Canadian seeks to preserve Mister Rogers’ legacy
Children’s book highlights gentle TV icon
HE’S AN AMERICAN cultural icon beloved by children and remembered fondly by many adults. Canadian writer Aimee Reid is now preserving and passing on Mister Rogers’ poignant story in the pages of a picture book.
You Are My Friend: The Story of Mister Rogers and His Neighborhood is described by the publisher as “a work of fiction,” one that is not “endorsed by the Fred Rogers Company” (www. AbramsBooks.com). But the book’s pages include a careful biography and bibliography that will leave readers with no doubt as to the story’s intent or authenticity.
“As a teacher I admired the way that Fred understood children,” says Reid, based in Hamilton, Ont., in a telephone interview. “I was taken with the idea of the profound influence for good that one person can have by simply choosing to be present to others . . . . I thought about it as being like seeds in an apple. They go on to bear other trees and we can’t possibly know one person’s impact on the generations that follow.”
You Are My Friend begins in Rogers’ own childhood, and readers learn how the kind and loving words of influential adults lingered in his life, helping to shape both the man and the message of love for neighbour that would form the foundation of his long-running children’s television program Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
Fred McFeely Rogers – musician, puppeteer, television producer, host and Presbyterian minister – died in 2003, but a recent documentary and a new feature film starring Tom Hanks in the lead role have pushed his persona into the headlines once again.
Reid says while on a family vacation a couple of years ago she literally “woke up” with the idea of writing the children’s book that details Mister Rogers’ ministry via the airwaves, how he “helped people learn to like themselves . . . to be good neighbours.” She drafted the manuscript and stuck it in a drawer.
“Usually there is a long gestation between the idea and finding the book in my hands,” she says. But timing is everything, and Mister Rogers is now a hot topic. So when Reid finally pulled the manuscript out again, worked on it for a couple of months, then sent it off to her agent, “We were delighted to receive an offer very soon after that.”
With gentle illustrations by artist Matt Phelan, You Are My Friend will have even adult readers appreciative and teary-eyed for its tender truths, and for the fact that even works of fiction told in children’s picture books can preserve important legacies.