Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: Everything You Didn't Know

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Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret history and little known facts behind your favorite music, movies, TV shows and more. We are your neighbors of Nerdery, your cardigan wearing caretakers of kids show Cannon, welcome to you a board the trolley of trivia. Can you say this bit is getting tired? Sure? I need you to. My name is mister rontog. Come on, do the bit, do the bit with me, and I'm ex the owl. And today we are talking about the one and only Fred Roger is better known by his affectionate honorific mister Rogers. Where do you even begin with him? He was a secular saint whose influence continues to spread long after his death twenty years ago this February. He was a radical on a cardigan, a man who saw the possibilities for television as a means to not just educate, but support emotional development. He harnessed the new medium to carry out work that was for him deeply spiritual, communicating directly with the hearts of each and every young viewer. But Fred didn't just see the potential in television He also saw the potential in everyone. He began his career in a world the valued children not for what they were, but for what they'd become, which was, in short, a consumer. Fred met children where they were, and that was his genius. He later said, I don't think anybody can grow unless they're accepted for exactly who they are. His authentic and intimate connection with children was so total that he changed many lives without ever having met them in person. He loved to tell the story about how one wide eyed kid came up to him at some in person event and said, mister Rogers, how did you get out meaning out of the TV? And Fred patiently explained to him out of television worked and the kids. You know, He's processing it thoughtfully for a few minutes before responding the genuine concern, but are you going to get back in? I'm keeping things light because I can't start sobbing this early in the episode, which I absolutely will. Higel, tell me your deepest, innermost thoughts about mister Rogers. I mean, it's like the only bit of children's entertainment from like three to six that I've I don't think has like aged poorly or failed me in retrospect. I mean, like you know, when I think back on the stuff that I remember, like on screens from this era, a lot of it is Disney, which is all well and good because Disney's great, but they're also at this point, like you know, Amazon, and they create grace sludge for the content troughs and so so that's ruined for me. And then and then otherwise, I have mister Rogers, a nice man from Pittsburgh who just never let anyone down. And that's really the thing. I mean, it's like it's you know, even with the Bob Browse episode, Like as much as I love Bob Browse, like you still have all that stuff with his business partners who screwed over his son, And there's so much in this world that is corrupted by the circumstances it exists. And except for mister Rogers, somehow that man transcended every ugly part of existence and you know, became a secular saint him and John Coltrane, Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right. Before we go any further, folks, I'll spare you all the suspense. Fred Rogers exactly the man you want him to be, which means that he was exactly the man you saw on television, teaching honesty and compassion, no forgotten scandals, no skeletons, and his cardigan filled closet. I'm sorry to disappoint you all, he said later in life, one of the greatest gifts you can give anybody is the gift of your honest self. I also believe that kids can spot a phony a mile away. And you know, like you said, he was above all, always himself. And you know, that's really the highest compliment I can pay anybody being always yourself. But that goes double if yourself happens to be mister Rogers, because that's a pretty amazing self. He opened up each episode of the show with the same question, won't you be my neighbor? And this wasn't some corny TV catchphrase, but a genuine invitation for closeness and connection. He would later say, television has the chance of building a real community out of an entire country, and I would argue he came the closest to achieving that dream more than anyone else who worked in that medium. He genuinely believed in the unity of humanity and the universe. Bore this out in a really funny way. Tom Hanks was cast to play Fred Rogers in the twenty nineteen biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, and after filming, Tom was informed that he and Fred Rogers were actually related in the literal sense. Ancestral dot Com proved that they were six cousins. They shared the same great great great great great grandfather who emigrated from Germany to America in the eighteenth century. And if you're the kind of person who doesn't believe in coincidences, Fred definitely did not. There was always meaning behind everything for him. Then this was just the most perfect way for the universe to emphasize Fred's strongly held belief that we are, in fact all one, all neighbors, all related, all connected, and I think that's wonderful. Well, without further ado, let's take a journey to the neighborhood of Too Much Information, from his oddly beautiful obsession with his weight to the horror icon, who got his start on his set, the troubling childhood that sowed the seeds for TV excellence, and his passion for Monty Python. Here is everything you didn't know about mister Rogers and his neighborhood. Every superhero needs an origin story, and Fred Rogers is a doozy pretty unexpected I have to say. He was a child of privilege, born in nineteen twenty eight to two of the wealthiest citizens of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Also the birthplace of the Banana Split. Did you know that? And Rolling Rock Beer really from the glass line to tanks of old Latrobe. It says on the it says on the bottle. Wow, this place, this place has got to be a Taurus Mecca good good the birthplace of Fred Rogers. Yeah, the Rolling Rockberry, the birthplace of the banana Split. Come to Latrobe. We got it all, baby, What a way to spend the day. Seriously, One more thing you can punch in about Latrobe. The birthplace of Arnold Palmer. Oh my god, So you can get yourself banana split. Chase it up with a half and half iced tea lemonade combo or do you mean the golfer or the drink? I mean I guess it goes both, right. Oh yeah. Fred rogers father was the president of the mcpheely Brick Company, one of Latrobe's most successful businesses, and his mother was a homemaker and a well known philanthropist. In fact, she spent much of the Second World War knitting sweaters for American gis serving in the frigid European theater. And Fred grew up in an enormous three story brick home summered in Florida and had a nearby vacation home, I think, And he was even taken to school in a chauffeured limo because this was just a few years after the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and his parents were nervous about that happening to him. As we'll see, this made him an easy target for childhood bullies. Yes. Unfortunately, even though Fred Rogers helped make childhood enjoyable or at least bearable for generations of kids, his own childhood was not very pleasant. He was shy and overweighted as a child, which led to his classmates, who had already marked him as the sissy rich kid, to nickname him Fat Freddie, which wore him very much, making matters worse. He was also very sick as a boy. He later said, I had every imaginable childhood disease, even scarlet fever. The industrial smog of western Pennsylvania exacerbated Fred's asthma, so he spent much of his time locked inside alone in his room, and he later said, I used to cry to myself when I was alone, and I would cry through my fingers and make up songs on the piano. Oh, this is too early in the episode for this, for this lump in my throat. To alleviate his loneliness, young Fred began playing with puppets, which became a hallmark throughout his life, as we'll talk about later. Those who knew Fred later said that the sweet, shy, innocent Daniel was striped tiger puppet was basically an unvarnished glimpse of Fred's wounded inner child, and in fact, the actor who played mister McFeeley the Mailman, David Newell, later observed, if there hadn't been a fat Freddy, there likely wouldn't have been a mister Rogers. And so for Fred, when he wasn't escaping into his imagination with puppets, he sought comfort from his maternal grandfather, Fred McFeeley, and Fred for the rest of his life, who recall one visit where his grandfather said to him, 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, which I have to say, is an unexpectedly compassionate, emotionally aware of sentiment from a guy who founded a brick company at the turn of the century. You know me, no, but just from yeah, coming from a lineage of presumably stern German immigrants, Yeah, exactly, making that's a very sweet thing, um. And Fred would always remember this. Obviously, that sentiment became basically his sign off for his TV show, and he would name the neighborhood mailman mister McFeely in his honor. So you're starting to see it all come together. Puppets, sweaters, McFeeley, well chosen words of encouragement. It's all there. And eventually Fred overcame his shyness in high school, telling mprs Terry Gross in nineteen eighty four, it was tough for me at the beginning, and then I made a couple of friends who found out that the core of me was okay. And one of them was the head of the football team. Yes, mister Rogers took the time honor attack to befriending the jocks to survive high school. I love that Fred became quite popular. He ultimately got elected class president of the student council during his senior year, and also the editor in chief of the yearbook. Neither of those things were cool at my high school, but I assume they were back in the forties. Times were different. Yes, Another big part of Fred's youth was music. You know we mentioned earlier he spent some time weeping at the piano, which is just weaving through his fingers that you you have in common with him? Sorry, does that really mean? No? Also really accurate. So Fred spent his first year of college at Dartmouth, but he really wanted to pursue a musical education and he you know, I guess spoiler alert for seventy five years shade against Dartmouth. He founded Dartmouth's music career track music education track lacking, so he transferred to Rawlins College, where he completed his degree in music and graduated magna cum laude in nineteen fifty one. It was there that he met his future wife, Joanne, who he proposed to in a letter a short time later. Given all of the puppets and positive reinforcement and sweaters, it's easy to overlook the role that music played on the Mister Rogers television show, and all of that came from Fred. He wrote all of the music for the program, including the main theme, which is based in part on Beethoven's Sonata in C major Opus two number three. Shout out to Beethoven, friend of the pod. I listened to it a bunch and I couldn't find how quote. No. I was gonna try to punch it them, but I can't find it. But didn't He also inspire one of his sonatas, also inspired the Flintstones theme. I believe that's another team cut. Yeah, you know, we used to have music education in this country. People, people would have heard that stuff. Fred was something of a child prodigy. Growing up at just five years of age, he could hear songs in the radio and then play them back on the piano by ear. His grandmother was very encouraging of this habit. She persuaded him to learn box minuet in g so that he could audition for a local respected piano teacher, and he learned the piece in just a few days, and he was accepted by the teacher, even though he was younger by far than many of his other students, and as a reward for his studies, Fred's grandmother offered to buy him his own piano for his tenth birthday, and Fred chose well tell him what he won. He chose a nine foot Steinway concert Grand, which was a three thousand dollar purchase in nineteen thirty six, the height of the Great Depression, and about sixty five grand today. Fred Rogers the only good rich person. He treasured the instrument for the rest of his life. It was around this time that he began writing original songs that he said described how he was feeling. He would talk about growing up in this household where it was being angry, didn't feel like an option was available, and music became his outlet for the feelings that he felt that he wasn't able to express. He said, at one point, music was my first language. I was scared to use worse. I didn't want to be a bad boy. I didn't want to tell people I was angry, but I could show it through the way I played on piano, And even as an adult, he would self soothe by sitting and playing the theme song to his show on piano. He talked about his passion for music during a nineteen ninety nine interview for the Archive of American Television, saying, my first love is music. It is a unique way for me to express who I am and what I'm feeling. Music was always my way of saying who I was and how I felt. I