Why Mister Rogers Is Worth Watching During Coronavirus Quarantines
(OPINION) During our phase of working and teaching our children from home, maybe we all need a little more Fred Rogers as an antidote to the Coronavirus outbreak and social lockdown.
As I watched the 2019 feature film “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” on a flight , I was struck when an old clip showed Oprah Winfrey asking Fred Rogers “What is the biggest mistake you think parents make?”
“Not to remember their own childhood,” Rogers said. “I think the best think we can do is to think about what it was like for us and to know what our children are going through.”
And as our lives slow down as we spend more time at home this spring, we find an opportunity to embrace our children, strengthen our families and deepen our faith. Perhaps Fred Rogers is a perfect guide in that process. Old episodes of his show are available for free to Amazon Prime members. And recent films about him are also available on several streaming platforms.
Fred Rogers progeny in Pittsburgh
When I lived in Pittsburgh in 2007, I hosted a State of the Union “Presidential bingo” event at a pub called the Map Room, for friends and alumni of The Fund for American Studies. Our task was to listen to then President George W. Bush give his annual presidential address and to mark down when he said words like “Nuclear,” “Al-Qaida” or “Iraq.”
A boisterous bar patron wanted to join the game. So I gave him and his friends bingo sheets, as they enjoyed drinking and joking about the speech with us.
I brought door prizes (freebies that arrived at my downtown Pittsburgh office of The Wall Street Journal, where I worked as a reporter at the time) that included a Mr. Rogers trolley piggy bank, an artifact that harkened back to the history of street cars in Pittsburgh. A trolley was also a device on Mister Roger’s show that took us from reality into the land of make believe. The bar patron kept looking at the piggy bank amid his running commentary on the president and politics.
“Where did you get that piggy bank?” he asked me. I explained it came from my office, perhaps a mailing from WQED.
"I worked for the company," he told me, showing me a trolley lapel pin on his jacket.
I asked if he meant he worked at WQED, the Pittsburgh public broadcast station that produced and aired Mr. Rogers Neighborhood?
"No. Fred Rogers was my dad," he said with a quiet, reverent tone, a departure from his boisterous engagement with the game. He shook my hand. “I’m Jim Rogers.”
“Wow!” I said. He didn’t look like his clean-cut father who wore cardigan sweaters, ties and lace up shoes. Jim sported a greying beard, a baseball cap, blue jeans and work boots. In one sense, it fit perfectly.
Jim Rogers (center), son of Fred Rogers, with Religion Unplugged executive editor Paul Glader (right) in Pittsburgh in 2007.
Pittsburgh was the home of Fred Rogers and his ground-breaking TV show that ran from 1968 to 2001. Pittsburgh was a place I felt peace and serenity as a 20-something. The city itself – with its old brick buildings, wood floors, high ceilings and radiator heat -- reminds you of the quirky show and kind man.
My work as a Wall Street Journal reporter who covered metals and mining – a part of the manufacturing world and global economy — often took me into coal mines and steel mills to speak with working people. I kept a hardhat and work boots in my Jeep Wrangler for such factory tours. On my way to titanium factories or steel plants — I often thought about a feature in Mister Rogers Neighborhood called “Picture, Picture” where he took viewers on a video tour of manufacturing plants in the Pittsburgh region to see how people and companies made things like musical instruments, food products or toys.
After moving around the country to chase stories and my journalism dreams – from South Dakota to Indiana to Kansas to Washington DC to Prague (Czech Republic) to San Francisco to Washington, D.C. to New York City – I landed in Pittsburgh. And I felt peace in a place to finally pause and think, a place to grow up and assess my own life a bit. I found communities of art, sports and faith.
As Ted Anthony, a Pittsburgh native, wrote in a feature for the Associated Press, “Fred Rogers, a minister whose sermons weren’t religious, offered children what was in essence a secular version of his faith: the notion that our community was our hallowed ground, and that, as we grew, it would be up to us to turn to our neighbors now and then and say, “Peace be with you.” ‘
For religious leaders and organizations, perhaps we find lessons from Mister Rogers and the renewed interest in his life and legacy. Perhaps some of the qualities he demonstrated are the kinds of qualities that help society function during a Coronavirus pandemic and during times of normal? Perhaps Fred Rogers helps us understand positive aspects of religion?
