DAVID MURDOCK COLUMN: On Mister Rogers (his Neighborhood and his ability to listen)

“Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” ran from 1968 to 2001 on PBS. Aimed at preschoolers, it was a groundbreaking educational show, beloved by Americans who grew up watching it during that time.

I missed it.

I simply do not remember watching the show with any regularity. It just wasn’t something I watched. “Sesame Street” I remember, and there are vivid memories of certain sketches from “The Electric Company” — both of which also ran on PBS. So, it stands to reason that I must have seen “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” as a kid. I just don’t remember it.

I feel sort of left out. When I asked some of my friends if they watched the show, many of them gushed about how much they loved it.

Frankly, I hadn’t thought much about Mister Rogers in years … until 2019. That’s the year that the movie “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” came out. Starring Matthew Rhys and Tom Hanks, it’s the story of Lloyd Vogel (played by Rhys), a tough, jaded journalist from Esquire magazine sent to interview Fred Rogers (played by Hanks). After watching the movie, I did a little research.

The movie was based loosely on an actual 1998 article in Esquire by Tom Junod titled “Can You Say … Hero?” It’s really fine writing — in fact, I choked up a time or two while reading it. The movie’s character Lloyd Vogel is a fictionalized version of Junod.

There are some things I learned from Junod’s article that seem essential. One, it’s “Mister Rogers,” not “Mr. Rogers.” Junod doesn’t make a fuss of it, but that’s how he refers to him. Mister Rogers was an accomplished musician. He was born into wealth, which was sort of surprising. Junod also stresses something that I knew already: Mister Rogers was an ordained Presbyterian minister. The movie doesn’t much go into that, but everything Mister Rogers did flowed from that fact.

The thing that Junod describes that did really surprise me is how adults reacted to Mister Rogers. He just … well, I don’t know how to put it. An encounter with Mister Rogers brought out the best in people, I guess is the best way. Junod describes the rather cheerful profanity people sometimes used when they realized they were seeing Mister Rogers on the street, live, in person. It’s like they couldn’t believe their eyes and their first reaction was a “cuss word.” That effect that Mister Rogers had on adults is incredible.

The 2019 movie also finds inspiration in a 2018 documentary about Mister Rogers titled “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” I couldn’t find it back then, but about a month ago, I noticed it was on Netflix and watched it. The documentary interviews several people who knew Mister Rogers — family, friends, co-workers. At the end, there is a powerful sequence where these people reflect on their experience with him. The look on their faces is absolutely beatific as they describe him. It’s extraordinary.

So, I was intrigued at that point. It turns out that there is a good biography — Maxwell King’s “The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers” — so I read it. Again, that theme I noticed in Junod’s article and in the documentary jumped out at me in the book — an encounter with Mister Rogers was a transformative experience for many people.

It was if they had met a truly godly man. One thing that was extraordinarily clear in everything that I read and watched about Mister Rogers was his ability to listen to people — many of the people who interviewed him, for example, talked about how it was as if Mister Rogers was interviewing them. That ability to listen — to hear what a person is actually saying and not what we think a person is saying — is a truly divine gift.  He was truly concerned about people.

Take, for example, the ability of Mister Rogers to understand what a child would think about something an adult says. He carefully wrote and re-wrote scripts for “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” to take into account the fact that small children take everything said to them literally. That’s an amazing insight.

Another thing repeated about Mister Rogers is the “quietness” and “simplicity” of his show. Having never really watched it, I really couldn’t appreciate that until I looked at some clips of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood available on the internet.” That quiet simplicity of it all really does stand out — it’s very different from most programming for children.

And, to be honest, that’s where I finally had my “Mister Rogers experience.” His sort of quiet simplicity is a message for adults, too. It’s something that I’ve been considering for a long time. In this age of noisy distractions, a life of quiet simplicity is needed. It would do us all some good, I think.

Better late than never, I suppose.

I found out a couple of things from King’s biography of Mister Rogers that I want to track down. First of all, King listed several books that Mister Rogers loved and kept near at hand for re-reading. And … Mister Rogers recorded 20 episodes of a show aimed at adults titled “Old Friends … New Friends.” Considering his popularity, those episodes cannot be that difficult to find. I’ll let y’all know.

David Murdock is an English instructor at Gadsden State Community College. He can be contacted at murdockcolumn@yahoo.com. The opinions reflected are his own. 

This article originally appeared on The Gadsden Times: David Murdock Column: On his Mister Rogers experience