was able to cry or laugh or say I was angry through the tips of my fingers on the piano. I would go to the piano. Even when I was five years old, I started to play how I felt, and so it was very natural for me to become a composer. Having written all of the music for the neighborhood, I feel as if that's one of my gifts to children. There's something very mystical and wonderful about how music can touch us. You know, it's elemental. It must be what heaven is like. What do you think about that? I mean, you actually write music and are a true musician. I mean. One of my favorite terms for why music has a hold on us comes from Daniel J. Levitton. It's a musicologist, and I don't think he coined the term, but he's the first person I saw apply it to music, which was evolutionary cheesecake. Because we don't need music, you know, apparently we must. Well, in terms of evolutionary psychology, you can kind of point to, or even evolutionary biology, you can point to like all of the different things that make humans human and brain function, and you know, the way our larynx has developed to communicate more complexly and and really like the enjoyment and creation of music, even though it fires different parts of our brains, is like not strictly speaking necessary, you know, in terms of how we function. And so that's why it's called evolutionary cheesecake. It's like a cheesecake whips but you don't need it. But it's just something that it's It's this huge it's one of the greatest buy in my opinion, the greatest art form. But it's a beautiful way of putting it. I think when whenever people try and talk about why it is beautiful and why it matters, that's what I always come back to, because it's not really it's like the least it gets it. Why people become so obsessed with it even though it's simultaneously devalued and depressing, depressing and all this other stuff. But it's like, yeah, I don't know that was a tangent. Sorry, no, I mean, I think that this speaks more to our different personalities that I you know, I mean, like you just said, we've seen remnants of early musical instruments in you know, caves from times when people when human beings were just struggling to eat and survive. I mean, there's clearly something there that I choose to believe that there's some kind of energetic connection to the divine. It's more closer to Fred Rogers definition than yours or the Levitands definition, but yeah, I like to believe that there's some kind of you know, they say, like the light, we only see a tiny percentage of the wave spectrums visible to us. Oh yeah, and there's just stuff on other sides that you know, X rays and all different kinds of waves. I just think that there's something similar to that with sounds. Maybe there's just all sorts of other things going on that we can't perceive, but it is necessary. Yeah, well, I mean it's it's vibrations, and that is the essence of existence. Is like Brownie in movement, Like every molecule is vibrating. It is presumably at some kind of frequency. Right, So this has been the metaphysics portion of the musical metaphysics portion here No, neither did I Yeah. Over the course of fred career, he would compose over two hundred songs, nine children's operas which I have been unable to locate. I don't know what those are interesting and released. He released twelve albums of children's recording in addition to the nine hundred episodes of the TV show. Some of these songs were released on records in the nineteen sixties, including the theme song, which ultimately one of MC grammy, and he even released a song protesting the practice of dying baby chicks different colors for Easter. This was the sixties thing called Don't pick on the Peeps, which featured the stirring condemnation. How do you think the chickens feel? This is where you punch in Werner Hurtz, I talking about chickens. The enormous flat stupidity of a chicken's eyes really quite a thing. Maybe they're distantly related. Actually the anti vast exactly. Music really colored how Fred saw the world. In an early interview in the six's, he used a musical term to describe how he wanted the show to impact children's lives, saying he wanted to have a way for children to navigate the difficult modulations of life. And it's a great interview clip that opens up Morgan Neville's twenty eighteen documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor. He's sitting at his I think it's the grand piano, that's Grandma Bottom, and he's just kind of waxing poetic about it, and he said, you know, there's different modulations when you play music. Some are easy, like going from C to F because it's mostly all white keys, and then there's tougher ones like C F sharp and he demonstrates it on the piano. His fingers go through all sorts of machinations and it looks really tough, and and he said, I'm here because I want to help kids with those more difficult modulations in life. And then he laughs at himself. He's like, does this make sense to anybody? I don't know, this makes sense to me. And we're like, yes, Fred, the sound guy, the video guy, everybody tap and was weeping. Well. Knowing all that, it comes as no surprise to know that when Fred did find the person to play piano on the show, because he didn't do it himself, he found a heavy hitter. How did the jazz pianist Johnny Costa as the show's musical director, arranger, and keyboardist, and Johnny held that role until his death in nineteen ninety six. And Johnny was no slouch. He was described as the white Art Tatum by Art Tatum. For those of you don't know, Art Tatum is widely considered to be the greatest pianist of the twentieth century, unless you're like a wonk and think it's like Arthur Rubinstein or one of those classical guys, maybe Glenn Gould. He didn't really need a gig on children's television, but he accepted the job because he could remain in his native Pittsburgh to record the show, and Fred agreed to pay him the same amount of money that Johnny needed to pay his son's college tuition, which is five grand or I guess what about seventy five thousand today's money, like like fifty thousand. Ah, we live in hell. Fred Fred called him one of the most talented musicians he'd ever known, and a lot of people thought that Johnny was slumming it, but Fred refused to talk down to children, and so the music that he played in the show was held to an extremely high standard. Um he welcomed an early synth pioneer named Bruce Hack and his collaborator Esther Nelson onto the program in nineteen sixty eight to explore electronic music and synthesizers for kids, which is not something you saw in the rest of children's television. I imagining Barney playing like a mogue. I was thinking like HR puff and stuff. Although that though they would have probably messed with synths on HR puffing. Yeah, yeah, uh. You know. Fred thought that children intuitively responded to music, and he encouraged Johnny Costa to play as experimentally as he and the other guys on the gig were a basis named Carl McVicker and drummer named Bobby ross Thorne, and they would settle in each taping day to play the show's main theme, the Charlie Whistle, Mister mcpheley's speedy delivery piano theme, and the vibraphone notes as Fred fed his fish, along with other incidental music. And they were in the TV studio with Fred. They were playing live as they recorded it as they taped the show, which I think is really cool. So from Pittsburgh, the Fred now Rogers Weekday Afternoon band. I mean, yeah, that's live from the Cardigan Room. My Cardigan quota for this episode, yeah probably. Oh, I feel like you got to handle the urban legend section of this. That's like your thing, It's one of my things. For a figure as beloved, ubiquitous and squeaky clean as mister Rogers, there naturally were some yard and downright unsavory urban legends that popped up around him. The one that I distinctly remember being told, like in school, was that he was a secret badass and the arm that he was a special Ops sniper during the Korean War, and that he wore long sleeves in a cardigan all the time because his arms were tattooed with his confirmed kills. I'd heard he was an eighty seal. That was more interesting. Okay, neither of those things are true. He never served in the armed forces, and one friend commented on those rumors by saying Fred didn't know how to use a screwdriver, let alone kill a bunch of people. His draft papers are circulating on the Internet, and though he was classified as fit to serve all through college just before his graduation. In nineteen fifty one, his status was changed to four F, which disqualified him for military service. This was during the Korean War, and so his impending graduation would have meant that his college deferment was up, so he could have claimed conscientious objector status even his religious convictions or his extremely wealthy family could have pulled some cash register leavers. Yeah, I mean there are gradiations to being disqualified for military service, and four F is like absolutely lowest, Like you will not like this, You're done, Like we don't want you ever. There's I forget what all the other ones are, but that's like goodbye, we don't ever want to see you again. Basically, there are some who have a theory that Fred potentially expressed bisexual tendencies to the draft board, which at that time was a sure fire away for the army to never want to talk to you again. A lot of people try to get out of the Vietnam draft by using the same tactic. Fred reportedly discussed these sexual feelings relatively candidly over the years. To quote the twenty eighteen biography The Good Neighbor, The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King, quote in conversation with one of his friends, the openly gay doctor William Hirsch, Fred Rogers himself concluded that if sexuality was measured on a scale of one to ten, he said, well, you know, I might be right smack in the middle, because I've found women attractive and I found men attractive. However, mister Rogers neighborhood Cats mate Francois Clemens, who is gay he played Officer Clements on the show, says in Neveral Morgan's twenty eighteen documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? If there was a gay vibe, I would have picked it up. Fred wasn't gay, not as far as I know. So who knows grain as salt? Yeah, then again, perhaps Fred's childhood asthma caused a lingering respiratory problem. And then there's also the fact that Fred was very badly color blind, so much so that he needed help telling the difference between red tomato soup and green split pea soup. And here's something that I've tried to verify. He reportedly couldn't see the color blue, which I don't know what that means. I don't know if that means it just comes through as gray or what, But that's pretty wild. So yeah, Fred, for all of his vibrant sweaters, had a hard time no oneman color they were. And you know, being colorblind, any kind of problem would definitely put a dent in your potential career as a sniper. But the thing that is weird to me is that presumably the draft board would have known earlier on when he was one A and fit to serve that he was color blind. So I can't imagine that was the reason. Yeah, I don't know. And in closing, who knows? Fred Rogers medical records have long since been destroyed, But funnily enough, the military did go out of their way to reject the rumor that Fred Rogers was a state trained killer, and in fact, the very first week that Mister Rogers Neighborhood was broadcast nationally in nineteen sixty eight, he included a puppet storyline and the Neighborhood make believe about war resistance, which many took to be a I can't even say barely veiled. It was an unveiled critique of the Vietnam War, and at one point in the episode, he asks viewers, isn't peace wonderful? And in an emailed with journalist Tom Jannaud, who wrote what many feel is like the definitive profile on mister Rogers and Esquire can you say Hero? They became friends after the peace ran and stayed friends until Fred's death in two thousand and three. Fred roonim an email talking about the possibility of being drafted, saying I have no idea how I would have responded to a Cold War. I may have had to do alternative service, as did the friends Quaker friends. I have a friend, not a Quaker friend, who was in the ambulance Corps. I would have probably been good at something like that. I would not have been good at shooting people, though, I don't think I could have done that. So that's one urban legend about mister Rogers. I think done and dusted. I mean it makes sense, though, because you know Bob Ross from the Joy of Painting Mister Happy Trees, and you know was a drill sergeant for I think the majority of his professional life. So I mean there is a little bit of I can see how people would extrapolate that and think that every peaceful zend out PBS character used to be a killer in the army. I don't think Bob Ross killed people. Well, we can hope. But there are also a few other urban legends related to mister Rogers. Yeah, they's that famous screenshot supposedly from the show that has him giving the finger directly to the camera's laughing as he does it. Yeah, it's even funnier. Yeah, it's not strictly true. He's singing the song where is Thumpkin? The