Rogers

The Mister Rogers No One Saw about:reader?url=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/magazine/mr-rog...
nytimes.com
34-43 minutes
Up at the castle, in front of the cameras,

the puppets were eagerly preparing for a
festival. Dwarfed beneath high rows of
stage lights, in front of painted trees,
they bopped happily along the pretend
stone wall. But there was a buzz kill:
King Friday XIII, the mighty ruler in his
bright purple cape, decreed that the
festival would be a bass-violin festival.
“But you’re the only one who plays the
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bass violin,” one of the neighbors

pointed out.
“Oh, so I am,” the king replied. “Well, it

looks like I’ll have a very large
audience.”
Fred Rogers was on his knees behind

the castle, dressed all in black, working
the puppets, his posture straight as a
soldier’s, lips pursed tight as he voiced
the king. There were cushions strewn on
the floor and blocks of foam rubber
taped to the parts of the castle where he
tended to bonk his head. In one swift
movement he crouched, slipped off the
king, slid on another puppet. He shot his
arm up, returned to his knees, but this
time he slouched, his face softening as
he voiced the meek and bashful Daniel
Striped Tiger.
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And so the neighbors scrambled about

trying to figure out a way to be part of
the festival. Stumped, and on the sly,
they began to invent bass-violin acts
they might contribute. One dressed up
her accordion to look like a bass violin,
another practiced a dance with one,
another tried to turn herself into one by
wearing a big fat bass-violin suit.
Another, a goat, recited a bass-violin
poem in goat language. (“Mehh.”)
Was this O.K.? Would the king approve?
He did. In fact, he was delighted. It

turned into a most rockin’ bass-violin
festival, neighbors singing and twirling
with pretend and real bass violins
(including a puppet holding a bass-violin
puppet), around balloons with little
cardboard handles taped to them to look
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like bass violins, to rousing bass-

violin/accordion polka tunes
accompanying bass-violin-inspired goat
poems.
“If you didn’t know what was going on,”

one of the guys on the crew said, “this
could be a very weird situation.”
Image
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Rogers, left, and Lenny Meledandri, who

later played Prince Tuesday, on the set
of the show in 1985.Credit...Jim Judkis
I appreciated that. I worked for a

different department in the building, at
WQED in Pittsburgh, down the hall.
They had microwave popcorn in the
cafeteria. To get to the popcorn you had
to walk by Studio A, and there was
usually the blue castle parked outside it
for storage. If the castle wasn’t there,
you knew they were taping inside, and
sometimes you heard music. It was fun
to go in and watch, if only to take in the
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live music, usually jazz, and to marvel at

the bizarro factor. Like Fellini for
preschoolers. My brother-in-law Hugh
Martin had worked as director and
producer of the program for a couple of
years. He was long gone, had moved to
New York, but he credited Fred with
starting his career. Fred loved Hugh —
so by association people were nice to
me. It helped. I was 26, just out of grad
school.
I wanted to ask Fred how he came up

with the idea for goat poems. Whose
day allows them to sit around thinking
about accordions dressing up like bass
violins? The first time I talked to him in
his office, one floor up from Studio A, I
tried to get him to explain. He kept
turning the focus on me. It took us a
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while to get past the deflection match.

He asked me about grad school. I hardly
wanted to think about that, about the
dark cloud hovering over my feelings
about my time there. I asked him what
he was working on. Any new scripts or
songs?
He put his eyebrows up. “It’s so hard,

isn’t it?” he said. “I think there are many
people who bring a whole lot of baggage
from their past and a whole lot of anxiety
about the future to the present moment.
What’s so great is that people can be in
relationship with each other for the now.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“If we can somehow rid ourselves of

illusions,” he said. “The illusion that we
are greater or lesser than we are. The
illusion that we’re going to save the
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world. There are a lot of illusions that

people walk around with. I would love to
be able to be present in every moment I
have.”
I distinctly remember having little more

to offer than, “Yeah.”
His office was more like a living room.

No desk, just his easy chair and a soft
brown couch — plus a flowering peace
plant, a piece of driftwood, a miniature
sandbox and other random gifts people
had brought him over the years, many of
which he pointed out, then told stories
about the people who gave them to him.
“I think the greatest thing about things is

they remind you of people,” he said.
I supposed so. And more so as I thought

about it.
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“I want to tell you about my tie,” he said.

