Introduction:  The Real Mister Rogers

As I was preparing to go to Pittsburgh to meet Fred Rogers for the first time, I had Uncle Al on my mind. Uncle Al wasn.t   my real uncle; along with his cape-donning wife, Captain Windy, he was an accordion-playing local legend in my hometown with his own children.s show. I loved Uncle Al as a child and even appeared on his program with one of my five sisters. But then one day I heard from my friends in the circle (our unadorned term for cul-de-sac) that Uncle Al had chased from his porch some children who stopped by his home for treats on Halloween.

Now, as an adult, I was getting ready to meet the uncle of all uncles, Mister Rogers himself. My childhood psyche quickened, dislodging the memory.and loss of innocence.had occurred when I first discovered that people aren.t always what they appear.

My childhood memories of Mister Rogers were less acute than those of my local icons. Mister Rogers. Neighborhood began to air nationally in 1968, and by then I was moving out of its two- to five-year-old demographic. More vivid than its public television début were the Mister Rogers parodies that emerged during my teenage years: spoofs by Johnny Carson, Harvey Korman, and, of course, Eddie Murphy with his now infamous Mister Robinson.s Neighborhood.

For many years I knew only the farcical Mister Rogers, the usually unflattering caricatures that made him famous for saying things like, .Can you say television set? I knew you could.. But when my two-year-old son discovered television, I was reintroduced to the real Mister Rogers, he of blue boat-shoes and cardigan-sweater fame. Making up for the mindless hours of Barney I had to endure were the thoughtful daily visits with Mister Rogers, the only person who could cause my whirlwind of a toddler to sit quietly for a half-hour. (My son affectionately referred to him only as .Rogers..) I.ve heard the same testimony from other parents who were amazed at the calming influence Mister Rogers had on their children. They said he was good for thirty minutes of babysitting so they could take a bath or enjoy a cup of coffee or talk on the phone. For some reason it never occurred to me to leave my son alone in front of the television when Mister Rogers was on. As the mother of a toddler and a newborn, I needed a calming influence myself. Underlying the apparent simplicity of the program.the kind that was fodder for mockery.I suddenly saw a depth I had never noticed before. Mister Rogers was more philosopher than babysitter. And never once did I hear him utter the phrase, .Can you say [insert inane word here]? I knew that you could..

As a mother with a graduate degree in psychology, I also realized that Fred Rogers had a connection with children that went beyond his being kind and gentle. He had studied the cognitive and emotional development of children and had blended his insights into an amalgam of wonder: what they could see with their eyes, what they could imagine with their mind.s eyes, and what they could feel with their hearts. Philosopher, psychologist, and sometimes confessor. that was the real Mister Rogers.

My reintroduction to Mister Rogers. Neighborhood coincided with my eight-year tenure in Christian television. I had worked on a summer children.s program for a Christian television network, and as a follow-up to that project some colleagues and I decided to do additional programming geared toward children. I suggested the idea of interviewing Fred Rogers, as did, coincidentally, another colleague. Our thought was, Let.s go to Mister Rogers. Neighborhood and find out if he is the same person in real life as he is on television. We also wanted to know how his faith undergirded his life.s work with children. Boarding the plane to Pittsburgh, I was crossing my fingers that Mister Rogers wasn.t an Uncle Al in disguise, chasing kids from a prefab porch in his Neighborhood of Make-Believe. I soon learned that I wasn.t the only one nervous about this meeting. Fred Rogers was nervous too.

LUNCH-HOUR SEMINARY
I.d like to be able to say it was my imposing stature or at least my journalistic prowess that caused him trepidation, but neither was the case. My five-foot frame isn.t exactly intimidating, and my usual role at the network was as a writer behind the scenes, not as a journalist on the front lines. It was the subject matter that mattered: Fred Rogers had never talked about his faith on television before. He had recently given his first interview to a Christian parenting magazine about his spiritual beliefs, but this was his medium.television.

Television was not the young Fred Rogers. first calling. His plan.and the expectation of his parents.was that he would attend seminary after he graduated with an undergraduate degree in music composition from Rollins College. But during spring break of his senior year, he received a sign from the heavens.or more specifically, the airwaves: Fred Rogers saw television for the first time. It wasn.t the potential of the fledgling medium that struck him; it was its abuse. .I got into television,. he told me during our first meeting, .because I saw people throwing pies at each other.s faces, and that to me was such demeaning behavior. And if there.s anything that bothers me, it.s one person demeaning another. That really makes me mad!. So mad that he opted out of seminary to start a career in television.