song that bestows a name to each finger on your hand, and the middle finger is mister Tallman, which scans. There's another one that it's probably the closest to what might have actually happened, which is that some neighborhood ne'er do wells stole Fred's car, and then, learning that they had robbed mister Rogers, they returned it. They went out of their way to return it to him unharmed. And that is not true, but a beautiful story, nonetheless, and one we can all secretly pine for. So all the pieces are in place for a chill TV legend. This brings us to a larger question, how did Fred Rogers get involved with television in the first place. We all started when Fred came home to visit his parents when he was a senior in college in nineteen fifty two, and his parents had just obtained a new fangled TV, probably becoming one of the first people in town to do so, and this sparked for his interest, not because he loved it, but because he absolutely hated it. One of the first things Fred Rogers ever saw on TV was the image of two people throwing pies at one another. I think it was on a kids show, and this left him offended to his core. He was so angry that this incredible new medium was being used to show kids such dribble, and so he took Gandhi's advice and decided to be the change that he wished to see in the world. He vowed to use television quote for the broadcasting of Grace through the Land, and though we'd initially intended on attending a seminary. After graduating from Roland's College, he informed his parents that he wanted to get into television, and they replied, but you've barely even seen a television And as he told Pittsburgh Magazine, when I first saw children's television, I thought it was perfectly horrible, and I thought there was some way of using this fabulous medium to be of nurture to those who would watch and listen. And you know, that's the thing about Fred Rogers. He respected childhood and he knew that, you know, it was more than just clowns and pies. And this respect became a hallmark of his show. And you know, in short, he was a reformer. He saw an opportunity one that really fit his mo which he later summed up as quote, It's not so much what we have in this life that matters. It's what we do with what we have. The alphabet is fine, but it's what we do with it that matters most. Making words like friend and love that's what really matters. I think he's got a sense that TV was going to be the medium of his generation and he wanted to use it in the best way that he knew. How So, after graduating college in nineteen fifty one, he got a job at NBC in New York City as a floor director for early TV shows like Your Hit Parade, which is an old music show, The Kate Smith Hour, and also an assistant producer for the Voice of Firestone. And this is so wild to me because mister Rogers worked at thirty Rock in Studio eight h which is the famous studio where Saturday Night Live is now filmed. So that means that the studio where Eddie Murphy performed his parody of mister Rogers in the eighties called Mister Robinson was the very same studio where Fred Rogers first started working in television decades before. I just think that's so cool. Again, like we say at the top of the episode, there are no coincidences. Then, after a few years of working at NBC, he was coaxed back to his home state of Pennsylvania to work for WQEED, which was a newly launched public access station that was actually the first community sponsored TV station of its kind. And it's worth saying that it was a sizeable risk to leave NBC at this time because it was one of the big three networks and w QEED wasn't even on the area yet. So but he decided to really go I think probably where he had more control and would have more of an influence over what he was putting on the air. And so he went back home to Pennsylvania. And it was also at this network that he first put his longtime love of puppetry to use. And this happened when he was hired to work on a kid show called The Children's Corner, which was hosted by a woman named Josie Carey. Fred was more of a behind the scenes guy who's working as an organist, and his career as a children's host really began by accident. They were going to be showing a quick little bit of film on this show, and the film strip snapped right when they're about to roll it, and this was live TV, so they were forced to improvise, and Fred grabbed a tiger puppet that the station manager given him shortly before the show premiered, and he just stuck it through a hole on the set and started improvising with the show's host. And this puppet became what we now know as Daniel Stripe and Tiger, and it was named after the woman who gave it to him, w QEED station manager, Dorothy Daniel, And as we said earlier, Daniel the Tiger, he basically became mister Rodgers alter ego in a sense. Fred's wife Joanne later said Daniel was pretty much Fred, the real Fred, And so this Children's Corner show was really an early training ground for Fred, and that was here that he owns many if not all of the ten puppet characters he would ultimately perform on Mister Rogers Neighborhood. There was King Friday the thirteenth, who was named I love this in an effort to make kids less fearful of Friday the thirteenth, which to me is fairly low on the list of things that I was afraid of as a kid. But go with God. According to mister Rogers Neighborhood, King Friday was born on Friday the thirteenth, which meant that Friday thirteenth was now a day to be celebrated, not feared. The math on this doesn't always work out, because sometimes there are multiple Friday the thirteenth cent a year, but just just go with it. The mischievous Lady Elaine Fairchild, who is horrifying, was supposedly named after Fred's sister Elaine, whose parents adopted when Fred was eleven years old, and by all accounts in his family was kind of a pill and as is the character Lady a lamb, and I guess whenever Fred had to say something on Mister Rogers, like in his house to his sons, he delivered the news and a Lady Elaine voice, which I think is a very fascinating and slightly troubling insight, Fred Rogers Psychology. In addition to these, he also voiced X the Owl, which is kind of like a badass name for a fifties kids show, puppet X the Owl, and Henrietta Pussycat, who I kind of forgot. She's the one always says like, always sticks me on my ows in between yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah. Kind of annoying, but yeah, I'll give it to him. Yeah. And in nineteen sixty one, after several years of working in the children's corner, Fred caught the attention with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, who's head of programming told him, Fred, I've seen you talk to kids. Let's put yourself on the air. Because, again, on the children's corner, he was just a puppeteer behind the scenes, no one ever really saw his face and no one ever really saw him and the magic that is Fred Rogers. So Fred, his wife Joanne, and the Two Sounds moved to Toronto to make his on camera debut in the confusedly named show Mister Rogers All One Word. I don't really understand why that choice was made. This show was essentially seen as an early Canadian prototype for the better known Mister Rogers Neighborhood three separate words. It was only fifteen minutes and shot in black and white, but it introduced even more elements that we come familiar to Mister Rogers fans all over the world, the music, the puppets, the Cardigans, as well as the neighborhood of make believe and the trolley. And actually the set pieces from Mister Rogers Neighborhood were actually the ones that were built by the CBC designers. He would later take him back to the US when he launched Mister Rogers Neighborhood. According to the official PBS site, the trolley from Mister Rogers Neighborhood, I don't understand this traveled five thousand miles during each season of the show. Now that's not correct, which to trust me. It's on like a big graphic on the PBS website. I trip, We'll checked it. I don't understand what they mean by that. Like the track that it travels on is like ten feet long. I know, I don't know, because I mean if they well they I mean, yeah, I don't know. Did they run it constantly day and night? It's only five thousand miles, like you know, that's that's the navigates the Earth or maybe not quite, but it's up there. Yeah. Well, Fred spent a full year developing this series in Canada, and many biographers have speculated, in kind of a psych one o one sort of way, that Fred's passion for television stemms really from his unhappy early life. The tiger was his mother. Yes, never mind, And so he spent three years in Canada until he returned to Pittsburgh in nineteen sixty six and expanded his show into a full half hour. And first it was seen just in the Northeast. It was like a local it was a prepbs era, and then it picked up Sears Roebuck as a sponsor and went nationwide in February nineteen sixty eight. And so Fred wasn't just working at children's television in the early sixties. Though. When he wasn't filming the show, he studied at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, and in nineteen sixty two he became the unordained minister in the Presbyterian Church. Friend of the pod. Now we throw to the Presbyterians, show me. Presbyterian writer Amy Hollingshorf, author of the Simple Faith of Mister Rogers, wrote, after graduating from seminary, the Presbyterian Church didn't know what to do with Fred, so they gave him a special commission to be an evangelist to children through the media. The television quite literally became his pulpit, and he didn't speak about it directly through the show, but it was something he was very open about in interviews. So he never became a practicing preachers minister. Minister, there we go, presber preacher, but that's not right. Press evangelist, telepress evangelist. He did appeared in nineteen ninety six episode of Doctor Quinn Medicine Woman as a pastor's mentor, the only time he appeared as any character other than himself on television. He appeared on Sesame Street and on the animated PBS series Arthur, but Doctor Quinn Medicine Woman holds the honor of getting Fred out of costume for the first and only time. He also guessed on Letterman, which is very weird demands yeah yeah, more of a Jimmy Fallon kind of guy in that Jimmy Fallon is no. This was in his like Letterman's Way Out era. This was in like the early eighties. This is when like Jerry Lawler was decan Andy Kaufman like yeah, but speaking of chat shows, yeah, he also started in nineteen to seventy eight, while on hiatus from the children's show Mister Rogers, wrote, produced, and hosted a thirty minute interview program for adults on CBS called Old Friends, New Friends, featuring esteemed guests the likes of Milton Burrell, Georgia on My Mind, composer Hoogi Carmichael, and Robert Frost's daughter Leslie. I think it only lasted like twenty episodes, it was, apparently, and they talk about this in the Morgan Neville documentary sort of Unwatchable. Well, just wasn't his medium, and you gotta work really hard to make Leslie Frost seem uninteresting. In addition to his theological studies, Fret also took courses at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development, where he met fellow adults who studied children, you know, the socially acceptable way, no white vans. These included doctor Benjamin Spock, the childrearing icon of the baby Boom era, and Eric Ericson, What a terrible name. I'm so sorry. He's developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theory on psychological development. He coined the phrase identity crisis, something I refer to almost daily, So shouts to Eric Ericson. Both of these experts helped shape Rogers's ideas for how to connect with children through his show. But the most crucial was his connection to doctor Margaret McFarlane, co founder and director of the Arsenal Family and Children's Center in Pittsburgh. And she would go on to be a consultant on his show for over thirty years. But you know, he was far from a chilli academic. There are just all of these stories, not just from the Tom Janoude, the journalist who became very close to him, but many others Rest and Tom Janoude and the rest. But he wrote, you know, as you mentioned before, probably the definitive profile and fred in Esquire nineteen ninety eight, and he wrote, he worked hard on his friendships. He prepared for his friendships, he took notes on his friendship. He even kept files on his friendships. And not long ago I found out he'd kept a file on me. The files are in his archives at Saint Vincent College in Latrobe. Apparently they are extensive box after box of information and inspiration concerning those he loved, and in one of those boxes are the names of my wife, my dogs, and one of my nieces who was facing trouble and for whom he prayed. There were also print outs of our correspondence and notes he took on our phone conversations, written on yellow legal pads in his eerily calligraphic hand. Does this freak me out? No, because I used to wonder how he did it, how he was available to so many people on so many different occasions. Now I know. I also remember that, for all his scrupulous preparation, his conversation was never canned, but rather questing and free. Fred had a very overarching emphasis on egalitarianism, to the degree that his office didn't have a desk because he didn't want to place objects between him and his guests, so he had a sofa and armchairs. And interviewers actually found him to be a tricky subject to interview because he would ask questions of the interviewers instead of giving answers. And this wasn't because he was trying to be evasive or duck their questions. He was just curious about their lives and that was his way of getting closer to people. He pioneered the celebrity selfie long before the age of Kim Kardashian and Taylor Swift. He was in the habit of getting photos with interviewers and would even send them little albums of the time that they spent together. One of your favorite anecdotes that you dropped in here when he was being chauffeur to a PBS executive's house for dinner, and he asked what the driver was going to do between drop off and when it was time to take him back. The driver replied he was just going to wait outside, which is pretty much power for the course for the life of a limo driver. Fred wouldn't hear of it, and he insisted that the driver come into the PBS executive's house to eat dinner with them, and then on the ride back home, Fred sat in the front of the car with the driver. The driver says, Oh, we're passing my house on the way back to Fred's house, and Fred asked if he could stop in and meet his family, and so the driver acquiesced and described it as one of the best nights of his life. He said, Fred played piano for them and chatted with them until late in the night. Again, I've spent weeks researching this episode. I have not found a single, remotely, dark, stormy negative thing about Fred Rogers, which makes me very happy. