LIFE Mr. Rogers

By Life

Fred Rogers was a beacon of unconditional love and acceptance who enchanted several generations of American children with his groundbreaking PBS program, Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Now, with the release of a Rogers biopic starring Tom Hanks, LIFE presents this special edition as an intimate, behind-the-scenes look at the life and career of this national treasure. Celebrate his quiet strength and simple words from their beginnings, when his testimony to the U.S. Senate convinced them to support public broadcasting to the tune of $20 million and changed millions of childrens' lives forever. Enjoy again his unique creativity with language and songs. Meet his cast of characters. Revisit iconic episodes. A bullied, Pennsylvania rich kid who grew up to become a Presbyterian minister, media icon, and gentle revolutionary, Mr. Rogers's powerful message of tolerance and self-love has never been more relevant than it is today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Life
• Release date: Nov 8, 2019
• ISBN: 9781547850143

Book preview

1993.

CHAPTER ONE

Rogers was a sensitive child who was bullied by his peers. As an adult, he tapped into that experience to help young viewers cope.

Man on a Mission

ROGERS WITH SOME OF the show’s most-loved puppets, including Lady Elaine Fairchilde, behind the ropes; members of the Platypus family (Dr. Bill, Ana, and Elsie Jean) in the balloon basket; King Friday XIII on the host’s arm; and, at bottom, X the Owl, left, Henrietta Pussycat, and, far right, Daniel Striped Tiger.

Mister Rogers’s very first neighborhood was the industrial town of Latrobe, Pennsylvania, where he was born on March 20, 1928, about 40 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Fred’s parents, James Hillis Rogers, a successful brick manufacturer, and Nancy McFeely Rogers, were known informally as the First Family of Latrobe. The wealthiest couple in town, they were admired for their generosity as well as an endearing lack of airs and pretensions—qualities they passed on to their son. Home was a three-story brick mansion in an affluent section of town known as the Hill, where Fred McFeely Rogers grew up privileged, pampered, and cosseted, perhaps to a fault. Sickly as a boy—his allergies and asthma got so bad he once spent an entire summer in an air-conditioned room with a family friend who also had allergies—Rogers was an only child for 11 years, until his parents adopted a baby girl, Nancy Elaine, known as Laney. Inclined to chubbiness as a boy and taunted as Fat Freddy, Rogers was considered something of a delicate sissy by some of his classmates. His parents’ excessive protectiveness didn’t help matters. They were concerned that he’d be kidnapped—this was the Lindbergh baby era—so they sent Fred to school driven by the family chauffeur, according to Michael Long, author of Peaceful Neighbor: Discovering the Countercultural Mister Rogers. One day school lets out early and Rogers decides he’d walk home. Just then, a bunch of bullies yell, ‘Fat Freddy, we’re going to get you!’ He freaks out and starts running, absolutely frightened that they’re going to catch up and do God knows what. Eventually Rogers makes it to a neighbor’s house, and the adults tell him, ‘Don’t mind those kids. Forget them.’ After some reflection, though, Rogers said to himself ‘But I did mind those kids, and I resented the fact that they did not see me for who I was.’

One day school lets out early and Rogers decides he’d walk home. Just then, a bunch of bullies yell, Fat Freddy, we’re going to get you! and he freaks out.

The incident, along with lessons he learned from The Little Prince, a book he read and loved as a child, helped shape Rogers’s life’s work, says Long. Young Fred was particularly struck by a passage in the novella that contained the line What is essential is invisible to the eye. Viewing the painful bullying memory through the lens of The Little Prince, he understood what is most important about everybody. For Rogers, what is essential to each one of us is that we are lovable and capable of loving, says Long. "For him, this holds true for everybody, no matter what you’ve done, no matter where you come from, no matter who you are, no matter what language you