The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers

by Maxwell King

unique television star with a real spiritual life. 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 seem radical and more pressing than ever. Mister Rogers recognized the way

“I still feel that way. I’m not ready. But Fred was. Fred was ready for him to come.”

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

And while we were on the go and busy a lot of the time, there’s a lot of learning to do about getting along, thinking of the other person and what he might like to be doing. For the first few years, it’s very difficult just to learn to live together.”17

It can be said that Fred Rogers lived out the conundrum of modern life: embracing technology and using it in imaginative ways to benefit children, while rejecting the dehumanizing aspects of complex technological advancement.

That might be one of the best things to remember: that the best things of life are way offstage.”38

Years later, talking with Fred Rogers in her office at the University of Pittsburgh, McFarland marveled at how critically important each parent can be to a child. Each parent, she explained, sounds different, feels different, even smells different to the child, who needs all the distinct qualities of the mother and the father to feel whole.

Mister Rogers took his viewers on this little journey to show that even in the face of death, things move ahead. That’s the essential message as he sits by the fish grave.

Rogers never told grieving children that everything will be all right: no such simplistic reassurances. Instead he shared his feelings about death and loss, and the extraordinary truth, reaffirmed repeatedly throughout the program, that life does go on.

The message of the song is that the same people who get sad also, later, get glad. Life goes on.

Silence—Fred’s willingness, as a producer and as a person, to embrace quiet, inactivity, and empty space—and his calm demeanor were completely unexpected in television in the 1970s. They were qualities that captivated children and their parents.

The conversations in poor families tended to be more perfunctory—“don’t do that, come here, put on your coat”—while in middle-class families they were richer, more discursive, and exploratory, employing a dramatically larger number of words. The result: The poor children in the study, published in 1995, had little more than a quarter of the vocabulary of the middle-class kids by the time they got to public school, and they arrived at kindergarten far behind and far less ready to learn. Most significantly, many of these kids never caught up: It was game over by kindergarten, just because they hadn’t evolved rich and modulated language skills.14

All I can say is, it’s worth the struggle to discover who you really are.”