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in just a moment, king up dinner with Fred. He was a staunch vegetarian for most of his life, and this was for moral reasons. He later said, I don't want eat anything that has a mother really puts the rest of us in an awkward position. That's a health of ways to do do it. And it probably becomes no surprise that Fred Rogers didn't drink or smoke either. He co owned the Vegetarian Times magazine for a time in the eighties, which he sold in the nineties for what was reportedly a healthy prophet good for Fred, and he also took major corporations to task. When Burger King had the guts to parody mister Rogers and one of their ads, how Dare They, Mister Rogers called them out in a big press conference, effectively shaming the company into canceling the ad. Ironically, Tofu Burgers is one of mister Rogers's favorite metals. He was very much a creature of habit. For breakfast, mister Roger, He's usually had milk and cereal or fresh fruit and toast. Lunchtime found the meaning yogurt and crackers or cotted cheese with peaches, and for dinner he often favored tofu and vegetables. And as a result, he kept a very spelt one hundred and forty three pounds, and he reportedly weighed himself each day to ensure that he kept that exactly the same weight. And he told writer Tom Jennold for his profile and esquire, the number one hundred and forty three or one four three means I love you. It takes one letter to say I and four letters to say love and three letters to say you. One hundred and forty three I love you. Isn't that wonderful? So for Fred Rogers, one hundred and forty three wasn't just his weight, but also a sort of cosmic confirmation of who he was. And Jannold later said that Fred would email him from an AOL account, and his AOL address was ZZZ one four three at aol dot com and the zzz signified the fact that Fred slept soundly through the night, and the one forty three was I love you It's incredible. But yes, as I said, Fred Rogers was very much a creature of habit and kept a very strict daily regiment. Uh. In fact, being mister Rogers sort of sounds like being in boot camp. He was up at five thirty every morning for a prayer and some studying. He would do a little writing, make some phone calls, and then he was off to take his daily swim at the Pittsburgh Athletic Club. But naked. Yes, Yes, my favorite part of the it's my favorite part of that Esquire profile. It's just so like it's it's again, just like it's stuff about him that would kind of be creepy and weird. It's like if you actually found out at any point that someone had bad things to say about him. The vegetarianism, the swimming in the nude, the over familiarity with strangers, the obsession with like classical piano, like all of it is something that could very easily be hallmarks of a serial killer. Yeah, you know, and then you're just like, oh, no, just just a sweet weird man. He was definitely eccentric. Yeah, I mean this in this Touch and od profile, I think it opens actually with Anne in the locker room with mister Rogers and mister Rogers is stripping off. I mean, it's a great callback to the opening of the Mister Rogers TV show when he takes off his jacket. It's it's actually brilliant. He's mister Rogers in the dress room, takes off his suit coat, takes off his tie, takes off his shirt, and keeps going, keeps going, and finally he was naked. And Fred looks at the writer Tom jan Oden says, well, Tom, I guess you've already gotten a deeper glimpse into my daily routine than most people have. Amazing. Arguably the most precious part of Fred's day was when he attended to his fan mail, and early in his career, he and his wife Joe Anne would write their responses on the dining room table together fairly quickly, but as the number of letters swelled between fifty and one hundred letters a day, he began to oversee the respects with the help of a personal assistant before personally signing each one himself, but his assistant later clarified that no one received a form letter from mister Rogers. Heather Arnott, who was an assistant on mister rodgers neighborhood, told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette he respected the kids who wrote. He never thought about throwing out a drawing or a letter. They were sacred and often in these fan letters, these kids were pouring their hearts out to him about a loss of a family member or a pet, and Fred felt it was the least he can do to respect them. He later said, anyone who does anything to help a child in his life as a hero to me, and this is really sweet. Some of Fred Rogers fan letters were published in an eighteen ninety six compilation, Dear mister Rogers, does it ever reign in the Neighborhood? And some of them are really cute too. And then, after all this work, mister Rodgers frequently took a midday nap before turning in for bed at nine thirty every night, where he'd sleep for an uninterrupted eight hours, secure in the knowledge that he was the most beloved man on the planet. Now, such a punishing workload was bound to wear on anyone and Fred Rogers expressed his frustration not by swearing, but by uttering mercy, not on like Uncle Jesse from Full House orson in Pretty Woman. It was a one that he said frequently as he sat down the tackle his pile of fan mail. But generally this was the strongest word in his personal lexicon. But that's not to say he lacked a sense of humor, even for body or jokes and gags. Surprisingly, he actually really enjoyed a lot of the mister Rogers parodies. He said that the first time he met Eddie Murphy, who regularly parodied him on SNL as mister Robinson, he threw his arms around the comedian and gave him a giant hug and they took a selfie together with a polaroid, which they showed off on The David Letterman Show, which is hilarious. And Fred told David Letterman that he believed that these parodies were done quote with kindness in their hearts. But it was not easy being mister Rogers when he wasn't writing original music, answering fan mail, or giving an endless stream of the two hundred commencement speeches he delivered at points in his career, fundraising or actually taping the eight hundred ninety five regular season episodes of his show, he would write it, and writing it was a complicated process, more than you'd think. Maxwell King, author of the book The Good Neighbor, The Life and Work of Fred Rogers, wrote in The Atlantic that Fred meticulously chose his words when writing scripts for the show because he wanted to make sure he was communicating in the most effective way to young children who tend to think in extremely literal fashion. This is really interesting the man, and this could lead to some inadvertent miscommunications. And King said that Fred was extraordinarily good at imagining where children's minds might go, adding the mister Rogers wrote a song called you can Never Go down the Drain because he knew that this was a fear shared by many children. In the book, King describes the nine step process that Fred would to translate an ordinary adult sentence to one that Rogers felt would resonate with children by validating their fears and providing what the children needed. So a sentence like it is dangerous to play in the street becomes your favorite. Grown ups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them, and listening is an important part of growing. Another example is that in one episode, there's a scene in a hospital in which a nurse inflating a blood pressure cuff says, I'm going to blow this up, and Fred insisted that they redub the line as I'm going to puff this up with some air, because blow it up might sound like there was an explosion. And then he was worried that children would cover their ears and not hear what was happening. Next once, he enlisted one of his writers to write a manual intended to teach doctors how to talk to children, and this woman worked hard on it, using all of her education and experience in the field of child development. But when she did him her opening, he crossed out what she had written and replaced it with six words you were a child once two. Fred learned early on in his TV career to pretend that he was speaking to just one child. He also made sure to speak at a very specific pace of no more than one hundred and twenty four words per minute. This is thought to be the ideal pace for children ages three to five to process. The speed and clarity also made it extra intelligible. To non native speakers, and many people, including Ricky Martin, credit the show with helping them learn English. Since Fred was so deliberate about his word choice, speed, and cadence, it makes sense that he was not a big fan of ad living. He felt that he owed it to his young viewers to make sure that every word was thought out. It's worth reiterating that Fred Rogers wrote and edited all of the episodes, wrote and saying most of the two hundred songs created, all of the characters, both puppet and human, played most of the significant puppet roles, hosted every episode, produced, and approved every detail of the program, So that's a lot. The show went national a year before another PBS children's juggernaut, Sesame Street, premiere in nineteen sixty nine, and though the two were often lumped together, they were seen as two sides of the same coin. Sesame Street focused on cognitive learning, where Mister Rogers Neighborhood focused on young children's social and emotional needs. Writer Kathy Murlock Jackson said, while both shows target the same preschool audience and prepare children for kindergarten, Sesame Street concentrates on school readiness skills, while Mister Rogers Neighborhood focuses on the child's developing psyche and feelings and sense of moral and ethical reasoning and fashion. I was more influenced by the fashion. Yeah, let's see that. Yeah, Louise was a pretty badass. Oh, I mean Oscar the Grouch in that I aspired to live in a trash can. Much the same way that Fred was strict about the writing on his show, he demanded excellence from his guest stars. After Roger's death, Joe Nigrie, who played the royal handyman in the Neighborhood of Make Believe, told the Associated Press that Fred didn't take kindly to celebrity guests who seemed to be phoning their performances in because they were on a kiddie show. Yeah. I like to imagine as soon as he got off camera he broke into like Arlie Ermi's voice. You call that an inspirational speech, maggot. The guest list for Mister Rogers is impressive. Tony Bennett, Yo Yo Ma, Julia Child went in Marsalis, the cast of Stomp Okay Sure LeVar Burton, Bill Nye, Astronaut, Al Warden. Children's book author Eric Carl magician David Copperfield, among many others. Fred later said of his guests, the thing that I remember best about successful people I've met through all the years is their obvious delight in what they're doing, and it seems to have very little to do with worldly success. They just love what they're doing, and they love it in front of others. Another notable guest of the show was Margaret Hamilton, best known as the Wicked Witch of the West and Wizard of Oz. Fred invited her onto the show in nineteen seventy five because he knew that kids were still terrified of her, as evidenced by the famous band episode of Sesame Street that aired once in nineteen seventy six before being yanked from reruns from being too scary, presumably featuring Margaret Hamilton. Yeah, oh yeah, that was the episode. She had guessed that on Sesame Street and it was so terrifying, and