In 1951 he was hired as assistant producer, and later floor director, for NBC.s network music programs in New York, including the The Kate Smith Hour. Two years later, he was invited to Pittsburgh to co produce The Children.s Corner. On The Children.s Corner, he stayed behind the scenes as a musician and puppeteer, reveling in unscripted banter with his co producer and the show.s host, Josie Carey.

Mindful of the need for an ever-deepening interior life.a contention that became a hallmark of his later shows.Fred hurried out of the studio each day to take up his seminary studies during his lunch break. As unorthodox as seminary-on-your-lunch-hour was, Fred also decided, when it came time to take a required advanced-counseling class that he wanted to focus on children instead of adults. He wanted to .deepen. what he could bring to television. He worked under the supervision of noted child psychologist Dr. Margaret McFarland at the Graduate School of Child Development at the University of Pittsburgh. (Dr. McFarland, who founded the Arsenal Family and Children.s Center with Dr. Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson, consulted with Fred for nearly twenty-five years on Mister Rogers. Neighborhood until her death in 1988. They were colleagues as well as revered friends.) Eight years. worth of lunch hours later, he was ordained by the United Presbyterian Church as an evangelist with a unique charge to serve children and families through the mass media.

Fulfilling a call to evangelism on a medium such as public television, which often steers clear of religious issues, may have caused some dissonance for both Fred and his ordaining body. At least one fellow student remembers the heated debate over Fred.s ordination as a minister sans a church. Perhaps in an attempt to reconcile the schism, the ordaining body considered using Fred.s talents to develop a children.s program as an outreach for the denomination. Would Mister Rogers, yet to slip into sneakers and sweaters, be subsumed by Reverend Rogers?

The answer came, not through the airwaves this time, but through the telephone wires. First, he received a call from denominational officials to report the unhappy news that money was not available for the program they were discussing. The very next day he received a second call, from Fred Rainsberry, the head of children.s programming for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. The closed-doorturned- open-window was Dr. Rainsberry.s invitation to Fred to produce a children.s program.fifteen minutes in length.to air daily throughout all of Canada. Fred.s assumption, upon accepting the propitious call to Canada, was that he would continue doing what he had been doing on The Children.s Corner: producing, making music, and manipulating and speaking for the puppets. But Dr. Rainsberry had other plans. No longer would Fred be hidden behind the scenes, shadowed in a puppeteer.s black shirt. No, Dr. Rainsberry had seen Fred interact with children, real children, and he knew Fred had a special gift. If Fred could somehow translate that into television.to talk to children as if they were there with him.the result would be more of a visit than a show.

By being called Mister Rogers, the program would reflect the nature of that relationship, like the one a child might have with a trusted neighbor. And so Mister Rogers was born in that Canadian studio, and Fred Rogers had finally arrived.by a rather circuitous path.at his destined pulpit.

He once told a fellow minister about his initial foray into commercial television, .I still wasn.t sure I was being led.. But being able to use his gifts to nurture children, through educational television, was all the assurance he needed. There was no scarcity.even back then.of .demeaning. television, but Fred Rogers had refused to stoop to that level, and would, instead, rise to a child.s.

PREACHING WITHOUT WORDS
During the report of Fred.s death on the Nightly News program on NBC, the network where Fred got his start in television, reporter Bob Faw said, .The real Mister Rogers never preached, [never] even mentioned God [on his show].. And then Faw added, .He never had to.. Indeed, Fred Rogers and his gentle care of children seemed to embody the words credited to Saint Francis of Assisi: .Preach the gospel at all times; if necessary, use words.. But when I contacted Fred in 1994 with the request for a faith-based interview, that.s exactly what I was asking him to do: use words. This may have caused concern for him on several levels; he was, after all, media-savvy enough to know reporters often come with agendas, and if he was going to .use words. about his faith for the first time on television, he didn.t want them fractured into sound bites and wrapped in the neat little package that was more my view of Christianity than his. Nor did he want children who might watch the interview to feel excluded if he used words or terminology they might not have been exposed to because they weren.t being raised in families of faith. He didn.t say yes right away; he mulled over the decision for weeks and consulted others.within his staff and outside of it.about what he should do. During the time he was thinking over my request, I opened my Virginia Beach newspaper one afternoon to find an op-ed piece by then. Boston Herald columnist Don Feder. It was titled, .It.s a Psychobabble Day in the Neighborhood.. In the column, Feder portrayed Mister Rogers as a man .with a Stepford Wives grin on his face, conversing with puppets.. Of Fred Rogers. book, You Are Special, published in 1994 when Feder was writing the column, he said, .For over 25 years on his PBS series, Fred Rogers has been filling the innocent heads of children with this pap. Now he.s instructing adults from the lofty heights of his tower of psychobabble..

