His television show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” ran from 1968 to 2001, transformed children’s programming, and made Fred Rogers (1928–2003) “America’s favorite neighbor.”
Much of the sensitivity Rogers showed toward his preschool audience derived from his boyhood, when he was overweight, introverted, and prone to sickness. In those days when he felt out of place, his Grandfather McFeely would often console him with the words, “Freddie, you make my day very special.” That sentiment and a character named Mr. McFeely both become integral parts of “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”
After gaining self-confidence in high school—he was elected president of the student council in his senior year—Rogers graduated from Rollins College in 1951, where he majored in music, met his future wife Joanne, and for the first time became interested in television programming for children. Though he was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in 1963, his pulpit became a camera and his congregation a vast audience of children and their parents. Today, the Fred Rogers Institute honors him with these words: “He was able to integrate all his interests and aptitudes—his music, his writing, his creativity, his faith, his sense of family and community, and his sense of service—into a coherent whole that gave a special power to his life and his influence.”
Fred Rogers, the host of the children's television series, "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood." Getty Images
Reading and books also shaped Mr. Rogers and his neighborhood. In 1991, when a fan wrote to ask what reading had most influenced him, Rogers replied with a list of 10 books, all of which offer different insights into the man famous for his sneakers and cardigan sweater.
Children’s Classics
On this list are two childhood books familiar to many adults and children. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 “The Secret Garden” is a tale of a garden and its curative powers for two children, Mary and Colin. This story surely appealed to Rogers for its message of happiness breeding happiness and the power of positive thoughts. As Burnett wrote, “If you look the right way, then you can see that the whole world is a garden.”“Le Petit Prince,” by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, tells the story of a pilot who crashes in a desert and meets a prince visiting earth from another planet. In a 2001 commencement address he delivered at Marquette University, Rogers included this line from the story: “‘L’essentiel est invisible pour les yeux.’ What is essential is invisible to the eye.”
He then said, “I feel the closer we get to knowing and living the truth of that sentence, the closer we get to wisdom. What is essential about you that is invisible to the eye? And who are those who have helped you become who you are today?” At that point, he asked those present, as he asked other audiences, to take a minute of silence and think of all the people who had helped bring them to where they were. This minute of silent contemplation, which Rogers called his invisible gift, so moved his audiences that it left many of them in tears. It was a profound way of teaching gratitude and love.
Faith
Given Rogers’s background and education, we shouldn’t be surprised to see the Old and New Testaments appear on his list. Most mornings, he rose between 4:30 a.m. and 5:30 a.m. to read from the Bible and meditate on particular passages in preparation for his day. He prayed, as his biographer Maxwell King wrote, “for the goodness of heart to be the best person he could be in each of the encounters he would have that day.”
His favorite authors also included Henri Nouwen, the Catholic priest whose books have struck a chord with Christians of different denominations as well as with many non-Christians. Like Rogers, Nouwen was a great communicator, in print rather than through a camera, who sold millions of books. Just as Rogers taught his audience of children, Nouwen wrote of accepting and loving ourselves and those around us. “Over the years,” he noted, “I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection.”
Fred Rogers meets with a disabled boy in the film, “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” a Focus Features release. Jim Judkis/Focus Features
Eclectic Interests
Of the other five books prized by Rogers, one is Erik Erikson’s study “Childhood and Society,” which deepened his knowledge of child psychology. Two books, “The Vegetarian Times Cookbook” and Dr. Theodore I. Rubin’s “The Angry Book,” reflect Rogers’ vegetarianism and his interest in explaining anger and how to handle it to his young audience. “The Works of William Shakespeare” may come as a bit of a surprise to Rogers’s fans, while the often-conversational style and thoughtful reflections of Robert Frost’s “Complete Poems” seem a natural fit.Hopeful that parents would inspire a love of books in their children, Fred Rogers once said, “You know you don’t have to be an actor when you read a book to a child. All you need is to simply love what you’re reading. ... When you share a book with a child, you’re saying to them that books are important. That’s a gift that can nurture them all through their lives.”
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