Mr. Rogers: The Passing of a Legend
February 28, 2003
by Matthew Scrivner

Today marks the end of an era. Fred Rogers, the warm, cheerful host of the PBS children's program Mr. Rogers Neighborhood passed away of stomach cancer at his home in Pennsylvania. With his death I feel a little bit of my own childhood fading.

Perhaps one reason that his death is so significant to me is that unlike most television personalities with long-term careers in front of the camera, Mr. Rogers retained a purity, an innocence, an element of the genuine in his programming throughout the thirty years it aired. I think that being a TV star corrupts you in one way or another whether you like it or not, even if you're the host of a popular children's program.

But somehow, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood never fell into any of the traps of pop culture, never stooped to self-satire, or self-grandeur. I realized, after my own son was old enough to start watching it, that after all these years the show continued to offer the same gentle, simple, intelligent programming that it had offered me. It was never patronizing, it was never excessive, and it never stooped to the level of being merely entertainment.

Remember Picture Picture? That painting in Mr. Rogers' den that would teleport us to places like the crayon factory or the sunlit field where horses ran? And the Trolley that we would follow to the Neighborhood of Make Believe, a place populated by hand puppets like Daniel the Tiger, Lady Elaine, and King Friday who would act out tiny morality plays about fear, sharing, and friendship. The show was never glamorous, always simple in its presentation, and while other shows began exploiting new technologies, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood retained the same format. At the beginning of every show Mr. Rogers sang the same welcoming song while changing his jacket and shoes and at the end sang the same goodbye song while changing back. This lack of alteration in content, this simple, almost ritualistic repetition is perhaps how the show retained it's ability to communicate.

What it communicated were the basic tenets of child development. Mr. Rogers always encouraged caring and understanding and patience toward small children long before this was the politically correct thing to teach and he provided it to them by offering a safe, happy atmosphere where ideas like divorce, anger, and even death could be discussed without ridicule or judgement.

Above and beyond this is that with his death, Fred Rogers takes with him a conceptual element of our society that has been slowly dissolving as technology and culture accelerates our lives: the idea of the Neighbor and the Neighborhood. I am ashamed to admit I don't know any of my neighbors, and I have lived in the same place for over two years. But I grew up in a place that I would compare to the neighborhood that the show built. I lived next to other kids my age, lots of families, we spent time riding bikes, exploring the desert, and when it got too hot, we swam or had water fights. Do places like that still exist? I want to think so, I hope that suburbia has not transformed itself into the illusory shell presented in movies like American Beauty.

On a much grander scale, it is certainly clear that as a country the concept of Neighbors is lost to us. We pass "free" trade agreements that openly exploit the poorer economy of our nearest southern neighbor (and if you do not think that is the case, I recommend you spend some time in Nogales and take a tour of the maquilladores). Furthermore, we are shocked and annoyed when countries we considered our allies neighbors openly oppose us at the U.N. in our pursuit of war. Yet we shouldn't be surprised. We have lost the awareness of our neighbors' needs and values, we are internationally renowned for our lack of respect for other cultures and languages. When we act, our foreign policy reflects only what is best for us and our home, and does not anticipate the needs of those who are both literally and symbolically our neighbors.

I think Mr. Rogers never meant for the things that he taught to be elevated to this scale. He just wanted children to be safe and happy. But the end result of the program's long-term content is the potential for a world that is a neighborhood, where problems are resolved the way we teach our children to resolve them, by sharing, with words, not hitting, without judgement or shame. The morality and character we have as adults was planted in us when we were children, and it should apply to everyone we encounter, not just the people who look like us, speak the same language as us, and watch the same TV shows as us.

Anyhow, I want to thank Mr. Rogers. He put on a good show, I think I learned a little from watching him and singing along. I hope that he's up in heaven right now and God has opened his door and is saying, "Welcome, Fred. Won't you be my neighbor?"


(Matthew Scrivner is a volunteer staff writer for 2 Walls Webzine)