February 27, 2003

Fred Rogers, Host of 'Mister Rogers' Neighborhood,'

Dies at 74
By DANIEL LEWIS

red Rogers, the thoughtful television "neighbor" whose songs, stories and heart-to-heart
talks helped generations of children learn to get along in this world, died this morning in
his Pittsburgh home. He was 74 years old.

The cause was stomach cancer.

"Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," his daily show, began airing nationally on PBS in 1968
and immediately caught on as a haven from the hyperactivity of children's television. Let
morphing monsters rampage elsewhere, or educational programs jump up and down for
attention; "Mister Rogers" stayed the same year after year, a homemade-looking, low-key
affair without animation or special effects. Fred Rogers was its producer, host and chief
puppeteer. He wrote the scripts and songs. Above all he supplied wisdom; and such was
the need for it that he became one of the longest-running attractions on public television
and a singular influence in America's everyday life.

Among his dozens of awards for excellence and public service, he won four daytime
Emmys as a writer or performer between 1979 and 1999, as well as the lifetime
achievement award of the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences in 1997.

When the Smithsonian Institutions put one of Fred Rogers's zippered sweaters on exhibit
in 1984, no one who had grown up with American television would have needed an
explanation. Mr. Rogers had about two dozen of these cardigans. Many had been knitted
by his mother. He wore one every day as part of the comforting ritual that opened the
show: Mr. Rogers would come "home" to his living room — a set at WQED-TV in
Pittsburgh — and change from a sportcoat and loafers into sweater and sneakers as he
sang the theme, "It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood. A beautiful day for a neighbor.
Would you be mine? Could you be mine?"

This would be followed by a talk about something Mr. Rogers wanted people to consider
— maybe the obligations of friendship, or the pleasures of music, or how to handle
jealousy. Then would come a trip into the "Neighborhood of Make-Believe," where an
odd little repertory company of human actors and hand-puppets like King Friday XIII and
Daniel Striped Tiger might dramatize the day's theme with a skit, or occasionally stage an
opera.

The show had guests, too, oftentimes great musicians like Wynton Marsalis and Yo-Yo
Ma; and field trips. Mr. Rogers would go out and show the things adults did for a living
and the objects made in factories, passing along much useful information. Visiting a
restaurant for a cheese, lettuce and tomato sandwich, he would stop to demonstrate the
right way to set a table. And the sign that said "rest room"? It just meant "bathroom," and
most restaurants had them, "if you have to go."

Yet for all its reassuring familiarity, "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" was a revolutionary
idea at the outset and it remained a thing apart through all its decades on television.
Reruns of the program continue to be broadcast, even though the last original episode
was aired on Aug. 31, 2001.

Other programs would also entertain the young or give them a leg up on their studies. But
it was Fred Rogers, the composer, Protestant minister and student of behavior, who
ventured to deal head-on with the emotional life of children.

"The world is not always a kind place," he said. "That's something all children learn for
themselves, whether we want them to or not, but it's something they really need our help
to understand." He believed that even the worst fears had to be "manageable and
mentionable," one way or another, and because of this he did not shy away from topics
like war, death, poverty and disability.

In one of his classic programs he sat down at the kitchen table, looked straight into the
camera and calmly began talking about divorce:

"Did you ever know any grownups who got married and then later they got a divorce?"
he asked. And then, after pausing to let that sink in, "Well, it is something people can talk
about, and it's something important.

"I know a little boy and a little girl whose mother and father got divorced, and those
children cried and cried. And you know why? Well, one reason was that they thought it
was all their fault. But of course it wasn't their fault."

There was also counsel and comfort to be found in his easy-to-follow songs, which
covered everything from the beauty of nature to the common childhood fear of being
sucked down the drain with the water. He wrote some 200 songs in all, and repeated
many of them so regularly that his audience, mostly aged 2 1/2 to 5 1/2, knew them by
heart.

"What Do You Do," about getting control of anger, began:

What do you do with the mad that you feel

When you feel so mad you could bite?

When the whole wide world seems oh, so wrong . . .

And nothing you do seems very right?

What do you do? Do you punch a bag?

Do you pound some clay or some dough?

Do you round up friends for a game of tag?

Or see how fast you can go?

It's great to be able to stop

When you've planned a thing that's wrong,"

And be able to do something else instead

And think this song

In "Everybody's Fancy," he taught that:

Some are fancy on the outside.

