What Fred Rogers taught us
Visit “The Good Neighbor.” Book review,
It’s a beautiful day to read about everyone’s favorite neighbor.
A new biography, “The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers” by Maxwell King (Abrams Press, 363 pp., ★★★☆), chronicles the childhood, family, career and legacy of the man who revolutionized children’s television with messages of kindness, patience and inclusion on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”
Blending stories about Rogers that you might be familiar with (perhaps you saw the documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”) with lesserknown facts, archival photos and new interviews, “The Good Neighbor” confirms what we already knew about Mr. Rogers: The world needs more people like him.
We’ve compiled the five biggest things we learn from “The Good Neighbor”:
1 Fred Rogers’ parents used their wealth to help the community.
Rogers’ parents – his father was a successful businessman in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and his mother was the daughter of a wealthy industrial family in Pittsburgh – were more than financially stable. Growing up, that often made Fred uncomfortable – as an adult, Rogers shied away from many of the luxuries he grew up with in favor of more modest living. His tax attorneys even had to coerce his company to pay him a higher salary.
But his parents also used their money to take care of friends, employees and neighbors. Fred’s mother, Nancy Rogers, apparently bought about 1,500 Christmas presents, “sometimes more,” every year for members of the community.
She also was known to help a large number of poorer families in Latrobe.
“Eventually the school nurse at Latrobe Elementary School would just order shoes, coats, eyeglasses, and even furniture and have the bills sent directly to Nancy Rogers,” King writes.
“Good neighbor,” indeed.
2 Before an “Oprah” appearance, he said he didn’t want children in the audience.
As a guest on “The Oprah Winfrey Show” in 1985, Rogers, who died in 2003, knew that if children were present, his de- meanor would change: Instead of articulating his work to a fellow adult, he would be concerned with making one-onone connections with the kids in the audience.
When he arrived on set, families made up a majority of the audience. Rogers was right: During a question-and-answer segment, he all but forgot he was taping a live talk show segment and instead broke out into small conversations with his young fans, one of whom ran onstage to hug him.
3 He often saw a psychiatrist to deal with work stress.
Francis Chapman, then a top executive in charge of children’s programming at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. recalled the toll Rogers’ hard work took on him.
“He underwent psychoanalysis, but I don’t remember what he learned from the psychoanalysis,” Chapman said.
“I think he told me once that his analyst had found him so interesting that he took him on for free – which wasn’t necessary for Fred, but it was nice.”
4 “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” could have featured more music.
Though the show is known for its famous theme song (”It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood ... ”), some of the recurring actors, such as Joe Negri (Handyman Negri to “Neighborhood” fans), hoped to add even more music to the lineup.
Negri thought it was a matter of budgeting – if he had worked on the show’s music in addition to acting, “they would have had to pay me two salaries.”
5 Rogers had a knack for anticipating the kinds of questions children would ask.
As he was taping an eye exam segment with Dr. Bernard Mallinger to teach children about medical care, Rogers asked an intriguing question: “Can you see what I’m thinking?”
From an adult’s perspective, it’s obvious that peering into a patient’s eyes – even with ophthalmologist tools – wouldn’t allow any sort of insight into one’s inner thoughts. But to a child, as Mr. Rogers was an expert at realizing, it might.
“It would have never, absolutely, never, entered my mind,” Mallinger said. “But he realized what children thought about. And of course, I explained that I can only see the inside of the eye, and cannot see any of his thoughts ... or fears, or concerns.”