A Fred Rogers Revival
The film “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” (released Nov. 22 and starring Tom Hanks as Fred Rogers and Matthew Rhys as Esquire journalist Tom Junod (named Lloyd in the film) who profiled Rogers for the magazine and became an unexpected friend) and the 2018 documentary “Won’t You Be My Neighbor” (the highest grossing biographical documentary of all time) and another documentary “Mister Rogers: It’s You I Like” have uncorked a flurry of nostalgic think pieces, essays and tweets that champion and explore the significance of Mister Rogers and the TV show he created. And that’s incredibly helpful in a national and global culture that needs heroes for civility, neighborliness and understanding.
Ryan J. Pemberton wrote a thoughtful essay in Christianity Today about the “Quiet Liturgy of Fred Rogers,” arguing that Rogers’s show operated with liturgical ritual, gave an invitation to young viewers to “be” a neighbor and demonstrated how. “What if the whole of Fred Rogers’s work was a liturgical invitation to embody the story of the Good Samaritan?” Pemberton writes. “What if Rogers was, over and over again, offering a model of what it looks like to be a good neighbor, loving our neighbor as ourselves?”
Pemberton marshals evidence that Mister Rogers TV show succeeded not on its low production value, simple set and unlikely star. Rather it used “repeated language and practices, the steady, sing-song voice and the unhurried pace” to develop a rhythm and pace for its young audience. “Each word and movement were painstakingly crafted for an intentional impact.”
He points to symbols in the show’s opening such as a yellow stoplight that signals to young viewers that it’s time to slow down. In one episode, King Friday XIII, ruler of the Land of Make-Believe, tried to build a wall to keep out foreigners before the plan backfires and he changes course, giving enemies an opportunity to become neighbors and, later, friends. He points to Rogers modeling neighborliness in an episode on May 9, 1969, a year after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in which Rogers cooled his own feet in a pool and invited an African American police officer to join him. The episode provided “counter-formation in viewers’ minds in a time when African Americans were violently removed from “white” swimming pools,” writes Pemberton.
In the original Esquire piece by Tom Junod upon which the current feature film is based, the author writes about Mister Rogers’ regular swimming routine, vegetarian diet and his disciplined schedule. “He takes a nap every day in the late afternoon—just as he wakes up every morning at five-thirty to read and study and write and pray for the legions who have requested his prayers; just as he goes to bed at nine-thirty at night and sleeps eight hours without interruption,” Junod wrote.
Everywhere Junod went with Fred Rogers, he saw Rogers living his faith. At his office in Pittsburgh, “He was sitting on a couch, under a framed rendering of the Greek word for grace and a biblical phrase written in Hebrew that means ‘I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine.’ “ Junod’s visit to Mister Rogers office involved Fred’s ministry to the soul and person of the journalist, a scene at the heart of the story.
“What is grace? I'm not certain; all I know is that my heart felt like a spike, and then, in that room, it opened and felt like an umbrella,” Junod wrote.
One of the things I admired about Fred Rogers from watching dozens if not hundreds of episodes of his show as a child was how he respected the human dignity in others. He demonstrated the best of Christian teaching that suggests people are made in the image of God, that people have intrinsic worth. It’s this perspective on personhood from religion that formed the basis for the theory of human rights. As someone with children of my own who watch a fair amount of children’s programming, it’s clear to me that few other children’s TV programming comes anywhere near Mister Rogers and its daughter program, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood, for teaching kindness, empathy and other virtues.
One reaction I noticed from friends who saw either the documentary or feature film so far is both joy and sorrow. Several people said they wept when they watched the films. And I have to admit my eyes were not completely dry watching these films. When I played the feature film trailer for my class in narrative non-fiction recently, I looked around the room and noticed several of my Generation Z students fighting back tears. I later asked one of them why her generation found Mister Rogers so moving, a figure who is deceased and from an older generation and era.