Some are fancy on the inside.

Everybody's fancy.

Everybody's fine.

Your body's fancy and so is mine.

Peggy Charren, the founder of Action for Children's Television, an advocacy group for
quality and diversity in programming that was disbanded in 1992, was a big fan of Mr.
Rogers's tunes. When she first heard him performing them, she recalled in a television
interview in 1990, she said to herself, "Gee whiz! A singing psychiatrist for children!"
She was not off by much.

Long ago, in the days before grownups learned how say to "mission statement," Mr.
Rogers wrote down the things he wanted to encourage in his young viewers. Self-esteem,
self-control, imagination, creativity, curiosity, appreciation of diversity, cooperation,
tolerance for waiting and persistence. It was no coincidence that his list reflected the
child-rearing principles gaining wide acceptance at the time; he worked closely with
people like Margaret McFarland, a leading child psychologist, who was until her death in
1988 the principal adviser for "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood."

And when Mr. Rogers himself got so mad he could bite, it was often because some others
in the television business had not done their homework.

"I think people who produce and perform on programs for children should have as a
prerequisite some sort of course to understand their audience," he once said. "You
wouldn't put a newsman on the air who didn't know how to pronounce Vietnam. But we
give millions of dollars to these people who are producing cartoons and they have no
earthly idea of what they're doing to a kid."

The Saturday morning cartoon shows that many parents relied on as baby-sitters, he
complained, "present a confusing way of dealing with problems, never real dialogue —
just flattening people and throwing them out, and then by some magic means they come
back again."

But he also said, "Please don't think I'm against fun." To the audience that counted, he
was neither a social scientist nor public conscience. He was a story-teller with a lot of
tricks up his sleeve.

He believed in the power of make-believe to reveal truth, and trusted children to sort out
the obvious inconsistencies according to their own imagination — as when the puppet X
the Owl's cousin, for example, turned out to be the human Lady Aberlin in a bird suit. His
flights of fantasy probably reached their apex in his extended comic operas; "trippy
productions," as the television critic Joyce Millman called them, that were "a cross
between the innocently disjointed imaginings of a pre-schooler and some avant garde
opus by John Adams." At least one of these works, "Spoon Mountain," was adapted for
the stage. It was presented at the Vineyard Theater in New York in 1984.

Those who knew Mr. Rogers best, including his wife, Sara Joanne Byrd, said he was
exactly the same man whether on camera or off. But that man was a more complex
personality than the mild, deliberate, somewhat stooped fellow in the zippered sweater
might let on. One got glimpses of this in footage of him behind the scenes, especially
when working his hand-puppets, wearing a black shirt to blend into the background,
becoming lithe and intense, changing his voice and attitude like lightning as he switched
back and forth between characters.

He was Henrietta the Cat, who spoke mostly in meow-meows; the frequently clueless X
the Owl; Queen Sara, who was named for his wife; pompous and pedantic King Friday
XIII; Lady Elaine Fairchilde, heavily rouged and evidently battle-tested in the theater of
life; sweet, timid Daniel Striped Tiger, and others.
He inhabited his characters so artfully that Josie Carey, the host of an earlier children's
series in which Fred Rogers did not appear on camera, said that she would find herself
confiding in his puppets and completely forgetting he was behind them. But of course he
had known everything about puppets for a long time, since his own solitary childhood in
the 1930's.

Fred Rogers was born in Latrobe, Pa., on March 20, 1928, the son of Nancy Rogers and
James H. Rogers, a brick manufacturer. An only child until his parents adopted a baby
girl when he was 11, and sometimes on the chubby side, he spent many hours inventing
adventures for his puppets and finding emotional release in playing the piano. He could,
he said, "laugh or cry or be very angry through the ends of my fingers."

He graduated from Latrobe High School, attended Dartmouth College for a year, and
then transferred to Rollins College in Florida, where he graduated magna cum laude in
1951 with a degree in music. From there, he intended to go to a seminary. But his
timetable changed in his senior year when he visited his parents at home and saw
something new to him. It was television.

Something "horrible" was on, he remembered — people throwing pies at each other. Still,
he understood at once that television must be something important for better or worse,
and he decided on the spot to be part of it. "You've never even seen television!" was his
parents' reaction. But right after graduating from Rollins in 1951 he got work at the NBC
studios in New York, first as a gofer and eventually as a floor director for shows like
"The Kate Smith Hour" and "Your Lucky Strike Hit Parade."

