The Legacy of Fred Rogers, America's Favorite Neighbor
It has been decades since Mister Rogers first looked into the camera and asked us to be his neighbor, but time has not diminished the impact of his legacy. Fred knew something very important about children and about all of us: that we all have something special to give.
Fred Rogers grew up in Latrobe, in Westmoreland County, a community that exemplified the strong, hardworking, and faith-driven culture of Western Pennsylvania. He always loved Latrobe, which became the basis for the television neighborhood he later created.
His father, James Hillis Rogers, was a successful businessman who was respected and relied upon by many of the local residents. Roger’s beloved mother, Nancy McFeely Rogers, was the daughter of a similarly successful businessman.
The whole family was steeped in a strong sense of service and strong ties to community, friends and relatives. These values remained with Fred throughout his life and became a part of the motivation for his selection of Saint Vincent College in Latrobe as the base for the Fred Rogers Institute.
For a time, Rogers’ childhood was difficult. He was overweight, somewhat shy, and introverted. Although respiratory ailments were not uncommon among children in the heavy-industry environment of Western Pennsylvania, he was sometimes homebound because of his hay fever, even kept inside in air-conditioning during the worst air congestion of the summer months.
He felt his physical and emotional childhood isolation acutely, and this experience in his childhood built the depth of sensitivity and empathy that characterized his life and work as an adult. Grown-ups who noticed his sensitivity as a child advised him: “Just don’t let on you care, then nobody will bother you.”
But young Rogers did care, enormously. He ended up taking great solace, and guidance, from his maternal grandfather. That first Mr. McFeely — the namesake for the character later made famous on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood — patiently taught Rogers to have a sense of self-esteem. He would often say: “Freddie, you make my day very special.”
Rogers’ own sense of loneliness and self-doubt taught him to be aware of the insecurities and needs of small children. What he learned about himself and life as a child — much of it from his loving grandfather — prepared him to help millions of young children later.
By the time Rogers got to high school, he had become more confident and capable. He had developed into an accomplished student and musician, and his popularity grew. He was elected president of the student council in his senior year.
In college, Rogers concentrated on music. His wife, Joanne, who attended Rollins College with him, remembers his exceptional talent:
“He sat right down and started playing some pop stuff. And we were so impressed, because none of us could do that … we couldn’t just sit down and play jazz. And he could. He could do it all. So we were very impressed, and … he was fun.”
During college, Rogers thought he was headed to the Presbyterian seminary and a life of service in the church. But he became captivated with television when, home on vacation from Rollins, he saw television programming for children that appalled him with its simpleminded approach. Rogers immediately saw the great potential of this new technology for education and for helping children — this at a time when almost everyone else just saw TV as a gimmicky source of big profits.
When Rogers graduated from college in 1951, he managed to parlay his degree in music into a job in television in New York, where he soon gained strong experience and began to build a reputation.
Not long after, he learned that his hometown region, Pittsburgh, was about to launch the first community-owned public television station, WQED. Rogers made the unexpected decision — to the surprise of his New York friends who foresaw an important big-city career for him — to go back home and join this fledgling public television effort.
Working off-camera with Josie Carey on a program called The Children’s Corner, Rogers instinctively began to develop ideas, music, puppet characters and narratives that were powerfully and thoughtfully engaging for children. The program was originally intended as a simple introduction of a daily film for children, but it soon became much more, with “Daniel” and “King Friday,” and “X the Owl” and “Henrietta” and “Lady Elaine” — all those figures made familiar and famous later on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
While working full-time at WQED, Rogers attended Pittsburgh Theological Seminary to complete his ministry studies and traveled to New York with Josie Carey to do a weekly live show there.
Importantly, he also started to study child development so that his work would always be grounded in the best practices and meet the very highest standards — standards that he fiercely protected and steadfastly championed in the world of television. Rogers began working with Dr. Margaret McFarland, director of the Arsenal Family and Children’s Center in Pittsburgh. This work brought Fred into professional contact with Dr. Benjamin Spock, Professor Erik Erikson and others who helped provide depth and rigor to his thinking about children and education.
In the early 1960s, Rogers was briefly enticed to a public television job for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Toronto, where he became an on-air performer for the first time. His work there, on a show titled “Misterogers,” helped shape and develop the concept and style of his later program for the Public Broadcasting Service in the U.S.
When Fred and Joanne started their family, they decided to come home to Pittsburgh and raise their two young sons there. He soon introduced “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” produced at WQED-Pittsburgh and initially broadcast regionally through the Eastern Educational Network.
But Rogers soon began building an extraordinarily powerful audience of some national scope for his public television program. When WGBH in Boston held an open house for Fred Rogers and his crew in 1967, they expected about 500 people to attend. They were overwhelmed with 10,000 visitors lined up outside the station.
In 1968, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood became a national program seen on public television all across the U.S. By 1971, Rogers had founded Family Communications Inc., the production company that has managed his work ever since.
After a little more than a decade working in children’s television, Rogers’ reputation as a champion of high standards for children’s programming and for television in general was well established. It was highlighted by his now-famous testimony before Congress in 1969, in which he brought flinty politicians and the rest of the audience to tears with his simple, genuine, and powerful plea for better television for children. The result was a sharp jump in federal funding for PBS. But television continued then, as it does today, to produce programming that research has found to be often damaging and degrading to children. Part of his vision for the Fred Rogers Institute was that it would continue his fight to advance the development and appropriate use of responsible media for young children.
Rogers was known for his creativity, kindness, spirituality, and commitment to the well-being of children. Lovingly called “America’s favorite neighbor,” he used his many diverse talents to inspire, nurture and educate.
The legacy of Rogers is of great importance — not just to children, though it surely is to them, but to all of us. And his thoughtful, sensitive, integrated approach can continue to be of great value to many future generations of children, through his programs and through the work of others who follow his example.
