Widow of ‘Mister Rogers’
Joanne Rogers, who as the gregarious wife of Fred Rogers, the influential creator and host of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” spread his message of kindness after his death in 2003, died Thursday at her home in Pittsburgh. She was 92.
Her death was announced by Fred Rogers Productions, which produces children’s programming for public television.
“So much a part of me was Fred,” Rogers said in a TEDx Talk in 2018. “One of the things he talked about was making goodness attractive, and I think that’s something that we can try to do, and it’s quite an assignment.”
Joanne Rogers was as comfortable being Fred Rogers’ wife as she was performing for nearly 40 years in a piano-playing duo with her college friend Jeannine Morrison. Fred Rogers, also a trained pianist, was not as adept as his wife.
Over 50 years of marriage, Joanne Rogers was a supportive force behind her husband, who, starting in 1968, welcomed children into his television neighborhood, where he gently sought to lift their selfesteem and taught them to cope with real-world situations like divorce, racism, death and war. The program ended production in 2001.
Joanne Rogers appeared a few times on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” but she became a much more public presence over the last three years. She vigorously promoted “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” (2018), Morgan Neville’s documentary about her husband, and “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” (2019), a feature film with Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers and Maryann Plunkett as Joanne Rogers.
She said that her husband would have been thrilled that Hanks portrayed him. “He was a huge Tom Hanks fan,” she told ABC’s “Nightline.” “He saw ‘Forrest Gump’ about 40 times. He said he saw something different every time.”
In an interview in 2019 with The Christian Post, an online news publication, she was asked if she and her husband had fought.
Not really, she said, but “sometimes I’d come in and I would have been going at it with somebody, like a garage mechanic, who didn’t have much respect for a woman, and I’d say, ‘Uggggh.’ And he’d say,
‘You never know what was going on in his life earlier.’ I wanted him to be mad, like me, but that was good. He calmed me down.”
Tom Junod, whose 1998 Esquire article about his friendship with Fred Rogers was adapted into “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” said in an interview that Joanne Rogers had long spread her husband’s simple, decent gospel “person by person,” and that “her presence in my life made me never forget Fred.”
Junod, who spoke often to Joanne Rogers, added:
“Fred was not a solemn man. But he was like a lot of other great men — you could see the weight of what he did and stood for on his shoulders, whereas she seemed to shrug that weight off.”
Sara Joanne Byrd was born in Jacksonville, on March 9, 1928, 11 days before her future husband. Her father, Wyatt Adolphus Byrd, was a traveling coffee salesman who later worked for the Post Office. Her mother, Ebra (Edwards) Byrd, was a homemaker who shared with her daughter her love of music; she played ragtime on the piano by ear. Joanne began taking piano lessons at age 5.
Joanne Rogers received a scholarship to Rollins College in Winter Park, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in piano performance. It was there that she met Fred Rogers, a transfer from Dartmouth College.
“I really liked him a lot,” she was quoted as saying in Maxwell King’s book “The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers” (2018). “But we didn’t date singly very much, except for dances. I would always invite him to the sorority dances the two years I was there with him.”
A year ahead of Fred Rogers, she studied music at Florida State, earning a master’s degree.
She is survived by her sons, James and John, and three grandsons.