He lifted it up and looked at it. “Do you
know what this tartan is? This tartan is
the clergy tartan. I suppose if somebody
were Scottish, they would recognize it.
But I don’t think most people know. I
wear this tie more than any other. Maybe
I just feel, you know, that it represents a
big part of who I am.”
Muted lavender and light blue, the clergy

tartan is one traditionally worn only by
people involved in ministry. Fred said it
was a gift from Bill Barker, one of his
closest friends and the minister who
gave the charge at Fred’s ordination in
the United Presbyterian Church in 1963:
“We charge you to shake us through a
God who involves Himself in our world,
into the world where He already is. …
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This world of TV cameras, of puppets, of

children, of parents, of studios, of
directors, of actors, this [too] is God’s
world. … We, as the Church, charge that
you speak to us to disturb us. … We
charge you to speak to us to remind us
that we too, through you, must be
involved.”
“So the show is like your church?” I

asked Fred.
He thought a moment. He said it was

easier to say what it wasn’t. It was not a
show. He used the word “program,”
never “show.”
“An atmosphere,” he said. What he was

trying to create with “Mister Rogers’
Neighborhood” was “an atmosphere that
allows people to be comfortable enough
to be who they are.” He continued: “I
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really don’t want to superimpose

anything on anybody. If people are
comfortable in that atmosphere, they
can grow from there, in their own way.
“A lot of this — all of this — is just

tending soil.”
He fell silent, as if adding white space

around that simple, stark remark.
When we were saying goodbye, I

thanked him for all he had taught me.
“I think that it is very important to learn

that you get that largely because of who
you are,” he said. “I could be saying the
same words and giving the same
thoughts to somebody else who could
be thinking something very different.”
I remember protesting. I was just trying

to say thank you.
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“It’s so very hard, receiving,” he said.

“When you give something, you’re in
much greater control. But when you
receive something, you’re so vulnerable.
“I think the greatest gift you can ever

give is an honest receiving of what a
person has to offer.”
He was impossible to thank. I remember

going home that day with goat poems
swirling in my head.
Fred Rogers was a curious, lanky man,

six feet tall and 143 pounds (exactly, he
said, every day; he liked that each digit
corresponded to the number of letters in
the words “I love you”) and utterly devoid
of pretense. He liked to pray, to play the
piano, to swim and to write, and he
somehow lived in a different world than I
did. A hushed world of tiny things — the
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meager and the marginalized. A world of

simple words and deceptively simple
concepts, and a slowness that allowed
for silence, focus and joy. We became
friends for some 20 years, and I made
lifelong friends with his wife, Joanne. I
remember thinking that it seemed as if
Fred had access to another realm, like
the way pigeons have some special
magnetic compass that helps them find
home.
Fred died in 2003, somewhat quickly, of

stomach cancer. He was 74. It was
years after his death that he would,
suddenly, go from a kind of lovable PBS
novelty to an icon on the magnitude of
the divine. It happened so fast that it
was easy to gloss over his actual
message. He gets reduced to a symbol.
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A conveyor of virtue! The god of

kindness! Something like that, according
to the memes.
“Just don’t make Fred into a saint.” That

has become Joanne’s refrain. She’s 91
now, still a bundle of energy, lives alone
in the same roomy apartment, in the
university section of Pittsburgh, that she
and Fred moved into after they raised
their two boys. Mention her name to
anyone around town who knows her,
and you’ll very likely be rewarded with a
fabulous grin. She’s funny. She laughs
louder and bigger than just about
anyone I know, to the point where it can
go into a snort, which makes her go full-
on guffaw. Throughout her 50-year
marriage to Fred, she wasn’t the type to
hang out on the set at WQED or attend
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production meetings. That was Fred’s

thing. He had his career, and she had
hers as a concert pianist. For decades
she toured the country with her college
classmate, Jeannine Morrison, as a
piano duo; they didn’t retire the
performance until 2008.
Joanne’s refrain has been adopted by

people who spent their careers working
with Fred in Studio A. “If you make him
out to be a saint, nobody can get there,”
said Hedda Sharapan, the person who
worked with Fred the longest in various
creative capacities over the years.
“They’ll think he’s some otherworldly
creature.”
“If you make him out to be a saint,

people might not know how hard he
worked,” Joanne said. Disciplined,
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focused, a perfectionist — an artist. That

was the Fred she and the cast and crew
knew. “I think people think of Fred as a
child-development expert,” David
Newell, the actor who played Mr.
“Speedy Delivery” McFeely, told me
recently. “As a moral example maybe.
But as an artist? I don’t think they think
of that.”
That was the Fred I came to know.

