookcase with several shelves of books he wanted handy to read and reread either in the evening or in the early morning, when he also read the Bible before starting his day. The titles reflected his broad interest in religion and spirituality: The Book of Common Worship of the Presbyterian Church; Zen Lessons: The Art of Leadership; The Way of Chuang Tzu; Dhammapada: The Sayings of the Buddha; The Ragamuffin Gospel; A Grammatical Analysis of the Greek New Testament; The Loving and Beloved Superego in Freud’s Structural Theory; The Diving Bell and the Butterfly; Three Scientists and Their Gods.

One of Rogers’s greatest friends, and one of his favorite thinkers, was the Catholic theologian and author Henri Nouwen. Rogers frequently visited Nouwen, a charismatic Dutch-born priest who wrote thirty-nine books about spirituality and had a large and loyal following internationally. The two enjoyed extended discussions about God and the human condition.

When I was a boy I used to think that strong meant having big muscles, great physical power; but the longer I live, the more I realize that real strength has much more to do with what is not seen. Real strength has to do with helping others. —FRED ROGERS

Fred Rogers articulated his philosophy in written form, as well as in broadcasts. He wrote, coauthored, or contributed to almost three dozen books published during his life, and a few that were released immediately after his death in 2003. Many were service books meant to help parents and children (The New Baby, 1996; Making Friends, 1996; Going to the Potty, 1997; Going to the Hospital, 1997; When a Pet Dies, 1998; Let’s Talk About It: Divorce, 1998). But some of the later books were the offerings of a sage: You Are Special: Words of Wisdom from America’s Most Beloved Neighbor, 1994; The World According to Mister Rogers: Important Things to Remember, 2003; and Many Ways to Say I Love You: Wisdom for Parents and Children from Mister Rogers, 2006. Many of these are still in print and available online through the Fred Rogers Company website and in major retail outlets. The Giving Box (2000), which taught children lessons of generosity and community, came packaged with a tin bank in which kids could save coins to donate. The book contains fables from around the world that convey a tradition of giving (e.g., the Hebrew tale “The Brothers,” about two siblings who secretly help each other without the other’s knowledge, and Aesop’s “The Lion and the Mouse”). In his writing, Rogers was homespun in his wisdom and quite elegant in his wording, sometimes simultaneously. The art that won him honors for homiletics at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary often shines through. Former Fami...

In many of Rogers’s commencement speeches, he talked about the way his quest for self-knowledge ultimately brought an exhilarating kind of freedom and focus: “I’ll never forget the sense of wholeness I felt when I finally realized what I was—songwriter, telecommunicator, student of human development, language buff—but that all those things and more could be used in the service of children’s healthy growing. The directions weren’t written in invisible ink on the back of my diploma. They came ever so slowly for me; and ever so firmly I trusted that they would emerge. All I can say is, it’s worth the struggle to discover who you really are.”

his central thesis: “One of the major goals of education must be to help students discover a greater awareness of their own unique selves, in order to increase their feelings of personal worth, responsibility, and freedom.”

“He never felt like an entertainer. He felt much more like an educator. And he was. He was very, very good with people, and was able to be very entertaining. . . . He had produced a lot of things that were entertaining. But that wasn’t who he was, essentially.”

“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.”

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.

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.”

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 Fred-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.