so many parents wrote in the complaint, which was sad because I think the whole episode of her on Sesame Street was about how she was like misunderstood. Yeah, it was so freaky that it was yanked off the air, and for years it was like, oh, on the top ten list of like lost media that p I wanted to see, and it only very recently came out. I think last summer. Somebody found it and put it on YouTube and I watched clips from it, and it is indeed pretty creepy. Yeah, and then later that would serve as the plot of Wicked. Yeah. Woh yeah. Well, we can't talk about fellow humans on Mister rogers neighborhood without discussing mister Speedy delivery himself, Mister McFeeley. That character was named after Fred's maternal grandfather and his own middle name. And Yeah. Years after the show ended, Fred Rogers admitted that he wished he chose in a different name for the delivery man because he was sick of all the dirty jokes that came from it. Mister McFeeley was played by David Nuwell, who was originally hired onto the show as a public relations manager, and Tred apparently liked his vibe and cast him in the role of mister McFeeley basically on the spot and ego eyed. Fans of Mister Rogers have noted that mister Rogers never shakes mister mcfeeley's hand, just once in the series finale, and also during a Christmas special ironic for a man named mcpheely. The other main human on Mister rodgers neighborhood is the beautiful and talented Lady Aberlin. She is King Friday's niece who acted as kind of a surrogate older sibling or parent to the characters in the Land of Make Believe. Lady Aberlin was played for thirty three years by Betty Aberlin, who came from more of an avant garde underground arts background than the one might expect for a Mister Rodgers intimate. She owsted a late night radio show with free jazz and spoken word pieces in the mid seventies, and she also worked with the comedy deal, The Smotherest Brothers and most interesting to Me. She is a long standing association with director Kevin Smith and has appeared in guest roles in the movies Dogma, Jersey, Curl Zach and Mary Make a Porno, and Red State. And the only other truly reoccurring live character most of the time on Mister Rogers are his fish, which he always made a big display of feeding, presumably saving the lives of countless family goldfish given the children as pets these frequent reminders to feed the fish. It probably helped Fred always announced when he was going to feed the fish because he once received a letter from a five year old blind fan reading, Dear mister Rodgers, please say when you're feeding your fish, because I worry about them. I can't see if you're feeding them, so please say you're feeding them out loud. And this was always one of my favorite moments of the show because it was always so quiet and meditative, and these little moments was something that Fred made true to include throughout the show, and in fact, in the intro to each episode, you'll notice the stoplight, which he inexplicably has in his living room is always on yellow when he walks in, and that's a subliminal reminder to both kids and parents to slow down, which I thought was cute. Fred had absolutely no fear of dead air. In one episode, he invited a marine biologist to teach kids about fish and specifically how they eat, so for one segment, they wanted to demonstrate how fish ate, so they tossed the mic into the tank and waited, but the fish weren't hungry. The biologist started to tap the tank and try to get the fish to eat, but they just weren't own for it, and the crew thought, you know, we'd probably need to retape this, but Fred didn't want to. He thought it was a great lesson in teaching kids the importance of being patient. And interestingly, a Yale study examining the difference between Sesame Street viewers and Mister Rodgers viewers determined that kids who watched Mister Rogers had a much higher what's called tolerance of delay, meaning they were more patient. So that's interesting. But mister Rodgers was very against quick cuts, and Tom jannatas quoted as saying he was in favor of media being human, meaning there should be mistakes, there should be accidents, and if that was the way it was filmed, then that was how it should stay. Many television critics have noted how Fred used time in a different way than many other TV hosts. He would do things like, we don't know how long a minute is here, let me show you, and then just sit there for a minute of dead air. And I can't even call it dead air because that implies that it's wasted time. It's just slow time. And there was another lengthy segment where Fred's showcases his breathing technique. It's all part of zen, the art of mister Rogers, and he later said, I think silence is one of the greatest gifts we have. And I mean, if you watch mister Rogers now and compare it to like, I'm sure any Bluey whatever, what are the New Kids shows. I don't even know. The speed of it is just it's unlike anything on the air now. But it's amazing. But it like it's kind of has like the joy of painting quality to it. It's very calming him in the Beckett Samuel Beckett, Oh my god, every word is like an unnecessary stain on nothingness, waiting for mcpheely. And there we come to mister Rogers true co stars his sweaters. I am hard pressed to name a man more strongly associated with my favorite garment. Maybe Bill Cosby, but I think that honor has been revoked at this point. Everyone can picture in your mind's eye the way that mister Rodgers zips his card again all the way up at the beginning of each episode and then brings the zipper back down to mid level, much more casual. They originally had buttons on his cardigans for the first couple episodes, but they took too long to fasten, so he switched his zippers very smart. This is also the part of the show where he switches his shoes from wingtips to sneakers, which I had assumed was part of his way of signaling if they were going to have a fun, relaxing time together. That's only part of the reason. This satorial choice was also dictated partially by necessity because his fancy dress shoes made too much noise when walking on the set, so he switched to Sperry topsiders or convers And for those of you who want to get the fool Fred Rogers look, I have bad news for you. You cannot. For the majority of the series, his cardigans were made especially for Fred by his mother Nancy. We mentioned at the top of the episode that she did her part for the war effort during World War Two by knitting sweaters for the local boys serving in Europe to keep them warm, and she continued to knit a sweater a month for the rest of her life, giving them out to her family members, including Fred, as Christmas presents, and Fred ultimately amassed a collection of more than twenty distinctive Varsity Next sweaters, which and he wore them on TV as his way of saying hello to his mother, which is adorable. It's like Carol Burnt tugging her ear to say hello to her grandmother in the every episode. Yeah. During one episode of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, Fred actually explained the background of his sweaters, holding one up to the camera so they could do a close up on his mother's handywork, and he told viewers she makes sweaters for many different people. That's one of the ways that she says she loves somebody. Though Fred's mother, Nancy, died in nineteen eighty one, he continued to wear her sweaters for many, many years, but after a while, sadly, they started to become afraid and decidedly not camera worthy, and finding replacement cardigans for Mister Rogers proved oddly difficult. The colors needed to be appropriately vibrant and the zipper exceptionally smooth so wouldn't get stuck and delay the shoot, and they really found themselves stuck until one day the show's art director, a woman and Kathy Borland, saw a postal worker walking down the street in Pittsburgh, and she realized that his cardigan was a perfect facsimile of Fred's. And she called the local post office supply and got a bunch of standard issue mail carrier cardigans. I guess those were really close to the style those mom made. And she got them all done in white so she could die them herself. And hilariously, this art director, Kathy Borland, she'd worked as an art director on George Romero's Day of the Dead, making outfits for five hundred zombies. So she's made outfits for five hundred zombies and mister Rogers, I cannot imagine that there's anybody else on the planet who can claim that honor. But dyeing these sweaters was no easy task. She had to buy an industrial size soup pot from a restaurant supply company, which, at seventy dollars, took a sizeable chunk out of her budget. And then she would throw all these white sweaters in in the backyard and mix it with a giant yard stick like the mom from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. I guess you know the scene. Then she them dry on a clothesline in her backyard and that was that, and she waxed the zippers herself for a smoother pool, but she later told the Smithsonian dot Com, every time he put that sweater on during a shoot, my heart would go into my feet, and it was only after he got a smooth zip that she could relax. And speaking to the Smithsonian, Fred donated one of his cardigans, the red one, to the National Museum of American History, in nineteen eighty four, where it is still on display for all to see. We should get you a red zip cardigan. I know, I'm surprised I don't have one, although I don't you know what, I don't really look good in cardigans. I look a little too. I look like I mean it. You would look good in cardigans because everyone would know you didn't mean it. He looked like you mean it. You know what I mean? I do? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do. Mister Rogers Neighborhood is one of the longest running programs in TV history, having produced nearly nine hundred episodes, almost five times as many as Friends. Until nineteen seventy five, Rogers and his colleagues were making sixty five episodes a year, and then, presumably buckling under this punishing workload, he took a hiatus until nineteen seventy nine, at which point he produced around fifteen episodes a year on average until two thousand and one. During this hiatus we mentioned earlier, he attempted to launch Mister Rogers After Dark, featuring a friend of the Pod, Leslie Frost, but he decided that he wanted to stop for good during this hiatus, essentially feeling that he after doing five hundred and eighty five episodes at that point over like eight years, he said all he'd had to say. But by nineteen seventy nine he felt moved to return for an unusual reason. This was soon after the Christopher Reeves Superman movies became a big success at the box office, leading to scores of children tying homemade capes around their backs and try and imitate him, which obviously didn't end well if they were jumping from great heights. A lot of kids were injured killed around this time, and Fred Rogers was outraged because he felt that the producers of these films were being irresponsible by not going out of their way to explain to them that Superman and every other superhero were just pretend. So he vowed to do a return of his show for a themed week of superhero programming, and these themed weeks were really the hallmark of the latter years of the show, tackling difficult topics. It is like death, divorce, children, getting lost, and even the nuclear arms race. So say what you will about Fred Rogers, but he was unflinching when it came down to giving kids really the truth, just phrased in a different way of divorce. He said, some people get married and after a while they're so unhappy they don't want to be married anymore, which is accessible and unvarnished. He wants said the world is not always a kind place. That's something all children need to learn for themselves, whether we want them to or not. But it's something they really need our help to understand. Can you say the grim embrace of the grave? Can you say every living thing dies alone? The most stark example of this comes just a few months into the shows around on June seventh, nineteen sixty eight, just days after Robert Kennedy was killed by the CIA. Can you say the CIA killed MLK? Can you say what was the LSD dosing? Is it mk Ultra? Can you say mk Ultra Project Monarch Children can you say, candidate, can children? Can you say Manchurion? Children? Did you know that there's a very good chance Lee Harvey Oswald was given LSD when he was stationed and sorry, that's possibly true though, because he was at one of the bases where they were doing that. Yeah. Yeah, Have you read Acid Dreams? The book? Oh man, that's a good one. You should look that one up. Anyway. In this episode, they're in the Land of make Believe when Daniel Tiger gives Lady Aberlin a balloon which they inflate and let the air out slowly, and then Daniel drops, what does assassination mean? Is wild to watch? And do you think they know? Because he didn't add lib is actually she is actually just acting? But you know she has taken him back. She says, have you heard that word a lot today? He says yes, and I didn't know what it meant, and she said, well, it means somebody getting killed in a sort of surprise way supposed