Creating, the creative impulse and the
creative process were our common
interests. He wrote or co-wrote all the
scripts for the program — all 33 years of
it. He wrote the melodies. He wrote the
lyrics. He structured a week of
programming around a single theme,
many of them difficult topics, like war,
divorce or death.
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I don’t know that he cared whether

people saw him as an artist. He seemed
more intent that people not see him at
all. Over the years he would
occasionally carry a small camera in his
jacket pocket. He would whip it out
without warning and just start snapping
away at you. No explanation. Then
about two weeks later you would get a
card in the mail from Fred. The pictures.
On the backs of some he wrote
comments. “I like this one a lot” or “You
sure look surprised here!” (He would not
sign the card; he would often put his
words on a Post-it so you could reuse it.)
You were left in a most unusual and
private moment, looking at pictures of
yourself from the point of view of Fred.
The focus was always on you. Or
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children. Or the tiny things. It was hard

to see Fred. I remember those first days
in his office, learning about soil, illusions,
giving and receiving, concepts that
would go on to rattle through me like
drumbeats. It would take me years to
understand it all, to see how those
blocks fit together, to recognize just how
radical his message was.
“L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.”

That was Fred’s favorite quote. He had it
framed and hanging on a wall in his
office. “What is essential is invisible to
the eyes,” from Saint-Exupéry’s “The
Little Prince.” “It’s not the honors and the
prizes and the fancy outsides of life
which ultimately nourish our souls,” he
once said, expounding on the idea in a
speech. “It’s the knowing that we can be
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trusted, that we never have to fear the

truth, that the bedrock of our very being
is good stuff. … What is essential about
you that is invisible to the eyes?”
I like you just the way you are. One day

he told me where that core message
came from. His grandfather, Fred Brooks
McFeely, who like the rest of the Rogers
family lived in Latrobe, Pa., about 40
miles east of Pittsburgh. “He was a
character,” he said. “Oh, a lot of me
came from him.” He got excited talking
about his grandfather, telling disjointed
stories and family lore. “If I knew how to
paint, I could paint you a picture of my
grandfather’s house. … He had an old
horse. It was so old nothing could have
happened to you. Sally. … And he’d
even let me send away to Sears for
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things!
“He was a real pioneer!” he went on.

“The fascinating thing about him was
that he loved to do things so much that
every time he would get something
started, a company started, he’d sell his
entire interest in it to be able to start
something else. So when he died, I think
he had all of 25 or 30 dollars. After all
that. He started something like four
companies in Latrobe.” Fred’s father
inherited the last one, the McFeely Brick
Company. “But then my grandfather
retired, and he went out to the country,
and he always wanted some chickens,
so he bought 5,000 chickens. Then he
got rid of them because that was too
much trouble, and he bought 150 head
of cattle, and then he got rid of them and
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he bought a whole lot of pigs. And then

he had a slaughterhouse, and they
made sausage and they evidently didn’t
make a penny. The last thing he bought
was a little coal mine, and then he sold
that when he went into a nursing home.”
His grandfather represented a life of risk

and adventure, the very things Fred’s
boyhood lacked. He was a lonely kid, an
only child until he was 11, when his
sister came. He was bullied. Here
comes Fat Freddie! He was sickly. He
had rheumatic fever. He had asthma. He
was not allowed to play outside by
himself. His parents and the family
doctor pitched in together to buy what
Fred loved to say was Latrobe’s first
room air-conditioner to help with his
breathing problems; they installed it in a
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neighbor’s window for Fred and Paul,

another sick child. “We rarely left that
room,” he told me. “We had our meals
there. After that, we got an air-
conditioner in our house.” They installed
it in Fred’s bedroom. It was there that he
spent much of his childhood.
Video
Puppets from “Mister Rogers’

Neighborhood:” Daniel Striped Tiger,
King Friday XIII, X the Owl, Lady Elaine
Fairchilde, Henrietta Pussycat, Queen
Sara Saturday.Credit
He had music, and he had puppets to

keep himself amused. He didn’t need
much. He was expected to fill his
father’s shoes, become his business
partner at the brick company. “My dad
was pretty much Mr. Latrobe,” he told
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me. “He worked hard to accomplish all

that he did, and I’ve always felt that that
was way beyond me. And yet I’m so
grateful that he didn’t push me to do the
kinds of things that he did or to become
a miniature version of him. It certainly
would have been miniature.”
Fred wanted to be like his grandfather.

He was allowed to leave the air-
conditioned room to visit him. “He taught
me all kinds of really neat stuff!” he told
me. “I remember one day my
grandmother and my mother were telling
me to get down, or not to climb, and my
grandfather said: ‘Let the kid climb on
the wall! He’s got to learn to do things for
himself!’ I heard that. I will never forget
that. What a support that was. He had a
lot of stone walls on his place.
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“And you can understand my mother

and grandmother. They didn’t want a
scratched-up kid. They didn’t want
somebody with broken bones. No. But
he knew there was something beyond
that. He knew there was something
more important than scratches and
bones. … I climbed that wall. And then I
ran on it. I will never forget that day.”
Joanne came into Fred’s life in college.