“I think it’s hard for us to fathom someone who is that kind,” she said.
The same reaction occurred in 1998 when Fred Rogers received an Emmy Lifetime Achievement Award. Fred Rogers walked on stage and asked the celebrities in the audience to pause for 10 seconds with him “to think of the people who have helped you become who you are... Ten seconds of silence.” As the audience reluctantly followed his instructions and started to reflect, many started weeping.
Kindness over the long haul
Author and essayist E.B. White once wrote in a letter to the Carnegie Commission in 1967: “I think TV should be providing the visual counterpart of the literary essay, should arouse our dreams, satisfy our hunger for beauty, take us on journeys, enable us to participate in events, present great drama and music, explore the sea and the sky and woods and the hills. It should be our Lyceum, our Chautauqua, our Minsky’s, and our Camelot. It should restate and clarify the social dilemma and the political pickle. Once in a while it does, and you get a quick glimpse of its potential.”
Mister Rogers seemed to accomplish that vision of excellent TV. He was motivated to become involved in television when his parents bought a TV for their red brick home in Latrobe, Penn., and a college-aged Fred Rogers turned it on and saw people throwing pies at each other. He thought the medium and machine had much more potential for good.
Jonathan Merritt writes in The Atlantic in a piece titled “Saint Fred” that “After graduating from seminary, the Presbyterian Church didn’t know what to do with Fred,” says Amy Hollingsworth, author of The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers. “So the presbytery gave him a special commission to be an evangelist to children through the media.” Merritt also noted that before Rogers would enter the office each day, he would pray “Dear God, let some word that is heard be yours.”
“Mister Rogers was not just special; he was a saint,” Merritt writes. “He’ll never be officially offered that title, and he’d probably want it that way. Instead, he has been canonized in the hearts of his viewers—Saint Fred, the patron saint of neighborliness.”
In the 2019 film, the magazine journalist asked Fred Rogers’ wife, Joanne, how it felt being married to a saint.
“He is not a perfect person. He has a temper. He chooses how he responds to that anger,” her character said in the film. “He does things every day that helps him deal with that anger. He reads scripture. He swims laps. He prays for people by name. He writes letters.”
Fred Rogers on parenting
Back to Fred Roger’s son, Jim. I found a story in People magazine dated May 15, 1978 by Cable Neuhaus that opened with reporting about Jim:
“Most kids rebel against their parents sooner or later. But Jim Rogers is having a harder time than other 18-year-olds telling his father to buzz off. Jim’s pop is not just any Mr. Rogers. He’s the Mister Rogers, for 24 years the gentle host of public TV’s Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and a paragon of parental understanding. A freshman at his dad’s alma mater, Rollins College in Florida, Jim has stopped writing his folks or even returning their phone calls. “He’s flown the coop,” sighs his father. “It’s been a difficult year,” agrees his mother. “There’s real hostility.”
The piece included more details later: “Despite his son’s defection, communication has hardly collapsed in Rogers’ Pittsburgh home. “It’s been painful, and it’s rough on Jamie,” says Rogers, 50, gamely understanding of his older boy’s relatively mild insurrection. “But if we don’t allow him to go off and have this time for himself, he’ll never come back to the nest.” “Mom and Dad have been nice about this break,” Jim reckons. “I’m just trying to get used to being a person, to get along by myself.” “
In the 2019 film, the magazine journalist speaks with Fred about why he stopped making the show in the mid-1970s and why he started making it again after that. Rogers explained the difficulty raising his teen-age sons and how he realized he had more to stay through the children’s show. “Being a parent does not mean being a perfect parent,” Rogers’ character said.
Those accounts matched up with what I learned from Jim. He didn’t become a minister like his dad. His politics seemed to be libertarian and anti-authoritarian. Jim was proud of his dad and told me that Fred Rogers was a good parent, as good a man at home as what we saw on television. And, by the way, Jim won our presidential bingo competition that evening and took home the trolley piggy bank.
Paul Glader is executive editor of Religion Unplugged, a former resident of Pittsburgh, Pa., and is on Twitter at @PaulGlader.