to a deliberate way. Fred would explain his decision to tackle the subject by saying, I felt I had to speak to the families of our country about grief, A plea not to leave children isolated and at the mercy of their own fantasy of loss and destruction. Children have very deep feelings, just the way parents do, just the way everybody does, and are striving to understand those feelings and to better respond to them is what I feel is a most important task in the world. He spoke about death on the show when he went to feed his fish and discovered that one of them had died. They didn't fake that that fish was really dead, and they zoom in on it, motionless at the bottom of the tank, and again, in a way that could scan, very creepy, dispassionately points out all of the ways he knows it's dead, which is like a mondy python sketch. Children, if you want a body not to float to the surface, you have to puncture the lungs so that the eric can let out of them, and that way it'll sink easier. Can you say, lime, Jesus? And then he went to the backyard and buried it, and he used that moment to explain and hopefully alleviate children's fears about death. Sixty eight was a rough year for kids and the rest of the United States. King Friday thirteenth, at one point was Roger's entryway into the concept of civil disobedience. He erected a wall in his kingdom topped with barbed wire in an effort to keep out the changers, repeatedly saying down with the changers because we are on top, which would later become the official platform of the GOP. Ultimately, the neighborhood is saved through civil disobedience. Lady Aberlin and the other puppets send King Friday balloons over the wall with cards that read love and Peace, which I think was a John Lennon yoko on an art piece. Also around that same time. Tolerance was obviously a cornerstone of mister Roger's neighborhood, and many episodes revolved around the topic of racism, but Fred was a master of the show don't tell approach. One particularly potent example was filmed less than a year after the assassination of MLK. It was a small moment when Rogers invited his African American friend, Officer Clemens, to cool his feet off in his inflatable swimming pool. And this is not long after footage of segregated pools had made the rounds in the news. With Irate a white hotel owners dumping bleach and other cleaning chemicals into their pools filled with black, peaceful protesters. Pools had recently become desegregated, but the controversy remained, and so the image of these two men, one white and one black, doing something as simple as dipping their bare feet into the same pool was fairly radical and a beautiful way to demonstrate to children that it was okay for people who were different to share not just a pool, but to share space and ultimately friendship. The character of Officer Clemens is really interesting to me. He was played by a singer dancer named Tis Clemens, who became one of the first African Americans to have a recurring role on the children's television show, and Fred's choice to make the African American character on the show a cop was obviously an intentionally loaded choice. This African American character was both a beloved neighbor to mister Rogers and also a respected authority figure. Francois Clemens himself later admitted, I've always felt that the police were the most dangerous people in the neighborhood. Real talk. Yeah, and Fred approached Francois early in the show's development about playing a part on the show, and Francois initially blanched because he was worried it would interfere with his singing career, and Fred used to tease him about that for years, but he also said it was the moment that he fell in love with the guy. Francois claimed that mister Rogers told him it was then that I knew you wouldn't kiss my ass, which is a very unmister Rogers thing to say, but he claimed those were his exact words. The pair remained close for the rest of Fred's life, but they did have a kind of tense moment early in their career. Francois marriage dissolved in the early seventies when he came to the realization that he was gay, and to use his own words, he couldn't pray it away, so Francois began to embrace the side of himself and frequented gay bars, and someone associated with the Mister Rogers Neighborhood's show apparently found out about this and relate it to Fred, who told Francois at the time that he could no longer go there if he wanted to remain on the show for fear of some kind of scandal, and Fred also told him that if he came out publicly, he couldn't be on the show anymore either. However, there were no hard feelings between the Fair and Francois later said in the Morgan Neville documentary very tearfully that he looked at Fred as his surrogate father, and in nineteen ninety three, when he retired from the show as Officer Clemens, they recreated the pool moment together, a friendly reminder that basic rules of neighborliness and civility remained unchanged. How do you feel about that? It's not great. It's not great. No. I don't think it was necessarily Fred's feelings about homosexuality. I think it was his feet year of what other people thought about homosexuality, potentially damaging what he had built, which was for the greater good of children. Yeah. I don't know. Yeah, it's a tough that's a tough one. Yeah, there's no way to really like. I assume he didn't speak on it. I've never heard him speak on it. This was it was a pretty sizable element of the Morgan Leval documentary. Not sizeable, but they go in on it fairly extensively. It's also worth noting that, like for being progressive racially, that's a dimension of some you know, sects of Christianity, whereas homosexuality is pretty much a no in all of them. So it might have come down to his faith and sex outside of marriage for quite a few especially back then, you know, it was yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean, I don't know, it is it's really thorny. I mean it was Stonewall sixty nine around the exact same time they shooting the scene in the pool. Yeah. So, but I mean, you know, that's still a kind of an underappreciated part of civil rights of this era. So yeah, I don't know, it's it's interesting to think about. It's all conjecture, right, Speaking of dead air, two straight guys talking about another long dead white guy's thoughts on homosexuality. Well, I actually just found a Clemens quote from the book Peaceful Neighbor Discovering the Countercultural Mister Rogers. Did you quote that? Oh? No, I want to hear it. This is kranzois Clements talking about mister Rogers telling him about the not to be on the show, and he said, I want you to know, Frank, that if you're gay. It doesn't matter to me at all, I said, but if you're going to be on the show, you can't be out as gay. People must not know. Many of the wrong people will get the worst idea, and we don't want them thinking and talking about you like that. If those people put up enough fuss, then I couldn't have you on the program. It's not an issue for me. I don't think you're less of a person. I don't think you're immortal immoral. Oh yeah, I don't know. I don't think you're immortal, but there's only one way to find out. If those people put up enough fuss, then I couldn't have you on the program. It's not an issue for me. I don't think you're less of a person. I don't think you're immoral. Um. Yeah, So I think it really did come down to wanting to protect the show, and he told him. He said, you know, this doesn't mean our friendship has to end. He said, man, this, I mean, this is the depressing part. Clement says that Roger told him talent can give you so much in this life, but that sexuality thing can take it all away faster than you can ever imagine. You can have it all if you can keep that part out of the limelight. So that's that's interesting. I mean he did suggest we talked about you talking about him suggesting that he marry a woman. No, I didn't hear that. Yeah, I'd married a woman. Yeah, and that's what it says. He said, Fred told him, have you thought about getting married? And then he said people do make some compromises in life. And so he did marry a woman in nineteen sixty eight, but then they divorced in seventy four. And apparently Fred later he stopped saying that he should remain in the closet and he said you should find a gay man to be happy with. But he still refused to address it on the show. So, and I guess in the book, this book Peaceful Neighbors also talks about I was wrong about the Presbyterian thing, that the Pittsburgh Church, the sixth Presbyterian Church was apparently actually relatively welcoming to gay people of that faith. Oh oh god, this is this is this is great. On Clemen's last appearance on the show, Rogers wrapped up the show with his standard clothes lines. You know, you make every day a special day. Just by being you and I like you just the way you are. And Clemens asked him when they were finished taping. He said, you know, you were looking right at me when you said that. Have you been talking to me or were you talking to me? And Fred said, yes, I have been talking to you for years, but you heard me today. Oh yeah, that was that was rough. That was like a very sweet part of the episode. Yeah, part of the movie. It is unfortunate that it came down to business decisions, but take some cold comfort in the fact that you know he was not personally bigoted in any way. As you meditate on that. We'll be right back with more too much information after these messages, and then we're going to talk about how Fred Roger was saved PBS, the VCR and pave the way for Netflix. Fred Rogers became a crucial pillar for the burgeoning PBS network in the early seventies, but there is a decent chance the network wouldn't have even existed without him. In nineteen sixty nine, he quite literally saved the network basically single handedly. PBS had first been proposed by President Lyndon Baines Johnson in nineteen sixty eight as part of his sweeping social programs known as the Great Society. But when President Nixon took office in nineteen sixty nine, he wanted to cut the burgeoning networks funding from twenty two million to nine million, suppose the leading effort to find money for the war that he'd just been elected to end. Seeking an articulate order who is sure to tug at the heartstrings, the leadership at PBS taffed Fred Rogers, who was really relatively unknown at that point, to speak before congressional hearing and essentially plead for funding. And the clip of the speech from nineteen sixty nine has made the rounds on the Internet for many years, at surfaces every now and then, basically because it's like watching the end of a Robin Williams movie. I encourage everyone to pause this right now and go look it up, because it's really something special. I might punch some of an in in here. It's everything about it is just so cartoonish. The chairman of the committee is this gruff senator from Rhode Island named John pass Story, and he is just cartoonishly dickish. It's day two of these hearings, and he is just wildly unmoved by the plight of PBS. He's just so unsympathetic, and he's so over everything. He's sick of people reading testimony they've submitted, he's sick of the whole discussion, and he seems like he's inches away from telling the speakers to scram or get off his lawn. He's just hilarious. In fact, he literally says, all right, Rogers, you got the floor, like kick things off. It's really funny. And he's just a beautiful foil for Fred Rogers, who you know as a man who's often described as a cartoon character brought to life. He's just the perfect depiction of a wide eyed Jimmy Stewart esque innocent and within six minutes Fred reduces the Senator and the rest of the committee to a tiery puddle. He speaks simply and eloquently about his goals to instill confidence in children and lead by example, to show them how to manage their feelings in healthy ways to ensure they become productive members of society. He says, in part, this is what I give. I give an expression of care every day to each child to help him realize that he is unique. I end the program by saying you've made this day a special day by just your being you. There's no person in the whole world like you, and I like you just the way you are. And I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service. Could I tell you the words of one of the songs, which I feel is very important? Yes, this has to do with that good feeling of control which I feel that children need to know is there. And it starts out what do you do with the mad that you feel? And that first line came straight from a child. I work with children doing puppets in very personal communication with small groups. What do you do with the mad that you feel? When you feel so mad you could bite, when the whole wide world seems oh so wrong and nothing you do seems very right. It's great to be able to stop when you've planned a thing that's wrong and be able to do something else instead, And think this song. I can stop when I want to, can stop when I wish, can stop, stop, stop anytime. Know that there's something deep inside that helps us become what we can. Past story who obviously has never watched mister Rogers show before, is visibly teary by the