They were music majors together at
Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., and
after graduation they lived in New York.
Fred was hoping to work as a composer
but had become intrigued by the nascent
medium of television. He worked his way
up to network floor manager at NBC
before learning about a start-up, the
nation’s first community-sponsored
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television station, WQED in Pittsburgh.

Despite warnings from people at NBC
who told him he was crazy — “That
place isn’t even on the air yet!” — he
moved to Pittsburgh in 1953, and he and
Joanne bought a red-brick house.
He brought out his puppets. He found

something important for them to say,
thanks in large part to the person who
would become his lifelong collaborator,
Margaret McFarland, at the University of
Pittsburgh. Along with her colleagues
Benjamin Spock and Erik Erikson,
McFarland revolutionized the study of
childhood development. She helped
Fred explore the emotional landscape of
children. “Anything human is
mentionable, and anything mentionable
is manageable,” she would repeatedly
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tell him. She taught him the ways in

which empathy and people’s own
experiences of childhood could enable
them to accept and help children accept
themselves, not as an end, but as a
starting place. She provided an
intellectual framework for what Fred
learned from his grandfather.
“I think it was when I was leaving one

time to go home after our time together,”
Fred told me, “that my grandfather said
to me: ‘You know, you made this day a
really special day. Just by being yourself.
There’s only one person in the world like
you. And I happen to like you just the
way you are.’
“Well, talk about good stuff. That just

went right into my heart. And it never
budged. And I’ve been able to pass that
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on. And that’s a wonderful legacy. And I

trust that he’s proud of that. I could have
walked into some positions that were
already set. I could have walked into an
office that was already furnished for me.
But I would much rather have done what
I have done.”
It was cold in Studio A. I learned to

bring a sweater. Usually I sat by the
piano, with Johnny Costa, a well-known
jazz musician at the time, admired by
greats like Duke Ellington and
Cannonball Adderley. He signed on to
Fred’s program back in its earliest days.
Costa was so cool. Wisecracking. He
seemed way more Bugs Bunny than
Mister Rogers. I marveled at the way he
and Fred communicated through the
piano, Costa following Fred’s
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movements during taping, matching his

expressions with a riff or a sequence of
chords, shoulders up, right hand in the
air on the high notes. He was so into it.
“Thank God I’m a genius,” he would say
after a take.
He liked to talk about his unlikely

friendship with Fred. “Me, I enjoy a good
steak,” he told me. “Now Fred, he would
never think of eating a steak. And I’ll
enjoy a glass of wine. Fred doesn’t
drink. Fred, he would never swear. Me, I
would swear. You follow me?” He said
he and Fred liked to talk about Heaven,
about meeting Beethoven up there.
Costa worried he would miss out. He
was “afraid about some of my sins, you
know, throughout my life.” Costa said,
“I’d tell him I’m more bad than good
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sometimes.”
Fred told him, “Remember how you give

this great comfort to people through your
music.”
That was the vibe in Studio A. Fred was

intentional about the atmosphere he
created on the program as well as on
the set. If you could provide an
environment that allowed people to be
comfortable enough to be, simply, who
they are, what would happen? Who
would they become?
“When I first started doing this,” Costa

told me, “I wasn’t so sure I wanted to do
kids’ music, you know?” Fred gave
Costa his songs. Costa interpreted
them, added the great Johnny Costa to
them. “I played what I always played,”
he said. “You know, I played jazz. And
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Fred liked it. And so it stayed. And so I

stayed.
“Fred knows that I have something to

give that’s important. And he lets me
give it, and I give it freely, and then I’m
part of it, a part of his creation.” He said
pretty much everyone felt that way.
“That’s what makes us so tight. It’s
because Fred lets us give. And what a
thing that is, huh?”
Video
“Neighborhood of Make-Believe” book,

1995. Mister Rogers showed this book in
his television
house.CreditCredit...Photographs by
Henry Leutwyler
This idea of accepting a person, a child

or anyone as is was a novel concept to
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me. I had spent a lifetime in a Catholic

household where adhering to dogma,
rather than self-discovery, was the thing.
The church supplied you with a better
way to act, to think, to behave. In time I
came to question if I had any of my own
thoughts at all. I went to grad school. No
Catholics anywhere as far as I could tell.
It was exhilarating! Critical thinking was
the thing. It was at first a mind-
expanding drug. Deconstruct your
thoughts. Doubt yourself. Doubt
everything. Attack your thoughts. Attack
everyone’s. Skepticism became the
badge of honor. But for me it all led to a
kind of sourness, a distrust of anything
soft, of beauty, silence, love.
And here was Fred. Accept yourself.

