Latrobe, Pennsylvania can
claim several distinctions: the first professional football game, the banana
split, Rolling Rock beer, and golfer Arnold Palmer, who it should be noted, won
the U.S. Open forty-three years ago today. But best known of all of Latrobe's
favorite sons must certainly be Fred Rogers, born in that tough coal mining
town on March 20, 1928, as Fred McFeely Rogers
(and now you know where that Neighborhood character comes from). It was
an unremarkable year otherwise, although
the Yankees won the World Series – four games to none – against the St. Louis
Cardinals, and the New York Times reported that the annual cost of
enforcing Prohibition had begun to approach the $200 million mark.
Much more important for
the future Mr. Rogers, however, was the appearance of a brief article in the
April issue of Popular Mechanics Magazine for that year announcing the
development of television for the home. The feature illustration for the report
was a family sitting around what looks like a radio with a three-inch-square
window on the front – in some living
room (actually, a neighborhood in Schenectady). Television's first drama, The
Queen's Messenger, was broadcast later that year from station WGY in Schenectady. And so, in one of
those minor coincidences of history, Mr. Rogers and the technology that became
his medium were born at nearly the same time.
Fred Rogers graduated
from high school in 1946 and set off to Dartmouth College to study for a career
in diplomacy, starting with a major in Romance languages. But Hanover proved to be too cold
for Mr. Rogers, in more ways than one, and he decided to return to one of his
first loves and transferred to Rollins College in sunny Florida to study musical
composition and performance. Legend has it, incidentally, that one of the first
students to greet Mr. Rogers during his first visit to Rollins, riding rather
smartly in a Maxwell automobile with a rumble seat, was a young woman named
Joanne Byrd.
Music had been an
important part of Mr. Rogers' life from his earliest childhood, both as a way
of expressing feelings and emotions as well as a way to tell stories that would
speak directly to very small children. Yo-Yo Ma , a guest on the Neighborhood, once remarked that Mr. Rogers used music to show that all things are
possible within you, that music creates a space of possible knowledge,
of feeling with words, stories, fears – all those things.
On vacation in Spring,
1951, Mr. Rogers saw his first television programming. He hated it. This was,
after all, the heyday of Milton Berle, Ernie Kovaks, Red Skelton, and Howdy
Doody. So he decided to do something
about it. Instead of going on to graduate school, Mr. Rogers went to NBC
television as an assistant producer for The Voice of Firestone and later
as floor director for the Lucky Strike Hit Parade, The Kate Smith Hour, and
the NBC Opera Theatre. This experience may account in part for the
popularity of the comic opera productions among the denizens of the Neighborhood
of Make-Believe. Television critic Joyce Millman observed that these
“trippy productions” were a “cross between the innocently disjointed imaginings
of a preschooler and some avant-garde opus by John Adams.”
But Mr. Rogers still had
a good reason to continue visiting Florida: Joanne Byrd. The story
is that, during one visit and in a gesture worthy of the Neighborhood of
Make-Believe, Mr. Rogers slipped with Joanne into a church entirely on the
spur of the moment – and proposed.
They were married on July
9, 1952.
The very next year, a new educational station in Pittsburgh, WQED, asked Mr. Rogers
to return to plan and schedule programming. His friends thought he was crazy. After
all, WQED had yet to begin broadcasting and was the nation's first
community-sponsored educational television station – not exactly a promising
start. But Mr. Rogers was ready to make the change.
Mr. Rogers and his
co-host, Josie Carey, went on the air in 1954 with one of the station's first
programs: “The Children's Corner,” a program that, in the following year, would
win the prestigious Sylvania Award for the best locally produced children's
program. But Mr. Rogers did not appear on this show in person. He was Daniel
Striped Tiger, X the Owl, King Friday XIII, Henrietta Pussycat, and Lady Elaine
Fairchilde – just as he continued to be to the end of his career. Carey
later remarked that she would sometimes find herself confiding in these
puppets, forgetting that Mr. Rogers was behind them – the same reaction children,
and children at heart, would continue to have for decades. Incidentally, each
one of these shows cost about $30 to produce.
Student readings:
— All through our lives, there are resignations of
wishes. As children, once we learn to
walk, we must resign ourselves to not being a baby anymore.
— I really think that everybody, every day, should be able
to feel some success.
— How we deal with the big disappointments in life depends
a great deal on how the people who loved us helped us deal with small
disappointments when were little.
— Childhood isn't just something we “get through.” It's a big journey, and it's one we've all
taken. Most likely, though, we've
forgotten how much we had to learn along the way about ourselves.
— One of the hardest things for young children to
understand is that their actions have real consequences for others. That's because for a time a child's own world
seems like the whole world: That's all
there is.
— I like you just the way you are.