end of Fred's a few minutes on the stand, he says, no, no no, I'm supposed to be a pretty tough guy, and this is the first time I've had goosebumps in the last two days. I think it's wonderful. I think it's wonderful. Looks like you just earned a twenty million dollars have. The room fills with applause, and Fred smiles sheepestly. Cue the strings. It's like the end, I guess, the end of a Rob Williams movie. It's a beautiful moment, one that has been viewed millions of times on YouTube. Usually it's shared in times when the arts funding is on the chopping block, which is every couple of months, and it's also studied by public relations experts and academics because Fred is just so compelling. Oh sweet man, right, I don't think I've really great put together? How much he kind of sounds like John Waters. Yeah, it's really a beautiful moment. Word of Fred's testimony reached Richard Nixon himself, who was so impressed that he appointed Fred the chair of the White House Conference on Children and Youth and more Germaine to our interests. It really kind of helped make Fred a household name. That was kind of one of the things that really launched him in the public consciousness. So by now probably a decent number of listeners are aware of Fred Rogers' role in saving PBS thanks to that viral clip. But a lesser known fact is that Fred Rogers also helped save the VCR and pave the way for Netflix. Is there no end to this man's string of good deeds? This was part of another court case in the late seventies that actually pertained to Sony's Betamax machine, which is the long dead competitor to the VCR. More than just the home video market, Beta Max was revolutionary for allowing consumers to tape live TV and watch it as often as they liked, whatever they liked, and the studios weren't exactly thrilled with this, and in nineteen seventy nine, Disney and Universal filed a lawsuit against Sony, claiming that the Betamax machine was a copyright violation that would cost the millions of dollars per year due to unauthorized duplication of materials. This case, Universal Studios versus Sony Corporation of America, also known as the Betamax case, went all the way to the Supreme Court in nineteen eighty three, and by my tally, the arguments were heard for a full year. But one of the most compelling of these arguments came from, of course, mister Rogers, and he defended the use of the VCR because he reasoned that it allowed working parents to sit down with their kids when they were home at night and watched television together as a family. Fred said, I've always felt that with the advent of all this new technology that allows people to take the neighborhood off the air, they then become much more active in the programming of their families 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 and just the way you are, you can make healthy decisions. I feel that anything that allows a person to be more active in the control of his or her life in a healthy way is important. And the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Sony, making it legal to record a broadcast for later use and they even referenced Fred's testimony and their concluding statement. And this also, according to people with better legal minds than I possess, claim that this crucial breakthrough and home video paved the way for Netflix. So there you go. Fine, but that's not all. Yes, Netflix isn't the only thing mister Rogers has gifted us. Gave us an early break to future Oscar nominee and repeating two time Batman Michael Keaton, imagine how wild it would have been if I said Christian Bale or Adam West when Adam West and Burward were having all their weird orgies at the height of their yes, they had been on and done the BATWATTUSI with mister Rogers. Anyway, Michael Keaton's first job is as a volunteer stage hand on Mister Rogers Neighborhood, where he helped run the Picture Picture Machine and appeared as Purple Panda a lot of alliteration in that particular summary. Keaton, as expected, had a wonderful experience on the show, later said that Fred Rogers was one of the nicest, authentically good people you've ever met. Following Fred's death, Keaton, who at this point had not only been Batman, but Beetlejuice as well, and let us not forget Multiplicity, Guy Rice, Mister Mom and the rest at the Rest. He was tapped to host the PBS special Fred Rogers America's Favorite Neighbor, and appeared in another special celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the show, Mister Rogers, It's You. I like haven't really talked about the surprisingly rowdy atmosphere on the set of the show. Thanks to the fun loving and not vegetarian Minister crew. They love to play pranks on each other and also mister Rogers, and given his personality, you know that that tracks would be fun to get one over on your svelt Vegetarian Daily five thirty swim Bossum. Once Michael Keaton placed a blow up sex stall into the closet on the set, the same one where mister Rogers retrieves his card again at the start of the episode. Fred found it during a taping and then began waltzing around with it on the set before bringing it back to the closet. He's got an idiosyncratic sense of humor, friend does He was a big Monty Python fam in the Morgan Neville documentary. There's a story of a crew member who loved to steal people's camera, take a picture of himself mooning the lens, and then return it to where he found it. This was in the days when you had to, you know, drop your film off to get developed, so that that that's a long conjo a joke takes weeks to land. The stage hand did this to an unsuspecting mister Rogers, mooning his camera while wearing what they would you believe in? According to the anecdote, was a King Friday the Thirteenth mask. Mister Rogers said nothing about it for months until Christmas came around, and then at the holiday party he presented the crew member with that very photo enlarged to poster size. This is probably my favorite bit. Fred Rogers was also champion of another media legend and Pittsburgh icon, George A. Romero, who brought us Night of the Living Dead, Day of the Dead, many other dead themed films, Donna the Dead, Martin, the Crazies, what other stuff that he film in it around Pittsburgh Monroeville. Technically, mister Rogers hired George Romero when he was fresh out of college needed a filmmaker to create a series of short segments for mister rogers neighborhood. Romero later said Fred was the first guy who trusted me enough to hire me to actually shoot film. Titles were stuff like how light bulbs are made and mister Rogers gets a ton selectomy. Romero considered the latter, shot on location in hospital, his first major production. He added, I still joke that mister Rogers gets a ton Selectomy is the scariest film I've ever made. And then in this really heartwarming Fred attended a screening of Romero's breakthrough film Don of the Dead. God, can you imagine what he thought of that? Did we get his capsule review of that? I would love? George Romero would later cast another mister Rogers, vet Don Brockett, who played Chef Brocket as a zombie in Day of the Dead and eighty five. That guy also had roles in Flashdance, Fletch Lives, and Silence of the Lambs on the as one of the one of the incarcerated gentlemen sharing a block with Hannibal. So your degrees of Hannibal Elector and mister Rogers is one doesn't surprise me. In a way. Another unexpected friend of mister Rodgers neighborhood was Coco the Gorilla. Yes, the beloved primate who learned to communicate with a thousand words of vocabulary and American sign language. Big fan of mister Rogers neighborhood, Coco was and Fred found out about this and decided to visit her and shoot a segment, and as soon as he entered the room, Coco signed the words love you visit Coco Love before hugging him. She was so familiar with the show that one of the first things she did was unzip his cardigan and remove his shoes, just like he does at the beginning of the program, and reportedly Coco got very upset upon hearing the news of Fred's death in two thousand and three, which is something that she also felt about Robin William's death. I'm gonna call bullshow on that. I mean, who's going around telling gorillas that famous people died? Yeah, that's part of your zookeeper duties. Every day you wake up and check TMZ and you go read it to Cocoa to see if she can sign something tragic about it. Did you ever read the the Gawker thing? Though? When when Robin died BuzzFeed did. These photos of Coco Gorilla mourning the loss of Robin Williams are incredibly moving. So the Gawker post was it was all written in Gorilla, Coco, Coco, sad, Cocoa, water eye, uh Man, funny Coco, Cocoa man, funny, Cocoa hug Man funny man, hug Coco. People want water eye, people eye Coco, people water eye, water eyewater people want. And it just ends with the repeated phrase people want, people want, But what people want? Are you quite moving? Tales of mister rogers healing powers, both in person and through the TV are a legendary. There's a story of a young boy with severe autism who broke his lengthy silence by saying X the Owl, one of the names of mister Rogers' most popular puppets. That was enough for the boy's father to make the trip to meet the TV legends, and so he said to his son, let's go to the neighborhood and make believe. And after meeting Fred Rogers, the boy slowly began speaking and reading, and the father believed that mister Rogers saved his son's life, and then there's a story of actress Lauren two Is I think is how you say her name. That's probably not how you say her name. She's a veteran of the show The love Boat, and she also felt that mister Rogers saved her life. She'd left The love Boat at the height of its popularity during her struggles with substance abuse, and she said that the morning that she hit rock bottom, she happened to look at the TV and see the opening of Mister Rogers Neighborhood, and she later described the moment as quote God speaking to her through the instrument of mister Rogers, and felt moved to get sober, which she's been ever since. And if this isn't enough to make you believe in miracles, then listened to the story of Beth Usher, a young woman who was suffering up to one hundred seizures daily due to a brain issue, and for reasons I don't personally understand, watching Mister Rogers Neighborhood alleviated her symptoms, and in the lead up to a brain surgery to try to correct the issue, her mother contacted Fred Rogers for assigned photos and encouraging gift. Rogers was extremely moved and called the little girl that very night, and he spoke to her both as himself and has his puppets, and he sent her a giant box of memorabilia from his show. And then not only that, he went and visited her in the hospital, and the two remained friends for the rest of Fred's life. But perhaps the most famous child associated with mister Rogers is Jeff Arlinger, who appeared on the show as a ten year old in nineteen eighty one in his electric wheelchair, which he used as a result of the spinal tumors that limited his mobility, and in one of the most unforgettable scenes from the series, he and mister Rodgers have what I believe to be an impromptu duet on the song It's You I Like. You know, it's you I like. It's not the things you wear, you know, all the things, not the way you do your hair, the way's at the Billy Joel's song anyway, But they altered the lyrics for that moment too, It's you I Like, not your fancy chair, And the moment was highlighted in Morgan Neville's twenty eighteen documentary And It's Not a Dry Eye In the house folks. The director later commented, Fred often said that this was his favorite moment of the show. It was normalizing the kind of thing that we tend to brush under the carpet in our society. Fred felt, the differences are all superficial underneath it all, we all have the same fears and all have the same hopes. He looked at people as humans first and our physical conditions second. And there's also a very touching story from Tom Jannaud's Esquire profile where Fred meets a boy with cerebral palsy who was I think also abused by some of his caretakers, so he was both physically and emotionally in a very tough place. And at one point during their visit, the boy has some kind of an emotional crisis and needed to leave the room, and when he came back, Fred said to him, I would like you to do something for me. Would you do something for me? And on his computer that he uses to speak, the boy said yes, and mister Rogers said, I want you to pray for me? Will you pray for me? And the response blew this boy's mind because he was so used to being the object of prayers and being pitied and to quote the Peace. Ever since then, he keeps mister Rogers in his prayers and doesn't talk about wanting to die anymore because he figures mister Rogers is close to God and if mister Rogers likes him, that must mean God likes him too. And Tom Jenna, the journalist, praised Fred for knowing how to get the boy to feel better about himself. But Fred stops him in the middle of this praise and says, oh, Heavens, no, I didn't ask for prayers for him. I asked for me. I asked him because I think anyone who has gone through the challenges that he is gone through must be very close to God. I asked him