The Radical Mister Rogers
Collage by A. E. McClure/ Yearbook photo courtesy of the Department of College Archives and Special Collections Olin Library, Rollins College, Winter Park, Florida.
Twenty-year-old Fred Rogers did not like Dartmouth College. The Ivy was a “beer-soaked, jockstrap party school,” as Maxwell King, Rogers’s recent biographer, puts it. Dartmouth also didn’t have a music major. But Rollins College, in Winter Park, Florida, did, plus a reputation as “the only New England college not located in New England.” In 1948, after two years at Dartmouth, Rogers transferred to Rollins and minored in French. “Bold move,” King summed on a phone call. Rogers had been a timid and sickly boy, overprotected. The switchover was “an instance of daring.” “And I think Rollins was the first place where Rogers really felt happy,” King told me. He’d once explained: “I just felt so much at home there.”
When I attended Rollins, sixty years after Rogers, his oil portrait hung in the concert hall, and a blue zip-front cardigan and signed canvas sneakers were encased at the library, like relics. We used to joke that a Rogers endowment bankrolled the landscapers—a huge, omnipresent force who cared for our subtropical surroundings—and frat boys boosted the urban legend that the children’s-TV host was an ex-Marine sniper.
Today, I’d shred those boys for wanting to bend the nonsmoking, teetotaling, vegetarian, pacifist mensch into a macho. Of course, Mister Rogers would not favor profile is the basis of the recently released , starring Tom Hanks.
