Book Musing: "The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers" by Maxwell King

 

I’ve decided to try something a little different with my book reviews on this blog. My goal is to develop more of an essay based on reading a book that offers more information and side references. I’m thinking of it as a combination monthly book report and ramblings or musings inspired by the book. I hope you’ll find it interesting.

Book Musing

The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers 

by Maxwell King

Over the winter holidays, I watched the Tom Hanks movie on Mr. Rogers, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. I was expecting a straight forward docudrama of his life, but the movie begins with a journalist who is having a rough time in his own life and is assigned to interview Mr. Rogers for a very short piece. In his insightful way, Rogers asks him questions that he hadn’t even thought about asking himself. We learn about Fred Rogers through the eyes of the journalist.

That movie was inspired by Tom Junod, and an article he wrote for Esquire magazine back in 1998, which you can find online. He also wrote an article on Mr. Rogers for The Atlantic in December of 2019 that I found beautiful and even more relevant. (You don’t have to be a member to read it, they allow a few views each month from non-subscribers.)

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/12/what-would-mister-rogers-do/600772/

In it, Junod laments what he sees as the failure of our world to embrace and actually live out what Mr. Rogers tried to teach people throughout his life.

“Fred Rogers never—ever—let the urgency of work or life impede his focus on what he saw as basic human values: integrity, respect, responsibility, fairness and compassion, and of course his signature value, kindness.” (The Good Neighbor)

I well understand Junod's critique of our society. Perhaps we have failed as a collective, but if one person carries the torch, then it’s not really lost. You can judge people harshly as a group, but the truth is that we all fail in big and small ways at least some of the time. The point isn’t our failure, it’s that we keep striving — trying to be better, to be kinder, to live our convictions. Of course, that means figuring out what they are. That’s where people like Mr. Rogers, and his legacy, come in.

 “You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.” – Fred Rogers

The Good Neighbor demonstrates that Fred Rogers knew what he believed at his core and he used those guiding principles to create something of lasting value and significance. One of his core convictions was being kind, and it led him to be open to people and ideas that others often weren’t at that time. (And sometimes still aren’t today.)

In fact, while he worked on a show called The Children’s Corner, he enrolled in Pittsburgh Theological Seminary and, even though he became a Presbyterian minister, he never stopped learning about and from many different religions and types of  spirituality.

There have been quite a few books written about Fred Rogers, some with particular emphasis on some aspect of who he was or his work. This book offers a multitude of stories to give the reader a well-rounded view of what Rogers was like – his deep ethical guiding beliefs, his playful sense of humor, and even his fallibility.

This is a slow read, just as Mr. Rogers slowed down when he talked to his audience. People have often said that watching Mr. Rogers gives them a warm feeling, and The Good Neighbor did the same for me. It is inspirational.

I grew up in front of the TV— Sesame Street, Romper Room, Captain Kangaroo, but I don’t have specific memories of the shows. My appreciation of Mr. Rogers is more a feeling, and now it’s more inspired by my appreciation of his work as a fellow educator.

Most of us know Mr. Rogers from his successful show on PBS during the 70s and 80s, or maybe even only from clips, or mostly from the recent movie. But I learned in The Good Neighbor that there were actually several programs that had Fred Rogers as the guiding force over the years — before, during, and after that famous show.

Rogers had a program on WQED outside Pittsburgh called The Children’s Corner. He did the music and puppets while Josie Carey was the on air personality. Then he went to CBC in Canada and they created Misteroger’s Neighborhood. Here he was actually on the screen too.

During Misterogers’ Neighborhood, the managers of the television station set up a meet-and-greet. They expected 500, but got 5,000 kids. This was the incredible appeal of Fred Rogers.

Finally, he came home to Pittsburgh and back to WQED to create Mister Roger’s Neighborhood - half an hour a day, five days a week, funded by Sears, it debuted February 19, 1968. There were 180 episodes just in season one alone.

“While communication technology proliferated, becoming ever faster and more complex, Fred Rogers used it in ways that were slow, thoughtful, and nuanced.” (The Good Neighbor)

One of the things that I learned from this book was that Fred Rogers was a musician and responsible for most of the songs from the show, plus little operas that he created. He worked with a live band that provided all the musical accompaniment that you hear on the show. In fact, when he was angry or frustrated, he would go over to the piano on the set to let out his feelings.