The pith of his argument was that Fred Rogers advocated a philosophy of self-esteem that makes children feel good about themselves no matter how rotten their behavior or how dull their intellects. .If you want to be my neighbor, Fred,. Feder concluded the piece, .you.ll have to start teaching virtue and stop singing siren songs about .good people who do naughty things... (The song he refers to is Fred.s .Sometimes People Are Good,. written to help children understand that they are capable of both good and bad behavior, as well as conflicting emotions and moods.) That evening, while my children.s eyes were heavy with sleep, having had their fill of pap for the day, I wrote a letter to Don Feder. .After reading your column,. I began, .the conclusion I came to was this: right argument, wrong target. I agree that the cult of self-esteem has gone too far. What I disagree with is that Mister Rogers is a proponent.. I continued: .Mister Rogers, I would venture to guess, would disagree with the statement you attributed to him that .judgmentalism will cripple a child.s self-esteem.. Setting limits and exercising virtuous behavior are two mainstays of his philosophy. And with degrees in music, theology, and psychology, I doubt if he would agree that self-esteem should take the place of academics.. After offering proofs of Fred Rogers. position culled from things I had read about him, I concluded my letter, .Mister Rogers has stated that the guiding philosophy of his life is one he gleaned from a seminary professor: You can be an accuser or an advocate. . . . Unfortunately, Mr. Feder, your mean-spirited statements and fallacious conclusions have led you to be an accuser. Shame on you for attacking one of the few people who actually tries to do something positive for my kids..

Don Feder never responded to my letter; it.s possible he never even read it. But Fred Rogers did. I sent a copy of both the column and my response to David Newell, Fred.s public relations director, who happened to play Mr.McFeely on the program. I didn.t find out until I arrived for the interview that this was the deciding factor, the thing that convinced Fred and the staff that I really cared about Mister Rogers. I was a mother defending those trying to help my two children to grow, not just a reporter seeking an interview. .How God uses things!. I scribbled in my journal that night as I was flying home from the interview.

A GRACE-FILLED VISIT
Once Fred Rogers realized there was no need to fear me, I was happily given the same assurance regarding him. I had the identical reaction to meeting him in real life as did author James Kaplan, who adroitly wrote for TV Guide that Fred Rogers is .more Mister Rogers than Mister Rogers.. There would be no chasing of children from porches on Halloween (although to be fair, Uncle Al.s antics may have been the stuff of urban legend). I even found out later, thanks to his real-life neighbor, Time magazine reporter Jessica Reaves, that not only did Fred Rogers not chase children from his porch on All Hallows. Eve, but that his wife, Joanne, gave out much-coveted, full-sized candy bars.

One of the first things Fred asked us (a fellow producer, the crew, and me) upon our arrival in his Neighborhood was what tie we wanted him to wear. He had three for us to choose from. One he called his .clergy tie,. since it was gift from a fellow minister. .I like to wear this on the program to give a subliminal message,. he whispered to us and then smiled. He also showed us the reel of film that contained his first sermon. He said he had not seen the reel in years and had just found it that morning. .Isn.t that funny?. he said. .I found it today, the day you.re here..

I showed him a photo of my children and told him that my son, Jonathan, had expressed his first real sadness the week before, after watching the Mister Rogers. Neighborhood episode about expressing sad feelings. (Jonathan had said he was .very sad. because I had put him in a timeout, a detail I edited out of the story when repeating it to Fred.) Fred.s eyes grew big at how quickly Jonathan had assimilated that information. .It will serve him well all his life,. he said.

The interview went very well, with no cajoling on my part and no holding back on his. His faith, as I had expected, flowed naturally from our conversation. When we left, Hedda Sharapan, his faithful producer who at the time of our visit had already worked with Fred for more than twenty-five years, had commented that many requests are made for interviews, but only a few are granted. What made the difference with us, she said, is that we came in love. Once settled back in Virginia, I wrote Fred a note of thanks, telling him about what had transpired when I came home: .I arrived home at 2 a.m. Thursday morning [due to a flight delay],. I wrote in my letter, .and tiptoed in to kiss Jonathan and Emily goodnight. A few hours later, Jonathan, my three-year-old, sneaked into our bedroom. He stood by my bed a few minutes until I woke up. I whispered, .Mommy.s home.. He was thoughtful for a moment and then said, .Mommy, is Rogers coming to live
with us?. ..No, honey,. I said, .but that would be nice, wouldn.t it?.. Fred loved the story; he quickly wrote back: .Your story about Jonathan.s asking if I was going to come and live with you all is so wonderfully childlike. How blessed he and Emily are to have you for their Mom! Thank you for your grace-filled visit to our .neighborhood.. Thank you for your ministry in this life. Jeff must be very proud of his talented and sensitive wife..

