Why Mister Rogers Is More Relevant than Ever

This week marks the release of the second major film about Fred Rogers in as many years. A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, which comes out tomorrow, tells the story of the friendship between Fred Rogers (played by Tom Hanks) and a journalist. The movie is based on writer Tom Junod’s classic Esquire article, “Can You Say…Hero?”. Last year, a profoundly moving documentary called Won’t You Be My Neighbor? was released to huge critical acclaim. I may or may not have had a slow drip of tears going through the whole film.

I’m a longtime admirer of Fred Rogers. (I just looked: I now have ten books by or about him.) If you think about it, Rogers exemplified the qualities we most desperately need now: neighborliness, gentleness, deep listening, creativity, emotional honesty, lack of pretense, and an unceasing focus on raising healthy and curious and confident children. I’m convinced that watching his show planted in millions of kids (across multiple generations) a seed of longing to know and be known by your neighbors. I think of him as the patron saint of the neighborhood. My Strong Towns colleague Michelle Erfurt says it even better: “Mister Rogers is an OG new urbanist.”

Rogers also consistently celebrated the power of the small, the slow, and the unprepossessing in a way I think resonates with many Strong Towns advocates. Consider this story from Rogers:

A high school student wrote to ask, “What was the greatest event in American history?” I can’t say. However, I suspect that like so many “great” events, it was something very simple and very quiet with little or no fanfare (such as someone forgiving someone else for a deep hurt that eventually changed the course of history). The really important “great” things are never center stage of life’s dramas; they’re always “in the wings.” That’s why it’s so essential for us to be mindful of the humble and the deep rather than the flashy and the superficial.

One of the folks interviewed for last year’s documentary was Maxwell King. King is the author of the first full-length biography of Fred Rogers. Published last September, The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers was a New York Times bestseller and has recently been released in paperback. I was fortunate to interview King in October 2018 about Rogers and the new book. We talked about how the pain in Fred Rogers’ own childhood prepared him to connect with children (and adults) everywhere, the importance of place in Rogers’ work, why the frenetic pace of modern life makes it difficult to connect with ourselves and others.

Maxwell King was the editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1990 to 1998. He went on to serve as president of the Pittsburgh-based Heinz Endowments, the director of the Fred Rogers Center at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and as the President and CEO of The Pittsburgh Foundation. A slightly longer version of this interview was originally published in The Englewood Review of Books, and it is republished here with permission.

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John Pattison

I was surprised it took so long for a biography to be written of Rogers. How did you come to be the one to write it?

Maxwell King

Fred Rogers, all through his life, didn’t want a biography to be done. He refused overtures from at least half a dozen biographers. In my case, I had been running another foundation here in Pittsburgh called the Heinz Endowments. I retired, obviously too early, because I didn’t like retirement. I was looking for something to do. Rogers left his professional legacy to Saint Vincent College in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, the town where he grew up. They established the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media. They had a building but not a lot else going on. I said I would help them raise money and start programs and get the Center in motion.

During that time, I asked Joanne Rogers, Fred’s widow, and the president of Saint Vincent College, why there wasn’t a biography. They said, “Oh, Fred didn’t want one.” And I said, “Well, with all due respect, Fred is gone and you’re asking me to help you raise millions of dollars to get the Center going. We need a biography.” Finally, after a couple meetings on that topic, Joanne said, “Okay, you’re right. You write it.”

I didn’t fully appreciate how much work it was going to be, but I said yes, and I’m glad I did. Because in addition to being proud of the book, spending seven years sort of “marinated” in Fred Rogers’s life has been very good for me.

Pattison

As you researched Fred Rogers’s own childhood, did you see the seeds of the man who would become “Mister Rogers”? The seeds of creativity were there, but there were also seeds of pain, weren’t there?

King

Yes. There were two important strains in the evolution of his childhood.

The first was his time in church with his mother and his grandparents. His mother was a very giving person both in personal relationships but also to the community. She volunteered for everything. She helped people who were in trouble. She was a person who was intentionally active in carrying out what she felt were her Christian values and principles. Fred picked up on that at a very young age. He would go to church and sit in the pew with his mother. Sometimes he would ask questions at inopportune moments. But she never shushed him. She never said, “Be quiet, the minister is talking.” She was always responsive to him.

The other strain is his own loneliness, his shyness, and the isolation that came in part from his being a very introverted little boy. And it came in part from his parents being overly protective. His mother was just wonderful and loving and a marvelous person, but she was overprotective of him and the family. The family was wealthy and they had a chauffeur. The chauffeur drove Fred to elementary school, which of course was just setting him up for being an outsider and being picked on by other children.

There’s a pivotal moment you’ll probably remember from the book. Fred was chased down the street by a group of other boys, and he was terrified. He got away to the house of a friend. I think the cathartic moment for him was when his parents and grandparents said, “We’re so sorry that happened to you, Freddie, that’s terrible. But, you know, if you just pretend you don’t care, and show them you don’t care, it’ll be okay. They’ll leave you alone.” As you may recall from the book he went up to his room, and he sat there just talking to himself, saying, “But I do care. I do care.” I think that was a very important moment for him. He began to fashion his own character in a way that all those things about him that were perceived by others as weaknesses—caring too much, being shy, feeling cautious, being very sensitive—he flipped them. He turned his sensitivity and caring nature into a strength.

