Royals or celebrities have never been a draw for me, and you would not find me on the streets of Windsor or on Hollywood’s red carpets among the fawning crowds, gasping for breath at the sight of lavish jewels, couture gowns, and perfect bodies.
Nevertheless, I confess to my private, career-long weakness: a tempered smugness for having studied and walked with many of my discipline’s luminaries, including anointed and should-have-been Nobel Laureates. But among all the gifted people I have encountered, I am profoundly thankful to have accidentally fallen—albeit briefly—within the personal orbit of the world’s most revered “neighbor,” Fred Rogers.
Like throngs of other parents, I first came to admire Mr. Rogers through his weekday children’s television program, but I never imagined I would one day have lunch with him to discuss a childcare issue of mutual concern. And I never dreamed that Mr. Rogers in person would be a more perfect version of his remarkably warm and wise television persona, for an unexpected reason: there was no hint that his graciousness and goodness was scripted.
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which first aired on PBS 50 years ago, was a path-breaking children’s program that mesmerized young audiences. The effect on my own preschool children in the early 1970s was perplexing and fascinating, as each program began with a touch of gentleness: Mr. Rogers singing, “It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood,” as he entered the set’s front door. With the most ordinary gestures, he created a calming effect, smiling and exchanging his jacket for a (dorky) cardigan sweater, putting on comfortable shoes, and reassuring his young viewers in the simplest, most profound ways: “You are special. There’s no one else in the world quite like you. Would you, would you please be my neighbor?”
At a time when most children’s television relied on cartoons and used slapstick histrionics largely to amuse (and babysit) children, Mr. Rogers was a television pioneer for an unheralded feat: He could magically make a deep emotional connection with the very souls of each of his millions of devoted young viewers through conversation and make-believe. As the Neighborhood Trolley arrived at the tagboard set of the “Neighborhood of Make-Believe,” Mr. Rogers operated one unpolished puppet or another—most notably King Friday the 13th—and explored children’s emotional landscape with safety and reassurance.
As I watched, I too gained much in his simple wisdom, especially that parents can never tell their children too often that they occupy a special place in the lives of the adults who love them. Mr. Rogers taught parents ever-lasting child-rearing values: Be there for your children. They have profound fears, not the least of which is that they will lose their connections to relevant others. Listen. “Deep and simple is far more essential than shallow and complex.” And through deep listening, adults can help young children handle more difficult issues than we might commonly assume.
My children developed a deep rapport with Mr. Rogers, and in their gazes, I could see and feel the connection he made with them. Unintentionally, I also felt that connection, as he won my appreciation and respect. He conveyed complete honesty and authenticity—but could anyone really be as genuine and sincere as the television “Mister Rogers”?
Over lunch in Pittsburgh in late April 1997, I found out.
* * *
Although my principal career has been as a university professor and researcher, I was spending much of my off-career time during the mid-1990s pursuing an avocation outside the “halls of ivy.” I was trying to come to terms with the contrast between my own positive coming-of-age experiences in a Presbyterian orphanage in North Carolina in the 1950s and the conventional, deeply engrained and awful Dickensian imagery of orphanage life of my era and before.
This journey led me to publish a widely read and well-reviewed memoir, The Home (1996), and research articles on the life outcomes of close to 3,000 orphanage alumni. Contrary to conventional wisdom, these alumni reported that they had been more successful, on average, on life’s scoreboards (education, income, and attitude toward life) than other Americans, and a dominant majority had highly favorable memories of their orphanages. Only a tiny minority had experienced anything comparable to Oliver’s horrific treatment (in what was really a “workhouse”).
In search for a broader audience for my contrarian views on orphanages of yesteryear, I began working with a prominent television producer to fund and develop a documentary in which aging orphanage alumni would be interviewed on their orphanage experiences while attending their orphanages’ annual homecomings. The producer had contacts inside Mr. Rogers’ production company, then named Family Communications, which might consider developing the documentary if an already interested foundation could provide the nearly $1 million in required funding. The producer arranged a luncheon in Pittsburgh to discuss the project with his colleague at Family Communications and none other than Mr. Rogers himself.
