“Just Don’t Make Fred Into A Saint”

The quote in the headline is from Joanne Rogers, wife of Fred, who needs no introduction.

Maybe she doesn’t want him to be regarded as a saint. And that’s probably no danger, because most of the people using his words these days are using them as weapons against those they hate, which I’m sure Fred Rogers would fine abhorrent. The same has been done with the quiet, peaceful leaders of religion or politics or thought in the past. And it will continue, as long as we remember the words as sharpened swords and arrows, not in the intent they were given.

From the article (emphasis mine):

At the luncheon, [a fundraiser, actually, for George H.W. Bush] Fred stood at the lectern between Bush and Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania. He leaned in to the microphone.

He looked tiny.

“I know of a little girl who was drawing with crayons in school,” he said.

He kept looking tinier.

“The teachers asked her about her drawing,” he said. “And the little girl said, ‘Oh, I am making a picture of God.’ The teacher said, ‘But no one knows what God looks like.’ The little girl smiled and answered, ‘They will now.’ ”

With that he asked everyone to think of their own images of God, and he began praying. He talked about listening to the cries of despair in America and about turning those cries into rays of hope.

A hush fell over the room, and he wasn’t tiny anymore. He stepped away from the lectern and darted. He was always a darter, but this was extreme. “O.K., now where the hell is Fred?” Isler asked me. We darted. We combed the building and climbed stairs. The Secret Service guys had lost sight of him, too. “We’ve got to get out of here,” Newell said.

We found him outside, next to an oak tree, motionless and relaxed. “Fred!” Isler said, exasperated. Fred said he wanted to go back to the office.

“I wasn’t about to participate in any fund-raising or anything else,” he told me later. “But at the same time I don’t want to be an accuser. Other people may be accusers if they want to; that may be their job. I really want to be an advocate for whatever I find is healthy or good. I think people don’t change very much when all they have is a finger pointed at them. I think the only way people change is in relation to somebody who loves them.”

And they don’t change much when words are aimed at them as weapons. Even if they’re the words of Fred Rogers.


Those are Fred’s words too. Many of us sing them today. But many of us don’t mean it.

What Would Mr. Rogers Do?

For a hard-bitten journalist like Junod to come out with a story like this speaks to the power of Fred Rogers. And it makes me weep to think as a nation we've looked at Fred Rogers' message, deified it, and put it on the shelf to be brought out as a cudgel rather than used in kindness.

From the article:

"It isn’t that [Fred Rogers] is revered but not followed so much as he is revered because he is not followed—because remembering him as a nice man is easier than thinking of him as a demanding one. He spoke most clearly through his example, but our culture consoles itself with the simple fact that he once existed. There is no use asking further questions of him, only of ourselves. We know what Mister Rogers would do, but even now we don’t know what to do with the lessons of Mister Rogers."

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.

Mr. Rogers. Still Brilliant.