'The Good Neighbor': A Fred Rogers biography
Maxwell King tells the story of an American icon
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As a preschooler I felt a sense of kinship and pride every time I saw Fred Rogers on our television, speaking to me through his iconic children’s program, “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” I understood that it was just a show, that he and I didn’t actually know each other. But we did share Pittsburgh, the city where I lived and where the show was filmed. And one memorable day, we briefly shared the same room.
The teachers at my preschool had been preparing us for Mister Rogers’ visit for days. They’d decided to put on a concert for him, and we’d all been assigned instruments. I got a triangle. On the big day, we were shepherded into rows of chairs and told to behave our best. When he walked in, I couldn’t look at him hard enough. He sat down and told us how glad he was to hear us play.
Even as a preschooler, I could tell that the sounds we were producing didn’t much resemble music. But Mister Rogers kept smiling. I tried to make eye contact with him, unsuccessfully. Maybe he couldn’t see me? I was off to the side, in the back. To help him notice me, I banged the triangle harder.
We probably “performed” for only a few minutes, but it felt longer. When the teachers signaled us to stop, I lowered the triangle with some relief. Mister Rogers beamed. He thanked us for the concert, and then he talked with us a bit, and then he was gone.
For years afterward, I could steal the spotlight from other kids by announcing that I’d met Mister Rogers. And for years afterward, I felt as if I knew the man.
Maxwell King’s fascinating biography of Fred Rogers, “The Good Neighbor,” showed me just how little I knew about the man beyond his TV persona. (Full disclosure: Back in the 1990s, King was the top editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer while I worked there in various editing roles.)
King paints a portrait of Rogers as the scion of a prominent family in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, who was often taunted by other children because of his parents’ wealth. His father hoped he’d grow up to take over the family’s brick business, but he pursued other interests that would eventually converge in “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood”: Puppeteering — including making his own puppets. Music — he studied piano as a child on a Steinway he’d picked out and his grandmother had paid for, and majored in musical composition at Rollins College. Theology — he earned a degree in divinity and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister. Television — he got a job with NBC just as television was really starting to take off as an entertainment medium, and spent years working in the industry in New York and Toronto, honing his script-writing and production skills, before launching his signature show.
His greatest strength was his ability to see the world eternally from a child’s perspective. An eye doctor whom he’d invited to appear on the show was taken aback when, during a demonstration of an eye exam, Rogers asked whether the doctor could see his thoughts. It was just the sort of question a child might well ask, the doctor said admiringly. Those who worked with Rogers on scripts recalled his attention to detail — for instance, he’d revise a sentence so that it directed children to their “favorite grown-ups” instead of their “parents,” because a child watching the show might not live with their parents.
If I have a quibble with “The Good Neighbor,” it’s that it feels a little journalistic now and then, as if it were written as a collection of stories rather than a cohesive narrative. At more than 400 pages, it also occasionally made me think of a journalistic phrase, “the notebook dump,” that refers to cramming everything one has learned about a topic into an article.
Still, I found this book a fitting homage to a man who helped his countless viewers think about imagination and creativity and feelings and community. He helped me by talking about things that my parents wouldn’t or couldn’t. I think it’s safe to say he’d be pleased that in times of tragedy and disaster, his words are passed from person to person like an amulet: “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”