Mr. Rogers arrived a few minutes late at our table, slowed on his way through the restaurant by patrons who wanted to shake his hand. As he joined us, my first private thought may seem odd: “He really looks like Mister Rogers,” with his signature broad smile and sporting the dark blue blazer, white shirt, and a medium-blue butterfly-style bowtie he often wore as entered the “front door” on his show.
After shaking hands with the two producers, Mr. Rogers reached out to me, grasping my palm with his right hand and covering the back of my hand with his left. Looking me straight in the eye, as if as fixated on meeting me as I was on him, he said, “I’m so glad to meet you, Richard. I’ve been looking forward to your being here. I’ve read some of your work and I want very much to hear about your project.” I thought I had been blessed. From then on, my pride swelled to know I had a new friend I could call “Fred” (as he insisted I call him).
Having a long interest in orphanages, Fred shared my skepticism of the conventional ideas about them and said he had known “fine people” who had come of age there. Later, his producer told me that in the weeks immediately before our lunch, Fred had lived for two weeks in a Canadian “orphanage” for middle-age and older adults with the mental ability of young children.
After initial greetings among the four of us, Fred shifted his chair to face me directly and said, “I want to know about you, Richard. Where you came from, what your early life and orphanage experiences were like. Of course, I also want to know what you want to do in your film.”
He listened with keen attention as I sought to condense my thoughts: I told Fred that some variation of my story was typical of my childhood cohort. I grew up with alcoholic parents who divorced when I was five. My mother committed suicide when I was 10. My father was incapable of obtaining custody of my brother and me because of his downward spiral from being an alcoholic into being a steady drunk. My mother’s family simply didn’t want us, not even in the same town. Although a Methodist orphanage was just three miles from where my grandmother and two aunts lived, they shipped us off to an orphanage a half-state away. On entering the orphanage with 225 kids, I lived with 23 other 10-year-old boys in one cottage with sleeping porches, each of which had beds for eight.
To me, orphanage life was a godsend, saving me from near certain sentencing to juvenile detention. Before my admission, I ran the streets of my hometown, often playing hooky from school and committing petty thievery from the age of five. I was a little brat with a cherup face.
How had the orphanage changed my life course? Fred asked. He nodded repeatedly as I described the benefits most outside observers overlook, if not dismiss: “We got boundaries, work demands, stability, security, expectations, and a multitude of ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters.’”
“You mean you got a family,” he said.
“You got it, Fred, a different family, but a family of sorts, nonetheless. And we got the chance to leave our sordid pasts behind. I no longer had to deal with drunkenness up close and personal. One of the reasons the alumni have outpaced their age cohorts is grounded in a statistical reality: If bad stuff is cut out of children’s lives and a few good things are substituted—such as a variety of good-hearted mentors, a work ethic, and an opportunity for a college education—the average outcome is bound to rise. I am confident that had I stayed with my father or my mother’s family, I would not be talking with you with my university career under full development.”
“How do you see the film developing?” Fred asked. “What can we do?”
I described producing a film that could spread the good news more broadly, beyond the academy, possibly airing on PBS. The general public is often surprised that orphanages of yesteryear all over the country still have homecomings, with hundreds, sometimes thousands of alumni returning to celebrate their childhoods. These homecomings could provide the opportunity for alumni to tell their stories, good and bad, how they felt as they arrived on campus that first day and as they had to leave after graduation – and how the years they spent in their orphanages improved or warped their lives long into their 80s and 90s.
“I want the film to be real, not scripted and staged,” I said. “The alumni’s authentic words can speak volumes about what many children have missed as orphanages have been spurned and closed over the past decades.”
