“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.