Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 374

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers," by Maxwell King.

To Fred Rogers, every child required special attention, because every child needed assurance that he or she was someone who mattered. This was far more than the informed opinion of an expert educator; it was a profound conviction, one that had motivated Rogers from his own childhood. When Mister Rogers sang, “Would you be mine . . . won’t you be my neighbor,” at the start of every episode of his show, he really meant it. 

Kindness and empathetic outreach had motivated Rogers since he was a sickly, chubby boy himself, whose classmates in industrial Latrobe, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh, called him “Fat Freddy” and chased him home from school. The lonely only child often spent school lunch breaks in his puppet theater in the attic of his parents’ mansion, entertaining a friendlier classmate who’d come home with him in a chauffeur-driven car. As Fred Rogers acknowledged later, the isolation of his childhood, though painful, was a key source of artistic invention that showed up in the sets, scripts, and songs on a program where he created an idealized version of his hometown.

A precise picture of what would become Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was lodged in Fred Rogers’s head, and the intensity of this picture was matched by his own rock-hard determination to get it done. Outwardly, Fred might seem to be underemployed and adrift, and his parents—particularly his father—were worried about him. Inwardly, he had never been more sure of his course.

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.

 

As television (and later the internet) infiltrated almost every home in America, it offered marketers and commercial enterprises an extraordinary opportunity to exploit young children, and Fred became the icon of protecting them. He did this through the example of his own program and its high standards, but he also did it by championing the importance of childhood itself. From his own struggles as a child, he had formed a powerful sensitivity to the feelings of young children. 

Later, as a public figure, Rogers’s shyness and modesty would take him to extremes to avoid adults who sought him out because of his notoriety (once, when he was receiving an award from a local Pittsburgh church, he had the seminary official who was escorting him take him down to the catacombs and passages under the old church to help him escape the crowd that awaited him at the front entrance). But whenever he encountered a child, in any circumstances, he felt it a sacred duty to respond and protect.

Tom Junod adds: “Fred’s email address was zzz143@aol.com. Zzz meant simply that he slept soundly at night, which he did, eight hours a night. And one hundred forty-three referred to two things.” First, “his weight. Every morning Fred weighed himself before he went to swim, and every morning he weighed one hundred forty-three pounds . . . that’s remarkable to the extent of near insanity. In another person, it would seem like obsessive-compulsive disorder, but in Fred it didn’t seem that way. 

“In Fred, it seemed this remarkable willed simplicity and consistency from which he decided to make his stand to the world. One-four-three was also reference to the . . . letters it took to say I love you. One, I. Four, love. Three, you. “That’s how Fred approached everything. His email address . . . seems simple, but it was full of all these interesting revelations.”

Fred Rogers got up every morning between 4:30 and 5:30 A.M. to read the Bible and prepare himself for the day before he went to the Pittsburgh Athletic Association to swim. But Rogers’s preparation was not so much professional as it was spiritual: He would study passages of interest from the Bible, and then he would visualize who he would be seeing that day, so that he would be prepared to be as caring and giving as he could be. Fred’s prayers in those early morning sessions were not for success or accomplishment, but rather for the goodness of heart to be the best person he could be in each of the encounters he would have that day.