Communion of Saints[1]

Won’t You Be My Neighbor? a film by Morgan Neville.  With Fred Rogers, Joanne Rogers, Joe Negri, Francois Clemmons.  ****1/2

Fred Rogers was one weird dude.  In all of show business, people on television, people who perform, who work with children, I’ve never seen anyone like him.  He had a television show in which, for all anyone could see, he just stood or sat there and talked to children as if he were in the same room with them, sometimes about almost nothing, and of course he couldn’t hear their replies, but seemed to know what they said anyway.  An adult coming across this phenomenon (I often was this person) would look at the screen and think, What the hell?

But even in an age when there seemed to be much more inventive and original television programming—Sesame Street and The Electric Company come to mind—nothing riveted my son’s attention like Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.  He knew all the songs, knew everything the man did, sometimes talked back to the screen.  It was as if Mr. Rogers were his best friend.  He knew him better than he knew me.

There was a slight hint of Pittsburgh in the way Rogers[2] talked (he was actually born in Latrobe, but that’s close enough).  I hear the same thing in his wife; they say a few words and a little voice in my mind says, Pittsburgh.  There was also something grating in his inflection, slightly naïve, sappy, a little goody-two-shoes.  It was as if he’d spent his whole life talking to children and couldn’t talk any other way.

Yet there are moments in Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, the new documentary about his life and work, where he seems anything but sappy, including one where he says, “Love is at the heart of everything,” and we’re thinking yeah, yeah, that’s what you tell the children who watch your show, that’s what we expect to hear from an ordained Presbyterian minister, and then he turns to the camera, with a look on his face that I would almost describe as steely, and says, “Love or the lack of it.”  He understands what the lack of love looks like too.  (You can see that moment in the movie’s preview.)

I am a Pittsburgher.  I grew up watching The Children’s Corner with Josie Carey, the first program Rogers was involved in, and in which he did the puppets.  I have a faint memory—I must have been only five or six years old—of going to the WQED studio and watching the show while it was on, from behind a glass window.  I didn’t know who Mr. Rogers was at the time.  He was the voice of the puppets, which as far as I was concerned was like being nobody.  The puppets were reality.  I never saw Mr. Rogers until my son watched him, perhaps thirty years later (I heard the voice of those puppets and thought, Where have I heard that Tiger puppet before?).

A few years after that, my mother, who had recently married her second husband (after being a widow for eighteen years) moved into a large Pittsburgh apartment where she literally was Mr. Rogers neighbor; in the large, rather posh apartment building she lived in (my brother called it the Hall of Fame, because the most famous movers and shakers in Pittsburgh lived there), there were only four apartments per floor, and on her floor, one of the apartments belonged to Mr. Rogers.  My mother heard piano music all the time (which she always said was Joanne, Rogers’ wife).

Mr. Rogers and my brother attended the same church, and eventually my brother—who is among other things a linguist, and taught the Bible from its original languages, Hebrew and Greek—became his Sunday School teacher, and his good friend.  They both had the same mentor, a man named William Orr, who had taught at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary when Rogers was there, and taught my brother Greek.  My brother wrote a book with the man, and has also written a chapter on Mr. Rogers’ theology in this book.

So I was in Mr. Rogers’ presence a handful of times in my life, and I must say I never heard him speak in anything other than the (slightly grating, at least for me) way he spoke on television.  He wasn’t playing a role.  That was who he was.

If the man had a genius—and I think he did—it had something to do with his understanding of children, and the way he related to them.  They weren’t some other species, the way many adults seem to think.  They were small human beings.  They were in some ways more alive than the rest of us, and their feelings—however they manifested—were every bit as valid as those of adults, and perhaps more honest.  I remember one time someone was cooking something on his show (it may have been Julia Child), and he got a kind of stricken look on his face, even before she put it on a plate; he rather gingerly took a bite, and a few minutes later, after he had moved away from his guest, looked into the camera and said, “When she put that on my plate, I wasn’t sure I was going to like it.”  It seemed exactly the reaction of a child.  He seemed completely in touch with it.

It was fascinating to understand from this film that his shows actually had scripts (he seemed to be talking off the cuff), and that he wrote those scripts and agonized over them.  There still exists a series of notes he wrote in the middle of his life when he was feeling self-doubt, rather anguished self-doubt, about what he was doing and whether he was still able to do it.  Everything that happened in the shows seemed as natural as the birds singing in the trees (as Chekov described his own process of writing).  It was stunning to realize the man agonized over it.

A technician from the show hints that there were a lot of weird things about the man that he doesn’t care to go into.  One of his sons (his two sons seem quite different, enabling their father to like them just the way they were; one of them, heavily bearded, chose to be interviewed while wearing a baseball cap) said that, when their father was critical of them at the dining room table, he spoke in the puppet voice of Lady Elaine Fairchild (I believe it was that same son who said that all of the puppet characters were based on Rogers’ family members).

He somehow managed to weigh 143 pounds every day of his adulthood (I find that hard to believe, but supposedly, after swimming a mile at the Pittsburgh Athletic Association every morning, he would get on the scale and it would unfailingly read, 143), and liked that weight because that number had the same numbers as letters in the phrase I love you.  At what point in his life he realized that, and decided to weigh 143, I do not know.[3]

He came from a wealthy family, and was a registered Republican.  He didn’t smoke or drink, was for many years a vegetarian; he didn’t want to eat anything that had had a mother.  I once asked my mother if the man had any vices, and she told me that she’d heard from the men down in the garage that he drove too fast, drove like a maniac in fact.  I was never able to confirm that.

He’s easy to overlook, easy to make fun of—Eddie Murphy did a good job of that (but who is Eddie Murphy now, all these years after he did that, and who is Mr. Rogers?  Will anybody really remember Eddie Murphy, or make a documentary of him?)—but I keep coming back to that one phrase he said in the movie, “Love or the lack of it,” and the look he gave to the camera.

He knew how children should be treated, how they wanted to be treated—mostly they just want to be listened to, and heard—and knew as well as anyone how seldom they were treated that way, to their detriment as human beings.  Apparently there are people who thought Rogers was a dangerous man—one moronic talk show woman actually called him evil—because he taught children they were special instead of teaching them they had to earn that designation by the sweat of their brow.  But he didn’t mean special in terms of accomplishment; he meant it the way my friend Stimp—also a Presbyterian minister—meant when he gave a benediction at a high school graduation, “Go forth and live out your life as the unrepeatable miracle of God that you are.”  Mr. Rogers saw that miracle in everyone.  Buddhists call such a person a Bodhisatva.  I believe Christians call him a saint.

[1] I choose this title because, after my wife watched the movie, this was the phrase that came to her mind.

[2] Every time I write his name without the Mr., it feels vaguely sacrilegious.

[3] If it had been me, I would sometimes have said, I love ya, and more often, as a true Pittsburgher, I love youse.  My weight fluctuates, is what I’m trying to say.