Fred Rogers was always saying things like that to the people around him: .How blessed your wife is to have you for a husband!. .How blessed your colleagues are to have you to work with!. .How blessed your children are!. (He once even told me that a magazine I was working for at the time was .blessed. and .lucky. to have me on staff.) But no matter how often you heard him say it to others, you never doubted his sincerity when he said it to you.

That was my first correspondence with Fred Rogers, after the big interview that almost wasn.t. (Remarkably, when the interview aired, David Newell told me that it was the closest anyone had come to revealing the real Fred Rogers.) The letter marked the beginning of our personal relationship that continued until his untimely death from stomach cancer, a month before his seventy-fifth birthday, in 2003. (I received my last letter from him three weeks before he died.)

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian imprisoned and executed for his opposition to Hitler, wrote in one of his letters from prison, .One writes some things more freely and more vividly in a letter . . . and often I have better thoughts in a conversation by correspondence than by myself.. That sums up my relationship with Fred Rogers, which flourished through the letters we wrote over the next eight years. We talked by phone as well, and I would visit the Neighborhood again, but the core of our relationship, our .better thoughts,. developed through our correspondence.

SPIRITUAL TOAST STICKS
One of the things I enjoyed most about my friendship with Fred Rogers was the stories he told me from his childhood. It was Dr. McFarland, Fred.s mentor in child development from his graduate studies, who noted that Fred was more connected to his childhood than anyone else she knew, that he hadn.t .shed. the vestiges of childhood as most of us have. He was deeply in touch with the joys . and the pathos . of his younger years.

One of those stories, which he related to me the summer before he died, reflects his keen sense of both. For Fred, perhaps the earliest prototype of a true .neighbor. took the form of an elderly woman who lived in his hometown of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. She was his grandmother.s age, and everyone called her Mama Bell. Many times five-year-old Freddy (as he was called) would amble up her back-porch steps looking for a snack. He would arrive strategically on her back doorstep because it led straight to her kitchen, where she often made him his favorite treat.toast sticks. .Come for toast sticks, Freddy?. she would ask. One day Mama Bell asked Freddy if he would like to make the toast sticks on his own. Imagine his delight at being able to master what seemed like a grown-up task, as well as his pride at being entrusted with Mama Bell.s specialty. He was prompted to put the bread in the toaster, allowed to slowly butter the toasted slice, and then top it off with a dollop of jam. Mama Bell even let him carefully cut the toast into four long sticks.

Very soon after that encounter, Mama Bell got sick and died. Many decades later, Fred wondered if somehow Mama Bell had known she was reaching toward heaven and wanted Freddy to have this experience as a comfort to him, as a reminder of their unique friendship. Even though she was gone, he could now make toast sticks on his own, and he would always think of Mama Bell as he made them. Toast sticks may seem like a simple legacy, but they had a profound effect upon a young boy.

This story was meaningful to me when I first heard it, but it took on special significance in the months following Fred.s death. (I wasn.t even aware that he had been sick; his cancer came on suddenly and took his life in a matter of weeks. But I had wondered if something was wrong. His last letter to me, the one that arrived three weeks before he died, was typed. He had never typed his letters to me before; they were always handwritten. I suspected that for some reason his staff had to be involved in completing that last letter. But at the close of it, in his own hand, he had written, .Grace and Peace and Love to you all. Fred..)

I thought about Fred and Mama Bell again when I returned home from his memorial service in Pittsburgh. Reflecting on our relationship, I realized that Fred had entrusted me with something very similar to the gift Mama Bell had entrusted to him; he had left me something while he was reaching toward heaven that I wasn.t even aware of (although I had a sense that he was). For years.through our letters, our conversations, and our prayers for one another.Fred had left me with spiritual .toast sticks,. a legacy that would comfort me long after he was gone, providing sustenance of a different kind. Now that I had them, I could enjoy them on my own, even when he was no longer here.

But Fred knew better than that. Sustenance is to be shared. During my second visit to the Neighborhood, Fred was taping a program on sharing. He held a fig bar up to the camera and said, .I wish I could break this in two and share it with you.. Later, during our interview, he said to me, .You know, we were just taping this afternoon about sharing. And as a matter of fact I was thinking of you, Amy, as I broke that fig bar in two. And as I said, .I wish I could pass this through the television set,. it just dawned on me.that was very much like the Eucharist, how [food] could be broken and offered to nourish others. And yet there was no way I could put that food through the television set, so I said there are other ways of sharing.. Other ways of sharing. Other ways of nourishing.

So with that in mind, I began to gather up the spiritual sticks Fred Rogers had bequeathed to me.