Mister Rogers built kindness into a daily ritual
Fred McFeely Rogers (20 March 1928 – 27 February 2003) hosted Mister Rogers' Neighborhood from 1968 to 2001—895 episodes of slow talk about feelings, death, and divorce. A Presbyterian minister and musician, he collected a Lifetime Achievement Emmy near the century's end and a U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom two years before he died.
Rogers grew up in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, in a three-storey brick house on Weldon Street. His father, James, headed the McFeely Brick Company, while his mother, Nancy, knitted sweaters for local soldiers fighting in Europe and volunteered at Latrobe Hospital. Asthma often kept the shy, overweight boy indoors, where taunts of "Fat Freddy" gave way to puppets, a ventriloquist dummy, and a piano he took up at five. Latrobe High School turned things around: he led the student council, joined the National Honor Society, and edited the yearbook. After a year at Dartmouth he moved to Rollins College, taking a music degree magna cum laude in 1951.
Watching television at his parents' home that senior year, he disliked it so much that he chose it over seminary, hoping to bend it toward nurturing its viewers. He began at NBC in New York as a floor director, then went back to Pittsburgh's WQED in 1953, building puppets and songs off camera for Josie Carey's The Children's Corner; Daniel the Striped Tiger, King Friday XIII, and Lady Elaine were born there. Meanwhile he studied divinity, graduating in 1962 and taking ordination in 1963 for a ministry aimed at children through the screen. At the University of Pittsburgh he met psychologist Margaret McFarland, who advised on most of his scripts and songs for three decades.
Canada made him a performer. CBC's Fred Rainsberry insisted he appear on camera in the fifteen-minute Misterogers, which ran from 1963 to 1967, and CBC designers created the trolley, sneakers, and castle. Rogers bought the rights and returned to Pittsburgh with his family and sets despite having no job waiting. The Neighborhood went national in 1968; ratings peaked in 1985–86 at 2.1 percent of households, about 1.8 million homes, and by 2016 reruns had made it PBS's third-longest-running programme.
Where Sesame Street, launched in 1969, drilled school-readiness skills, Rogers aimed at feelings and moral reasoning, borrowing ideas from McFarland, Benjamin Spock, Erik Erikson, and T. Berry Brazelton. He tackled a pet's death, a new baby, moving house, and divorce, and two days after Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated he aired a segment about it. Stomach cancer killed him in 2003 at 74; by then he held more than forty honorary degrees and a 1999 place in the Television Hall of Fame.
Source: Fred Rogers