Mr. Rogers was ordained
a Presbyterian minister in 1963; his call was to continue working with children
and families through television, radio, magazines, and newspapers. Almost immediately Mr. Rogers went to Toronto to work for the
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, producing a short children's program called
“Mister Rogers.” It was on this show that he appeared on-camera for the first
time as himself. The following year the program, now ½-hour long, was picked up
in Pittsburgh. In 1966 the Eastern
Educational Network bought 100 of the programs, gave them the new name of
“Mister Rogers' Neighborhood,” and distributed them to Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and a few other
American cities for the first time. Two
years later, the National Educational Television network, later to become PBS,
made the show available for national distribution. Mr. Rogers became an instant
celebrity and the Neighborhood became part of millions of homes. By
1985, 8 percent of American households were tuning in to Mr. Rogers and by 1991
a poll revealed that 45 percent of preschoolers thought that Mr. Rogers ought
to be President. Five years later, TV Guide declared Mr. Rogers to be
one of the 50 greatest television stars of all time.
Student readings:
— Taking
care is one way to show your love.
Another way is letting people take good care of you when you need it.
— There's never been a time in our history when there have
been so many changes, so many unusual things to deal with for which we have no
experience. It's as if our whole society
were walking along a road through a wilderness of constant change with
strangers we think we should know, but don't quite understand.
— There are times when explanations, no matter how
reasonable, just don't seem to help.
— Just displaying his or her picture on a refrigerator or
at the office can make a four-year-old as proud as an artist at a gallery
opening.
— We have all been children and have had children's
feelings…. But many of us have
forgotten. We've forgotten what it's
like not to be able to reach the light switch.
We've forgotten a lot of the monsters that seemed to live in our room at
night. Nevertheless, those memories are
still there, somewhere inside us.
— We all have different gifts, so
we all have different ways of saying to the world who we are.
Fred Rogers was given
every significant broadcasting award for which he was eligible, including
lifetime achievement awards from the Television Critics Association and the
National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences. He has a star on the
Hollywood Walk of Fame and is in the Television Hall of Fame. But it wasn't
until 1999 that he was persuaded to establish a Web site for his show. He was
resolutely non-commercial. There is no Mr. Rogers talking doll, no Fred Rogers
line of cardigans, and no Prince Tuesday cologne (imagine a T-Shirt of the Simpsons on vacation in the
Neighborhood of Make-Believe). He refused to make commercial
appearances, not even for PBS station pledge breaks (for which we may all be
grateful). It was all about the children. But he did play a key role in one
commercial decision that was to have unexpected and fruitful consequences for
us all. We can thank Mr. Rogers in large measure for the fact that we can watch
television programs anytime we want with the assistance of our VCRs and the
technologically advanced successors to VCRs that we use today.
In 1976, a group of
television companies brought suit against the Sony Corporation to prevent
off-air duplication of copyrighted television programs: time-shifting, in other
words. This case made its way through
District Court and the Court of Appeals, ending up finally on the docket of the
U.S. Supreme Court nearly a decade later as Sony
Corporation of America v. Universal City Studios. In a very close decision, the Court sided with
Sony and referred explicitly to the testimony of Mr. Rogers in support of the
majority opinion. Here is what Mr. Rogers testified:
“Some
public stations, as well as commercial stations, program the Neighborhood at hours when some children
cannot use it. I think that it's a real service to families to be able to
record such programs and show them at appropriate times. I have
always felt that with the advent of all of this new technology that
allows people to tape the Neighborhood
off-the-air, and I'm speaking for the Neighborhood
because that's what I produce, that they then become much more active in the
programming of their family's television life.
Very frankly, I am opposed to people being programmed by others. My
whole approach in broadcasting has always been: 'You are an important
person just the way you are. You can make healthy decisions.'”
We
can just hear him saying it – and believing it to be so simple that even a
four-year old could understand.
It
would be easy to say that Mr. Rogers remained a child all of his life. But this
would be a mistake. Mr. Rogers' gift was that he always remembered what
it was like to be a child. He remembered what it was like to be afraid of going
down the bathtub drain, or of not being able to make the dark go away because
the light switch was too high to reach. And he remembered how a small child
might wonder about, and be frightened by, divorce and death. Few are given this
gift, and fewer still know what to do with it.Your mothers and fathers
will remember with gratitude the many late afternoons that they relied on Mr.
Rogers to bring a little peace into your life and theirs. Someday you may
remember that you absorbed some important lessons about being a kind and
considerate person in the time you spent in the Neighborhood.
Student readings:
— Almost all of us who have been parents have had the
feeling of wanting to give our children perfect lives, lives without pain or
sorrow. But, of course, none of us can.
— Grandparents are both our past and our future. In some ways they are what has gone before,
and in others they are what we will become.
— There are no perfect parents . . . just as there are no perfect children.
— I recently learned that in an average lifetime a person
walks about 65,000 miles. That's two and
half times around the world. I wonder
where your steps will take you. I wonder
how you'll use the rest of the miles you're given.
— Parents are like shuttles on a loom. They join the threads of the past with the
threads of the future and leave their own bright patterns as they go, providing
continuity to succeeding ages.
— I have really never considered myself a TV star. I always thought I was a neighbor who
just came in for a visit.
Mr. Rogers, you were, and still are, special. We liked you – just the way you were.