Accept others. As is. In Fred’s world I
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found my own thoughts, and quite

literally my own voice, as a writer. I even
wrote about him over the years, without
much success. Some of the
conversations and moments recalled
here are from those early attempts to
understand — puzzle pieces I continue
to play with, all these years later, at
random intervals in my day.
Fred and I commiserated about the

creative process. We would often sit and
talk about confronting the blank page,
the blank canvas, the blank song sheet.
That place of vast possibility and
bottomless terror. “Why is it so scary?”
he would say. “It’s so hard.” He told me
he would sometimes freeze before being
able to jot down a word. He had a writing
room, away from the office, away from
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home, where he showed up on writing

days no matter what. Take it on. Enter it.
Sometimes in Studio A he would show
me how he worked out his doubts about
himself and his emotions at the piano.
Banging out anything angry or anything
glad. He said it helped. I told him my
outlet might be something more like
shopping or maybe napping. He said
either of those could work.
Fred saw creating as a divine act.

Inspiration happened in everyday
moments. “I remember one time,”
Newell told me, “Fred and I were in
Ligonier, Pa., in the mountains, and we
were filming a nighttime sequence. And
we were driving home. And as I pulled
onto the turnpike there was somebody, a
soldier or sailor hitchhiking. This was like
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12 at night maybe. And Fred said, ‘Look

at him, he looks so lonely there.’ I said,
‘Fred, we have no room.’ We had a full
car of equipment. He let it go. Or, well, I
guess he didn’t. A couple of weeks later,
he wrote a song.”
Hello there
Are you lonely
Are you a lonely neighbor
Alone tonight
Hello there
If you are lonely
Then you need only say
Hello there
I’m lonely
Hello there
Just say hello
That was the place where Fred and I

connected, and it was also the place
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where he lived. This place of creating, of

making stuff, and I know for him it was
vital, a lifeline. He said he thought it was
for me, too. In fact, he thought it was
true for everybody. Fred believed that
the creative process was a fundamental
function at the core of every human
being.
“I think that the need to create has to do

with a gap,” he said. “A gap between
what is and what might be. Or what
you’d like to be. I think that the need to
create is the need to bridge that gap.
And I do believe it’s a universal need.
Unless there is somebody out there who
feels that what is, is also what might be.
“I don’t know anybody who has complete

satisfaction with everything. Do you?”
On the beach in Nantucket, he was
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wearing a tattered windbreaker,

loosefitting chinos and the famous blue
sneakers. It was the summer of 1992,
almost a decade into our friendship. He
was struggling to carry all the stuff he
had gathered: a ratty old beach chair, a
towel, a ball cap. Joanne and I were not
exactly helping. These things were filthy,
random junk having washed up on the
shoreline at various stops along our
walk. At one point he put them down and
charged toward something else that had
caught his eye. It was a sheet. A dirty
old sheet. “Now, what size is our bed?”
he called to Joanne as he began
spreading it out on the sand.
“Uh, Rog,” Joanne said, as we drew

near. “I don’t think — ”
She looped her arm around mine.
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He looked at us, seemed to genuinely

calculate the sincerity of our disapproval,
then glanced back down at the sheet.
“It’s disgusting, Fred,” I said.
He put it down, gathered up the other

stuff, and we toddled back to the house
without comment. By this point, I was
pretty used to Fred’s quirks. He was
definitely a guy drawn to junk. To the
world’s discard pile. He liked flea
markets. On Nantucket, where he and
Joanne spent summers in the small
cottage they called the Crooked House
(it leaned), he liked to stop by the town
dump just to browse. That weekend he
had rescued a cement deer from the
dump, a lawn ornament or something. It
was missing an ear. He had it perched
on the porch railing at the house, and he
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kept calling our attention to it. “Yup, nice

deer, Fred.”
The tiny things. The meager and the

marginalized. This emphasis was ever-
present in Fred’s life — in everyday
exchanges at home, in speeches, in
scripts and in songs. He embodied a
kind of simple/fancy dichotomy. Simple
was a virtue. Fancy was suspect. Simple
was pure. Fancy was exhausting and
vapid. What is essential is invisible to
the eyes.
That year I went with Fred to something

