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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Maxwell King
Read between
July 18 - July 24, 2023
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.
“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.”
“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.”
Wynton Marsalis observes: “Fred Rogers was one of a kind—an American original, like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Johnny Cash. There was no one like him. “Every original and innovator doesn’t have to have psychedelic hair. There’s a cliché version of who’s an original. It’s always somebody making a lot of noise, and being disruptive of some status quo. His originality spoke for itself. He was so creative. He spoke very clearly, and he showed a lot of respect [for his audience]. And he also integrated a lot of material.” Marsalis adds: “Fred Rogers tackled difficult issues, like
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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.
“You don’t set out to be rich and famous; you set out to be helpful.”
When he set up a company in 1971 to produce Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, he established it as a nonprofit. Eventually tax attorneys had to pressure the company to pay Rogers a higher salary; his compensation had been set at a level too low to be credible under the tax laws.
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
“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.”6
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
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.”
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.
When Rogers asked Orr what was the most important word in his theology, Orr replied that the word forgiveness was paramount because it alone could defeat the Devil. “One little word shall fell him,” Bill Orr told his student, who adopted the idea of forgiveness as the essence of human kindness.
“You know how, when you find somebody who you know is in touch with the truth . . . you want to be in the presence of that person.”
In his occasional sermons, Fred Rogers would marvel at how genuine Jesus’s childhood was: “And like so many other teenagers absorbed in their own pressing, growing needs, Jesus got scolded and went home with his parents.
“I wonder at what age is it that Fred no longer likes you just the way you are?”
Jim Rogers recalls his father’s unusual enthusiasm for a new show that he previewed one night for the family: “I can remember being probably ten or eleven, and Dad came home from work one day with a videotape. He said, ‘I have something you have to watch.’”40 WQED was considering offering it, and program director Sam Silberman had asked for Fred Rogers’s input for a show featuring six guys from England—the first four or five episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
When interviewed by a New York Times reporter who asked what it was like to be Fred Rogers’s son, John replied: “Well, it’s hard to make a comparison, because he’s the only father I have.”
In the end, the hotshot “bad-boy” journalist concluded that Rogers had agreed to the interview for Fred Rogers’s own reasons: “Once I sort of got in his sights, I think that he was looking to minister to me.”
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
no one did more to convince a mass audience in America of the value of early education.