Fred recalled that his friend, also an orphanage alumnus, praised his experiences: “He always talks about his orphanage family … I feel for many disadvantaged children today who are taken from their parents and placed in foster care, only to be shuffled from placement to placement and to be released from the system at high school graduation—if they make it that far in school—unprepared for later life. I’ve read many stories about homeless foster-care alumni, even here in Pittsburgh. So sad. What are we doing? Can’t we do better?”
Time had flown during the lunch. We had been at the table for maybe two hours, and Fred needed to head to other appointments. But before we parted, Fred handed me a couple of souvenirs from the “Neighborhood,” adding, “Richard, if your children want anything we have in the Neighborhood store, just write. Anything. I like your project. It’s important for children today.”
I asked him to stand with me for a picture of the two of us, to which he graciously agreed, smiling big with his arm over the back of my shoulders. The tragedy of the day was that my camera misfired.
The greater tragedy was that the stock market tanked the next year, and the foundation interested in funding the documentary had to drop the project. The film was produced, but only because a young director from Burbank, George Cawood, agreed to find 150 talented young filmmakers in Hollywood to commit pro bono time to it. Their film, Homecoming: The Forgotten World of America’s Orphanages, screened to critical acclaim in film festivals and on PBS, but not until three years after Fred’s death in 2003. (See the film on YouTube here.)
At my chance luncheon with Fred Rogers that day, I had given him a copy of The Home, and he had warmly assured me he would read it—and did he ever, with care! In a heart-felt email sent soon after, he described reading the book during a recent roundtrip to Los Angeles “with enormous interest and feeling”: “I can still hear Joe [a black farmhand at The Home] saying, ‘Attitude, now that’s what’s important …’ and I can see poor Lady dying, and Wanda, your goat, and Mrs. Lester, and your saying as you wrote about your Dad so tenderly that ‘Death is a time for forgiveness …’ and Miss Winfield’s making cookies and sending you birthday cards every year until she died. You painted such a superb picture of your years in and out of The Home, Richard.”
Never had I received such a touching reaction to a book, which speaks volumes about how he affected so many, with depth of feelings. I could scarcely go on reading, but there was more: “There were moments as I was reading,” Fred added, “that I found myself in tears during the telling of your story. I guess that speaks to the universality of human longings, no matter what the setting. I do so much appreciate the honesty and splendid work you’ve invested in the book.”
Fred wrote that he wanted to send The Home as a birthday gift to a good friend, who grew up in an orphanage in Oklahoma. “Frankly, I hate to give it up; there are parts which need rereading, but … I just know that your words will make a big difference for him (and his mother). The healing ministry of truth!”
Then, remarkably, before closing his message, he offered an apology for a request he had made at lunch, one I had totally forgotten: “One other thing, Richard, perhaps I shouldn’t have asked you to give the blessing at our lunch, even though you generously offered one. In your book you write that you ‘question God’s existence.’ Had I read those words first I would have been more sensitive and much less assuming. If I need excusing in your mind, I trust that you will grant me that.”
You can bet I rushed another copy of The Home to him to give to his friend. At our lunch, I felt reasons to doubt my skepticism through the conveyance of Fred’s goodness that remains palpable to this day.
Later, I deduced from news reports that Fred read The Home on his roundtrip to Hollywood to receive his Lifetime Achievement Award at the Emmys, where he delivered one of the most touching, gentle, pithy, and humble acceptance talks ever given in such august settings. Speaking for only 90 seconds, he turned the attention away from himself, as he asked his audience to join him in 10 seconds of silence to reflect with appreciation on someone who had made a difference in their lives and in their reaching the awards ceremony that night. Whenever I have taken 10 seconds to do that, Fred Rogers in full smile emerges. Surely, he also must come to mind for tens of millions of other grateful people, especially those fortunate enough to have passed through his aura that continues to circle the globe. What a presence. What an impact. What a life well-lived.