that was anything but simple. It was a
fund-raiser for George H.W. Bush’s 1992
re-election campaign. The decision to
attend was out of character. Fred did not
endorse politicians, ever. He was a
pacifist and was vehemently opposed to
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Bush’s war in the Persian Gulf. But

somehow he had agreed to do this favor
for friends involved in arranging the
event. Newell, who doubled as the
program’s public-relations guy, went with
him, and so did Bill Isler, president of
Family Communications, the company
that produced the show. (It would later
change its name, after Fred’s death, to
Fred Rogers Productions.) I remember
that Isler was nervous, and Newell was
rattled, and Fred was trying to pretend
he wasn’t angry or, at least, miserable.
We arrived late, skipping the cocktails,

and entered a ballroom at Duquesne
University in Pittsburgh. Fred was
scanning the room as if expecting
ghosts to pop out.
“You O.K. there, Fred?” I asked.
39 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
“I just don’t know what to expect,” he

said. “You know, that’s why I sing that
song, ‘Children Like to Be Told.’ ”
Just then Secret Service officials popped

out. “Hello!” Fred said with a little hop,
like when a balloon pops. They took us
to a little room. They pulled back a blue
curtain and there was the president of
the United States, standing between two
big potted plants. “Thank you for
coming!” Bush said to Fred. “I am so
sorry Barbara isn’t here. She is a real
fan of yours.”
I don’t remember anything else about

the small talk. I just remember Isler
yanking Fred aside to provide
commentary. “My God, you guys look
like you’re part of a wax-museum
exhibit.”
40 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
At the luncheon, Fred stood at the

lectern between Bush and Senator Arlen
Specter of Pennsylvania. He leaned in to
the microphone.
He looked tiny.
“I know of a little girl who was drawing

with crayons in school,” he said.
He kept looking tinier.
“The teachers asked her about her

drawing,” he said. “And the little girl said,
‘Oh, I am making a picture of God.’ The
teacher said, ‘But no one knows what
God looks like.’ The little girl smiled and
answered, ‘They will now.’ ”
With that he asked everyone to think of

their own images of God, and he began
praying. He talked about listening to the
cries of despair in America and about
41 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
turning those cries into rays of hope.
A hush fell over the room, and he wasn’t

tiny anymore. He stepped away from the
lectern and darted. He was always a
darter, but this was extreme. “O.K., now
where the hell is Fred?” Isler asked me.
We darted. We combed the building and
climbed stairs. The Secret Service guys
had lost sight of him, too. “We’ve got to
get out of here,” Newell said.
We found him outside, next to an oak

tree, motionless and relaxed. “Fred!”
Isler said, exasperated. Fred said he
wanted to go back to the office.
“I wasn’t about to participate in any fund-

raising or anything else,” he told me
later. “But at the same time I don’t want
to be an accuser. Other people may be
accusers if they want to; that may be
42 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
their job. I really want to be an advocate

for whatever I find is healthy or good. I
think people don’t change very much
when all they have is a finger pointed at
them. I think the only way people
change is in relation to somebody who
loves them.”
Video
“A Granddad for Daniel,” final score for

the MRN
opera.CreditCredit...Photographs by
Henry Leutwyler
Unity Cemetery is two miles outside

Latrobe. There’s a little church on it,
Unity Chapel, that Fred’s father helped
organize a campaign to restore in the
1950s. Fred’s buried in the back, inside
the family mausoleum. Four marble
steps, four marble columns, a sharp-
43 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
pitched roof, a brass door, gleaming

stained glass. From that spot, the
mountains stretch in all directions, green
and blue and streaks of vermilion. I
peeked inside and read the names on
the marble walls. I said hi to his mom
and his dad, as you do. I said, “Oh,
Fred.” I did not look at the space
reserved for Joanne. I turned around
and took a long breath of the mountain
air, and I remembered a bright green
lawn. Fred barefoot. His first grandson,
Alex, was 3. His toes. “This little piggy
went to market.” Alex squealing with
delight. Me and Fred lying in the grass.
It’s probably the closest I ever felt to him.
He wasn’t asking me questions about
me. He wasn’t taking my picture. He
wasn’t making my mind do back flips. He
was just Grandpa on a fabulous spring
44 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
day.
Recently someone asked me if I thought

my friendship with Fred had any impact
on my life now. I said that I probably
think of him, or of something he taught
me, every single day. I suppose that’s a
weird thing to say about an old friend.
But I know that anything worthwhile I do
as a parent is rooted in Fred’s teaching
about tending soil. The same goes for
anything good I do as a teacher, at the
same university, in the very same
classrooms where the darkness once fell
over me. I’ve been back awhile now,
working to create an atmosphere that
allows people to be comfortable enough
to be who they are. I don’t want to
superimpose anything on anybody. A lot
of this — all of this — is just tending soil.
45 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
It’s not the kind of thing you read in the