He seems very simple, gentle, and sweet; some of his friends even described him as androgynous, not masculine in the traditional sense of being aggressive. And yet he became a very strong person. Everybody I talked to who worked with Fred described him as a wonderfully loving and caring friend, but also somebody who was as tough as nails. He knew exactly what he wanted to accomplish, and how he wanted to go about doing it.

Pattison

I was moved by that passage in the book. And I feel like that scene of young Freddie upstairs in his room was replayed again and again on the show, when Mister Rogers told children in his audience, “It’s okay to feel. It’s okay to care.”

King

Exactly. That was terribly important to him to convey. There is a famous moment when another player on the show was performing a puppet character and said to another puppet character, “Don’t cry.” Fred stopped everything, and he said, “We’re not going to tell children—” because of course the puppets were surrogates for the children “—we’re not going to tell children not to cry, not to feel, not to have and show their honest emotions.”

Fred Rogers appears before Senator Pastore’s committee to advocate for funding for public television. Clip from “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” (2018)

Pattison

There were a number of times in which Rogers seemed to be able to penetrate the defenses of adults—even adults who had a reputation for being (or at least acting) tough. I’m thinking, for example, of the first time that he was on the Tonight Show with Joan Rivers. He started singing “It’s You I Like,” and he just seemed to cut right to the heart of who she was. It was a lovely moment between Rogers and a comedian with a reputation for being caustic. And then there were the famous hearings with Senator Pastore, who had a reputation for being…

King

…brusk.

Pattison

Yes, that’s it. Why do you think he was able to penetrate even adults’ defenses?

King

I think it was his authenticity. He was very real. He just was who he was in a very genuine way. He didn’t incorporate the usual reserves we as adults incorporate in our dealings with each other. I remember Yo-Yo Ma talked about when he first went to perform on the Neighborhood. Fred Rogers was interviewing him before he performed. Rogers came about six or eight inches from his face and just broke down all of his defenses. He got him to talk in the interview in a very genuine way.

That was also the case with a wonderful writer named Tom Junod. Junod had a reputation for being a bad boy, tough guy journalist, but his editors at Esquire assigned him to do a piece on Fred Rogers. Junod wondered if the assignment was a joke. But Junod and Rogers became fast friends. There was a whole side of Junod that he wasn’t even aware of but that came out through his friendship with Fred. This is what the movie is about that’s being shot right now with Tom Hanks playing Fred Rogers.

Fred seemed simple and gentle. But he was just fearless. He was fearless about relationships with other people, about being honest with people, about being honest with children. And he was fearless about how he used television.

Pattison

I’m curious about your take on this next question, not just as the author of this biography but also because of your work as the CEO of The Pittsburgh Foundation. Place is obviously such an important part of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Can you talk about why it was important that Fred Rogers situated his show in the neighborhood—both the TV neighborhood and the Neighborhood of Make-Believe?

King

He drew a lot on the neighborhood he grew up in in Latrobe. He was very much a creature of western Pennsylvania. He went away first to New Hampshire to college, then to Florida, then to New York, and to Canada. But he always came back to western Pennsylvania because place was terribly important to him. The comfort he got from his friendships was matched for him by the comfort he got from the familiarity and the love of place. He had that here and he really didn’t want to be anywhere else.

Place is something we’re edgy about in today’s society because we’re losing it a bit. So much of our communication takes place through the ether of the internet. People today move again and again. I certainly have. We are losing a sense of place. And I think that some facet of that phenomenon, the effect of losing place, is part of what has broken down in our civil dialogue today.

Pattison

You know who comes to mind is the character of Lady Elaine, in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Lady Elaine was ornery. Most real-life neighborhoods have a character like that too. But if you’re committed to a place, you’re not going to pull up stakes when things get tough. You have to figure out how to be a good neighbor to the “Lady Elaines.” One of the things I most admired about Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood was that there was this very difficult character, and the other characters had to do the hard work of learning how to love her.

King

Fred was an accomplished storyteller. He knew good stories need dramatic tension. And without Lady Elaine, a significant part of the dramatic attention would have been missing.

Pattison

Yes.

King

Before we wrap up, there is one thing I wanted to mention to you. I noticed you are associated with the notion of ”Slow Church.” I wanted to address that with you.

Since I wrote the book, I’ve been doing a lot speaking, including radio interviews and telephone interviews; I must have done forty of these things. Particularly in public, a lot of people ask me to “boil it down.” Can I boil down to a few words what Fred represented? Although it’s a little bit of a disservice to Fred, because he was a very deep thinker, I agree to try.

The way I boil it down is to say that there are really two pieces to Fred’s message: Slow down. And be kind. Those two pieces were related to each other for Fred. Because if you don’t slow down, if you get swept away by the increasing pace of today’s society—faster and more complex—you really can’t be kind. You can’t have authentic, respectful, caring, kind relationships with other people if you’re constantly being swept up on this tide of speed.

So slow down and be kind. I believe they were related for Fred. They certainly are for me.

Additional Reading/Listening

• “3 Urban Planning Lessons from the New Mister Rogers Movie,” by Rachel Quednau (Strong Towns)

• The Good Neighbor, by Maxwell King (paperback)

• “Can You Say…Hero?" by Tom Junod (1998 Esquire article)

• “My Friend Mister Rogers,” by Tom Junod (2019 article from The Atlantic)

• Welcome to the Neighborhood: A Mister Rogers Tribute Podcast

Top photo via WTTW.

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