Four Men

Television brought four men into my little life as a kid.

Four men.

Two were on the same show – Gilligan’s Island. Gilligan and Skipper. Skipper and Gilligan. The skinny oaf and the fat oaf. One who ate glow-in-the-dark glue and the other who’d get mad and swat at people with his hat. When we played at being Gilligan and Skipper, my younger brother and I, I was always Skipper.  The game involved me lying on the top of the couch cushions as my little buddy Gilligan lay on the couch. As was Skipper’s wont, occasionally I fell out of my hammock – off the cushions – to land on Gilligan.

The third was master of a glittering game show – Bob Barker on The Price is Right. They talked a lot about Rice-A-Roni on that show, but what I remember most was the three strikes game people played on the chance to win a car.

I made my own three strikes game and, I’m sure, drove my siblings nuts insisting they play it with me. Other games on the show, notably the big wheel, proved too difficult for me to create out of masking tape and cardboard, though I recall trying mightily.

The fourth man?

Mister Rogers.

Contrary to what you’re thinking, this is not going to turn into a paen for Fred Rogers, nice a man as he is. To tell the truth, I saw enough nice men in my early years, from Mr. Rogers to Skipper and Gilligan to my father to any number of other fathers in the real neighborhood I lived in for Mister Rogers to stand out as a spectacular example. I remember thinking he was a nice man who loved puppets and had a trolley and – inexplicably – a TRAFFIC LIGHT in his house.

Maybe he wouldn’t have appreciated the demeaning behavior between Skipper and Gilligan. But he might have appreciated the many games we came up with, and the many things, from houses to airplanes to cars, that we built out of cardboard and tape and other odd bits of junk, thanks to the silly inventions those castaways came up with.

Maybe he wouldn’t have appreciated the loudness and the in-show commercials for Rice-A-Roni in The Price is Right, but again, seeing all the stuff I made to imitate Mr. Barker’s games might have impressed Mr. Rogers.

I think Fred Rogers would have appreciated the fact that since I saw so many nice adults in my life, from parents to school teachers to Sunday school teachers and neighbors, that his niceness didn’t really stand out in my mind as a kid. He’d have seen a bevy of adults, trying in their own ways to help kids out, and appreciated what he saw.

He might have seen a kid with ordinary kid struggles, from being fat enough to be typecast as Skipper to being bullied mildly at school, and then seen plenty of adults around him working hard to see that kid do as well as he could with what he had – and he had plenty.

That I didn’t really need Fred Rogers in my life probably points to me having a pretty good life. Though I’m glad he was there, one more of a large group of adults who cared.

Why is this coming up?

I watched Benjamin Wagner’s “Mister Rogers and Me,” in anticipation that I’ll eventually find and watch the more current “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” both documentaries about Fred Rogers.

As I watched Wagner’s documentary, I thought there are plenty of lessons I can learn now from Mr. Rogers that maybe I didn’t need as a kid.

This quote hit me pretty hard: “I feel so strongly that deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex.”

Deep implies, to me, slowing down, showing focus – as Mr. Rogers famously did. Whomever he was talking to at the moment was, in his mind, the most important person in the world. That’s something I could stand to remember, particularly as I interact with my own kids, my wife, and others. It’s easy to remain selfish, even when we’re interacting with those we love.

Another thought: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. Maybe the most important part of that is to like ourselves. It’s pretty easy to maltreat others if we feel maltreated enough we treat ourselves poorly. That’s something Fred Rogers fought against mightily.

There’s the deep in Fred Rogers. Maybe I didn’t need him as a kid. But there are, clearly, things I can learn from him as an adult.