pedagogy journals. It’s not really a thing
at all.
But it’s all connected. The soil, the

atmosphere, the fundamental human
urge to create. It all goes to Fred’s
notion of a gap between what is and
what might be. For Fred, creating is an
expression of optimism, an act of faith.
Faith in progress, in invention, in some
basic urge to constantly make life better.
Perhaps the best way to understand just
how radical his message would be is to
think of what happens when soil isn’t
tended. A barren landscape. A toxic soil.
An atmosphere devoid of love and of
acceptance, where a person’s internal
wars go unnoticed and unattended.
What sort of creations come out of those
46 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
people, stuck in that place? A world

war? Walls? Children in cages.
“I think that how we were first loved — or

not — has a great deal to do with what
we create and how,” Fred once told me.
He put it this way in a speech:
“There are those of us who have been

deprived of human confidence. Those
who have not been able to develop the
conviction that they have anything of
value within. Their gap is rather a
chasm. And they most often despair of
creating any bridges to the land of what
might be. They were not accepted as
little children. … They were never truly
loved by any important human other. …
And so it seems to me that the most
essential element in the development of
any creation, any art or science, must be
47 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
love. A love that begins with the simple

expressions of care for a little child.
“When people help us to feel good about

who we are, they are really helping us to
love the meaning of what we create.”
The speech was a commencement

address at Carnegie Mellon University.
After Fred delivered the last line, he
began singing his song “It’s You I Like,”
and hundreds of students joined in.
Costa was there on the piano, going full-
on rhapsodic.
It’s you I like.

It’s not the things you wear
It’s not the way you do your hair
But it’s you I like.
The way you are right now
48 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
The way down deep inside you

Not the things that hide you
Not your degrees
They’re just beside you.
But it’s you I like.

Every part of you
Your skin, your eyes, your feelings
Whether old or new.
I hope that you’ll remember
Even when you’re feeling blue
That it’s you I like
It’s you yourself
It’s you —
It’s you I like!
Fred told the crowd that he wrote that

song “for the child in all of us — that part
of us which longs to help in the creation
of a new and better world.”
49 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
A local opera company in Pittsburgh

recently decided to stage two one-act
operas written by Fred. Over the course
of his life, he wrote 13 of them. He would
weave them into a week of
programming. It didn’t matter that the
puppets could barely sing; the point was
the process of making an opera, not the
performance. When I thought about the
company’s putting this show together
with actual opera singers, I thought,
Huh, will these things hold up? I don’t
think Fred intended for them to hold up.
Joanne told me she was going, and she
said she would save me a seat.
I entered the lobby, and it was like a

Who’s Who of “Mister Rogers’
Neighborhood.” So many familiar faces,
all of us a kind of saggy version of our
50 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
former selves. Newell was there with his

wife, Nan, and “Mrs. McFeely,” a.k.a.
Betsy Seamans and her husband, Joe.
Hedda was there, and props people
came, and various support-staff
members I recognized from the WQED
cafeteria. Everyone seemed excited or
maybe nervous. Fred never intended
these things for an adult audience.
Joanne was wearing one of her

signature pretty flower-print tops. She
clutched her purse in front of her like a
demure, dainty lady, wearing her white
curls like a dainty lady; she is always
sporting this same demure, dainty-lady
look that does not prepare you for her
giant laugh, her occasional potty mouth
and her fierce intelligence.
She and I found our seats in the middle
51 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
of the theater, and we sat there staring

at the watercolor Fred on the cover of
the program.
“I don’t think I’ve seen this one,” she

said.
“It’s a good likeness,” I said.
“I think it’s one of those photos they blur

up to make it look like a watercolor,” she
said, holding it up and peering over her
glasses.
Just then the house lights went down. A

thundering piano rolled into, “It’s a
beautiful day in the neighborhood,”
invoking the spirit of Costa, who died
more than two decades ago.
Joanne smiled broadly, and she reached

out and held my hand. True to form, she
led the audience with her booming laugh
52 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
as the first opera, “Spoon Mountain,”

went crazily on. Purple Twirling Kitty
twirled her silver spoon and sang of her
fear of Wicked Knife and Fork. “This is
so ridiculous!” she cried out. “Oh, my
goodness, Fred!” Then as soon as
Wicked Knife and Fork finished her aria
in which she revealed the source of her
darkness — “A spoon! All I ever wanted
was a spoon! A spoon! A spoon!” —
Joanne clapped feverishly shouting:
“Brava! Brava! Brava!”
At intermission I ran into Newell. He

asked me what I thought of Spoon
Mountain, and I said that I got lost in
parts. He told me that the next opera,
“Windstorm in Bubbleland,” was
originally produced and directed by my
brother-in-law Hugh. “So if you thought
53 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
‘Spoon Mountain’ was wild,” he said,