because I wanted his intercession. Yeah. Fred's sons later admitted that it could sometimes be difficult living with someone who's effectively the second Christ in their words, and yet because in the immortal words of slipknot people equals. There were some who have dared to suggest that mister Rogers I'm glad I got slip slipnot reference to our mister Rogers episode. There are some who dared to suggest that mister Rogers was maybe not a good influence on children. In fact, perhaps he was even harmful for children, much in the same way that the other child growing experts of Fred Zara, especially Benjamin Spock, were later accused of fostering a lazy, self obsessed generation of kids. Some have leveled similar accusations that Fred for convincing viewers that their specialness is inherent, therefore they don't actually need to work for it and foster that specialness. Allow me to quote discussion Fred about mister Rogers on the Yahoo Answers website, which opens with this passage. Mister Rogers spent years telling little creeps that he liked them just the way they were. He should have been telling him there was a lot of room for improvement. Nice as he was and as good as his intentions may have been, he did a disservice. And this sentiment was echoed by a professor at Louisiana State University by the name of Dawn Chance, and he actually committed his feelings to the pages of the Wall Street Journal in a two thousand and seven article called Blame It on mister Rogers, Why young adults feel so entitled? And in the PC he states his belief that mister Rogers created a quote culture of excessive doting and as supposed to proof. Professor Chant said that the many Asian born students in his class except lower grades as an indication that they need to work harder, and he attributes this work ethic in part to the fact that they didn't grow up watching mister Rogers. And he contrasts this with American students infected by Fred Rogers, who quote hit you up for an a because they came to class and they feel they worked hard. This world owes you nothing. You have to work and compete. If you want to be special, you'll have to prove it. So that is according to the Wall Street Journal. Believe it or not, mister Rogers was actually called a task for his message of acceptance on tolerance during his own lifetime, and he clarified and all he meant by all the special business was a secular way of expressing that you are a beloved son or daughter of God. He said, your special means you don't have to do anything sensational for people to love you. And for Fred, love was elemental. He's quoted as saying love is at the heart of everything, all learning, all parenting, all relationships, love and the lack of it, and one of his favorite quotes is from the book The Little Prince. It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. What is essential is invisible to the eyes. But nothing gold can nothing all that glitters, nothing gold can fade. Makes cliche which all the glitters is gold is not gold? Stay gold, pony boy. It must have dawned on Fred Rogers by the dawn of the twenty first century that we didn't deserve him. So yeah, so by the turn of the turn of the century. In the year two thousand, he decided he was ready to retire the age of seventy two. The final episode of the show was taped that December and aired on August thirty first, two thousand and one. In typical understated Fred Rogers fashion, there was no publicity about it, no media on set, and then less than two weeks later nine to eleven. Fred felt compelled to make a public statement about nine to eleven, which he did on the first anniversary of the attacks, although he did not mention them by name. Speaking to adult viewers, he told them, I'm so grateful to you for helping the children in your life to know that you'll do everything you can to keep them safe. This proved to be his final television visit. Though it is so ungodly sad, so we're gonna just gloss over it for ours, yes, not yours. Fred's wife Joanne said that he'd seemed somewhat depressed after he stopped doing the show, and she would ask him about it, and he would respond by saying, I miss my playmates, which is crushing. Making things worse, He began to experience intense stomach pains around this time, and in December two thousand and two, shortly after the airing of his last TV message, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He underwent surgery the following month, reportedly delaying it slightly so that he could serve as Grand Marshal of the two thousand and three Rose Parade with the creator of Candid Camera, Art Link Letter and Bill Cosby, so that that didn't age well. But these medical efforts failed to slow the spread of the disease, and Fred spent his last weeks studying the Bible and ruminating, pondering, pondering. One night, while speaking to his wife, he evoked the story of the Sheep and the Goats. The metaphor from the Bible, in which God is the shepherd, separating the cheeps from the goats, in other words, and undesirables from the desirables. I guess there's the message of that from the bad, because from the bad, what's so bad about goats? Goat cheese is delicious, bait, trash You God. They have a new sound of the text notification from you. I'm I'm upgrading God, downgrading God from an enemy of the blood. Just under Jeffrey Katzenberg, this passage is paraphrase and knocked and boiled down to whatever you did for the least of your brethren you did to me, which is you know, the Fred Rogers ethos as well. In his final weeks, Rogers asked his wife joe Anne if he was a sheep or a goat, and she assured him that he was the former. I just think it's it's it's poignant that even looking back on his entire life, he was so humble that he wasn't sure yeah that he had yeah, you know yeah. To find that really sad, not tragic, but very fitting of the kind of guy who was. I guess, well, you know, I mean, it's it's He's very human. Everybody has doubts. Everybody, even somebody is universally beloved, can on their deathbed think did I do enough? What did I do? Yeah? What did I do Yeah. An interview with the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Joe Anne talked about their final discussion, in which she let him know that he could leave if he was in pain. She said, there was a feeling of real relief when I could say to him, you know, we're going to be okay, We're going to be all right, the boys will be fine, and I'm going to try to be fine. So when he went, I could feel he went at peace, and even with joy, I really feel he went with joy. Fred Rogers died on February twenty seventh, two thousand and three, at his home in Pittsburgh, with Joanne at his side. Following his death, PBS published a guide for parents for their kids to talk about what had happened, which is something that he surely would want it. Do you think he wrote it in advance? Ah? You know what, I don't know. I haven't been able to confirm that, but it reads a little bit like it. We have some we like to share now because families are so important to young children. They may want to know that Fred Rogers had a loving and caring family. He had a wife, two sons, both of whom were grown and married, and two grandsons. His family helped to care for him all through his illness. Some children may express disbelief, saying, but I just saw him on TV. You can help them understand that when people die, they don't come back to life. But mister Rogers put his programs on videotape so they can be shown over and over again. It's okay to cry in front of children. Fred Rogers talked about seeing his father grieving when his own father, Fred's grandfather died, and that helped him to know that it was okay for men to show their feelings. It helps children know that it's okay for children and adults to cry, but we can deal with our feelings and smile again later on. Remember that Fred Rogers has always helped children know that feelings are natural and normal, and that happy times and sad times are part of everyone's life. Yeah. I said this a moment ago. I just think it's really sweet to hear of Fred's himility. Towards the end of his life, questioning the impact he had and the life he led, and he'd achieved and nearly every accolade a person in his position could receive. In two thousand and two, one year before his death, he was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which is the highest civilian honor in the United States. The medal commemorated his quote contribution to the well being of children, career in public television that demonstrates the importance of kindness, compassion, and learning. He also won two Peabody Awards and any Lifetime Achievement award, and not only that, he basically earned every major television award for which he was eligible. And in nineteen ninety eight he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. In nineteen ninety nine, he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame, and he even had an asteroid named after him. And yet these uncertainties about himself persisted. There's a surprising bit in Morgan Neville's documentary where they found the note from Fred written in uncharacteristically hostile negative terms, and this note was written to himself. It reads, in part, am I kidding myself? But I'm able to write a script again, Am I really just whistling? Dixie? I wonder if I don't get down to it, I'll never really know. Why can'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 torches of the damned trying to create. Oh, well, the hour cometh and now is when I've got to do it. Get to it, Fred, get to it. But don't let anybody ever tell anybody else that it was easy. It wasn't away. The insecurities that plagued Fred as a child remained with him through adulthood, as is the case for probably all of us. And in a way, that's what made Fred so good at connecting with children and the child and all of us. He never forgot how vulnerable it was to be a kid. This is tough, man, Yeah, yeah, he wow, I this is the one that finally got me. Um. Sorry, I'm not expecting this. It's just so sweet man, It's yeah. Not many of these episodes are us, you know, addressing a being of pure love? Well, we did do Dolly last week? Oh that's true. Yeah. He gave dignity to children by respecting their emotions, and in many cases, those emotions from childhood are still there deep inside all of us. And in that way he was able to touch the deepest part of us. And you know, there's no way we're going to sum up all of Fred Rogers like so, I'm not even going to try. But perhaps the biggest legacy are the lumps in the throats of these two thirty five year old men mourning the loss of a TV host we never met who died twenty years ago. Fred Rogers dreamed of using television to build a community out of an entire country, and two decades after his death, that bond between television neighbors is still very real. The expression of care that he offered had a significant effect on generations of children who felt genuinely loved by him. But in classic fashion, he was quick to remind others that they're loved by many who lived outside the television neighborhood too. There was a practice that he routinely employed when speaking to large groups of people, and I'd like to share it with you now so you can hear it in his own words. This was from nineteen ninety seven, when he was accepting the Lifetime Achievement Emmy. It's his biggest honor to date, yet he gave a tremendous gift to the audience. I'd like you all to experience it now. So many people have helped me to come to this night. Some of you are here, some are far away, some are even in heaven. All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take along with me ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are, those who have cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life. Ten seconds of silence. I'll watch the time. Whomever you've been thinking about how pleased they must be to know the difference you feel they've made. It's pretty good, powerful man, I know I know well. To end, I'd like to share a quote generally attributed to Fred Rogers. I've actually been unable to track down the source, but it seems legit, and even if it's not, the spirit of the words is certainly true to his intent. These are mister rodgers three keys to success and happiness. Quote. The first way is to be kind, the second ways to be kind and the third ways to be kind. Sign of a pitch da damn him to hell. Laura's part was my dad came up to me earlier and was like, what's wrong. I just watched some Mister Rodgers clip. Yeah. Yeah, it's fair, it's fair. Who Well, this is a TMA. First, folks, thank you for bearing with us. George and has done his usual heroic job of editing so you did not get through multiple breaks that it took two grown men to repeatedly collect themselves. This has been a special edition of TMI. Oops, all sobbing. I'm Alex Hegel and I'm Jordan Runtalg. We'll catch you next time. Too Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog. The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtog and Alex Hegel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra. If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave us a review. For more podcasts on iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.