In 1953 he was invited to help with programming at WQED in Pittsburgh, which was just
starting up as the country's first community-supported public television station. The
following year he began producing and writing "The Children's Corner," the show with
Josie Carey, and he simply brought some puppets from home and put them on the air. In
its seven-year run, the show won a Sylvania Award for the best locally produced
children's program in the country, and NBC picked up and telecast 30 segments of it in
1955-56.

Meanwhile, Mr. Rogers had not given up his other big goal. Studying part-time, he
earned his divinity degree from the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1962. The
Presbyterian church ordained him and charged him with a special mission: in effect, to
keep on doing what he was doing on television.

He first showed his own face as "Misterogers" in 1963 when the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation asked him to start a new show with himself as the on-camera host. The CBC-
designed sets and other details became part of the permanent "look" of Rogers
productions. But as for Canada, Mr. Rogers and his wife, a pianist he had met while at
Rollins College, soon decided they should be raising their two young sons back in
western Pennsylvania. He returned to WQED where, in 1964, "Neighborhood" premiered
in its fully developed form. It was distributed regionally in the East, and then, in 1968,
PBS stations began showing it all across the country.

In their own way, the program and Mr. Rogers's production company, Family
Communications Inc., constituted one of the country's more stable little industries.
Underwriting by the Sears-Roebuck Foundation provided long-term financial security.
Technicians and collaborators, and cast members who played roles like Mr. McFeeley,
the Speedy Delivery man, enjoyed virtual lifetime employment. (McFeeley was Fred
Rogers's own middle name, which he got from his maternal grandfather.)

The unlikelihood of such an institution, along with Mr. Rogers's mannerisms — that
gleaming straight-ahead stare, for instance — made parody inevitable. Perhaps the most
famous send-up was on "Saturday Night Live," with Eddie Murphy as a black "Mr.
Robinson" who lamented:

I hope I get to move into your neighborhood some day

The problem is that when I move in, y'all move away.

When Mr. Murphy later met Mr. Rogers face to face, it was reported, he did what most
everyone else did. He gave him a hug.

Mr. Rogers was a vegetarian and a dedicated lap-swimmer. He did not smoke or drink.
He never carried more than about 150 pounds on his six-foot frame. He took a few years
off from production in the late 1970's, and later, toward the end of his long career, he cut
back to taping only 12 or 15 new episodes a year. Although "Mister Rogers" ran daily
throughout those years, what his latter-day viewers saw was a mix of new material and
reruns, the differences between them softened by a bit of black dye in Mr. Rogers's gray
hair. As a spokesman for Mr. Rogers said, it didn't matter so much that the shows were
repeated: the audience itself was always new.

Mr. Rogers kept a busy schedule outside the Neighborhood. He was the chairman of a
White House forum on child development and the mass media in 1968, and from then on
was frequently consulted as an expert or witness on such issues. He produced several
specials for live television and videotape, including "Mister Rogers' Heroes" in 1994.
Many of his regular show's themes and songs were worked into audiotapes. There were
about a dozen books, with titles like "You Are Special" and "How Families Grow."

He was also one of the country's most sought-after commencement speakers, and if
college seniors were not always bowled over by his pronouncements, they often cried
tears of joy just to see him, an old friend of their childhood. In fact, this happened
everywhere he went. He was even credited with something akin to miracle cures, as in
the case of an autistic little boy who had seemed beyond all speech until one day he said,
"X the Owl."

After the attacks on the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Rogers recorded several
public service announcements for PBS to help parents and children cope with the
disturbing events.

He continued working through Family Communications, and his latest book, "The Mister
Rogers Parenting Book: Helping to Understand Your Young Child," was published last
September.

Fred Rogers had a kind of moral authority that was beyond viewership statistics and
impossible to quantify. He knew this and occasionally made full use of it.

When he was inducted into the Television Hall of Fame in 1999, he began his formal
acceptance speech by saying, "Fame is a four-letter word." And now that he had gotten
the attention of a house full of the industry's most powerful and glamorous names, he
asked them to think about their responsibilities as people "chosen to help meet the deeper
needs of those who watch and listen, day and night." He instructed them to be silent for
10 seconds and think about someone who had had a good influence on them.

And finally he said: "We have only one life to live on earth. And through television, we
have the choice of encouraging others to demean this life, or to cherish it in creative,
imaginative ways."