“now you’ll see Fred’s imagination really
let loose.” He said Hugh encouraged
Fred to fly. I said that was funny because
I always thought it was the other way
around.
Then Newell told me something else I

never knew. He said one thing Fred
talked to him about was the idea of one
day writing a stage musical. A real
musical for an adult audience. It was a
lifelong dream. He said Fred talked
about getting started on it. But then
came the cancer. “And he was gone so
quick.”
That hit me. The idea that Fred believed

he had another act. That he had more
creating to do. Maybe a lot more. People
often wonder what Fred would think of
54 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
the world today, which can seem so far

removed from his vision of bridges, love,
a healthy atmosphere. Maybe he would
have despaired and given up on it,
people say. I don’t think so. Just the
opposite. I think right now, Fred would
be feverishly creating bridges and
bridges and bridges.
I kept thinking about it as I sat in the

dark next to Joanne and we all went to
Bubbleland. “There’s never, ever any
trouble in Bubbleland,” the TV anchor
sang. Except there was. It had to do with
a windstorm coming and a bad guy
promising to spray sweaters on bubbles,
and there was a hummingbird named
Hildegard trying to warn everybody, and
it felt as if we were tumbling through the
looking glass into one man’s imagination
55 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM
that knew no bounds, all of us in that

theater laughing and shaking our heads
and nudging each other. What? Spray
sweaters? And Joanne with her best
guffaw. I felt as if we all got to visit Fred
where he lived most fully. An artist of
goat poems and wicked knives and forks
fearlessly embracing the absurd, singing
with abandon.
Jeanne Marie Laskas is a contributing

writer for the magazine whose last
article was the basis for her most recent
book, “To Obama: With Love, Joy, Anger
and Hope.”
Student rate: Subscribe for $1 a week

until you graduate.
This is your last free article.
56 of 56 11/22/2019, 12:34 PM

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The Mister Rogers No One Saw about:reader?url=https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/19/magazine/mr-rog...

Up at the castle, in front of the cameras,

“But you’re the only one who plays the

bass violin,” one of the neighbors

“Oh, so I am,” the king replied. “Well, it

Fred Rogers was on his knees behind

And so the neighbors scrambled about

Was this O.K.? Would the king approve?

He did. In fact, he was delighted. It

like bass violins, to rousing bass-

“If you didn’t know what was going on,”

Rogers, left, and Lenny Meledandri, who

I appreciated that. I worked for a

live music, usually jazz, and to marvel at

I wanted to ask Fred how he came up

while to get past the deflection match.

He put his eyebrows up. “It’s so hard,

“If we can somehow rid ourselves of

world. There are a lot of illusions that

I distinctly remember having little more

His office was more like a living room.

“I think the greatest thing about things is

I supposed so. And more so as I thought

“I want to tell you about my tie,” he said.

Muted lavender and light blue, the clergy

This world of TV cameras, of puppets, of

“So the show is like your church?” I

He thought a moment. He said it was

“An atmosphere,” he said. What he was

really don’t want to superimpose

“A lot of this — all of this — is just

He fell silent, as if adding white space

When we were saying goodbye, I

“I think that it is very important to learn

I remember protesting. I was just trying

“It’s so very hard, receiving,” he said.

“I think the greatest gift you can ever

He was impossible to thank. I remember

Fred Rogers was a curious, lanky man,

meager and the marginalized. A world of

Fred died in 2003, somewhat quickly, of

A conveyor of virtue! The god of

“Just don’t make Fred into a saint.” That

production meetings. That was Fred’s

Joanne’s refrain has been adopted by

“If you make him out to be a saint,

focused, a perfectionist — an artist. That

That was the Fred I came to know.

I don’t know that he cared whether

The focus was always on you. Or

children. Or the tiny things. It was hard

“L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.”

trusted, that we never have to fear the

I like you just the way you are. One day

“He was a real pioneer!” he went on.

he bought a whole lot of pigs. And then

His grandfather represented a life of risk

neighbor’s window for Fred and Paul,

Puppets from “Mister Rogers’

He had music, and he had puppets to

me. “He worked hard to accomplish all

Fred wanted to be like his grandfather.

“And you can understand my mother

Joanne came into Fred’s life in college.