This book takes us from Rogers’ childhood in Latrobe, Pennsylvania as a chubby and asthmatic child, through his schooling years, his marriage, his various career choices, through his final illness, and even into his legacy.

Part of the book is family history – who Fred was born to and how he was a product of that time and place. (I fell down a little rabbit hole here when it mentioned that part of Fred’s family were Scots-Irish and came from Northern Ireland. My own great X 5 grandmother came from Ennis Killen. I found myself wondering if they came from similar people. I went into our library’s Heritage Quest database and tracked down the Federal census for 1840 to 1880. Though I didn’t go so far as to look for connections between the two families, I did learn more about my own family.)

The section on how Fred’s family were captains of industry in Latrobe and felt a strong responsibility to care for the families that worked for them reminded me very much of the stories I grew up with of George F. Johnson and the Endicott Johnson shoe factory where my grandparents worked in Johnson City, New York. Then I turned the page and found the author discussing that very thing, referring to George F. Johnson by name.

A formative aspect of Fred’s life was how he was bullied as a child, for his weight, his asthma, and his parents’ wealth. He was told to act like he didn’t care, but that’s hard to do when you do care.

“As he grew older, Rogers struggled to work out a set of responses to the challenges of life that could turn his caring, his belief in love, and his great sensitivity into a life course based not on fragility, but on a quiet strength. He found a way to be true to himself that enabled him to build a uniquely thoughtful set of defenses that relied on empathy and sympathy. Ultimately, he developed a powerful authenticity….” (The Good Neighbor)

Maxfield is careful to give us all the relevant details to understand the time and place that Rogers grew up in, the family dynamics, and later the relationships that were instrumental in giving Rogers the opportunities that led to his success in television.

The behind the scenes information on the early show is fascinating, such as how the puppet Daniel Tiger was named for Dorothy Daniel, a manager on the early show, in part because she actually gave Fred the tiger puppet that he used.

The Good Neighbor touches on all the facets of Rogers’ life - the music, the puppets, the shows, the spirituality, his marriage and his children, his beliefs, and his strict way of creating something that would be accessible to kids and help them. The many examples of letters sent to Mr. Rogers, and his responses, are illuminating.

There are many, many little stories in the book that demonstrate who he was. How he fell over laughing when one of the stage hands appeared naked in a closet during filming, or how he would express himself in the voice of one of his puppet characters if he wasn’t quite comfortable saying something. Or how he would use those puppets to talk to people in a way that made them more comfortable.

This book must have been a monumental undertaking to write, and something of a mission — so many details, right down to what he had on his bookshelf in his Pittsburgh apartment. Many people are thanked in the notes at the end for all they contributed to this compendium of Fred Roger’s life, and the footnotes go on for pages.

In 1969, Fred Rogers testified before the Senate Subcommittee on Communications. President Johnson had proposed 20 million for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting but Nixon wanted to cut funding because of the Vietnam war. Fred Rogers was just 41 years old at the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fKy7ljRr0AA – Fred Rogers’ testimony

On the recommendation of a couple friends, I watched the testimony, it’s only six or seven minutes long. It was good, interesting, but it wasn’t until I read the part of the book about it that I really understood it – the tone of the room, the different people and their relevance, the significance of how Rogers handled it and the outcome.

Rogers had a real impact on more than one generation of people and from many walks of life. I was surprised and pleased to learn that several of the programs I have enjoyed with my own daughter — Peg + Cat, Odd Squad, and Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood — were produced by Fred Rogers Company.

After reading this book, I am now, more than ever, inspired by who Fred Rogers was and what he did with his life.

A special quote for my writer’s group, and other writers, from a note Fred Rogers wrote to himself in 1979—

“Am I kidding myself that I’m able to write a script again? Am I really just whistling Dixie? I wonder. Why don’t I trust myself? Really that’s what it’s all about  . . . that and not wanting to go through the agony of creation. AFTER ALL THESE YEARS, IT’S JUST AS BAD AS EVER. I wonder if every creative artist goes through the tortures of the damned trying to create? GET TO IT, FRED! But don’t let anybody ever tell anybody else that it was easy. It wasn’t.” (The Good Neighbor)