Joanne Rogers, who died Thursday at age 92, met her husband Fred Rogers when they were both music students at Rollins College in Florida.
They were married for more than 50 years, until Fred Rogers’ death from cancer in 2003. Later that year The Atlanta Journal-Constitution spoke with Joanne Rogers about a small book of wisdom, “The World According to Fred Rogers,” for which she had written the forward.
Since that time, their marriage has been celebrated (most recently in the movie “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”) as a paragon of loving union, just as Fred Rogers, the inimitable host and creator of the children’s television show “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” has emerged as the closest this country may come to a secular saint.
Here’s Bo Emerson’s interview with Joanne Rogers from 2003:
If you couldn’t think of anything nice to say about anyone, it was a bad idea to sit down next to Mister Rogers.
“It was no fun to bad-mouth people to him,” says Joanne Rogers, widow of legendary children’s television host Fred Rogers, who died in February.
Fred Rogers’ response to reports of bad behavior was invariably an effort to understand, to empathize. “There were many times I wanted to be angry at someone,” says Joanne Rogers, “and Fred would say, ‘But I wonder what was going on in that person’s day.’”
Chestnuts like these fill the pages of “The World According to Fred Rogers: Important Things to Remember,” a child-sized book bearing pearls of adult wisdom. The small-format hardcover is filled with quotes from Fred Rogers’ 40-year television career, including words drawn from his correspondence and speeches and lyrics from songs he wrote for “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” the show that taught three generations of children how to make the world a better neighborhood.
“This book is such a gift to me; I will never cease to be grateful for it,” says Joanne Rogers, who met her future husband at Rollins College in Florida. Both were music majors and pianists, though in very different styles. She preferred the classical repertoire; he preferred playing from memory and enjoyed improvising over such jazz standards as “Misty.”
The two were married in 1952 and, as his widow writes in the foreward to the new book, “He was my icon before he was anybody else’s.”
She was often inspired by her husband’s example, in particular by his scrupulous effort to avoid condemning the behavior of others. He was not only a generator of great quotes but a collector of other people’s sayings. Among the many quotes that he kept folded up in his wallet was a line from a Benedictine nun, Sister Mary Lou Kownacki: “There isn’t anyone you couldn’t love once you’ve heard their story.”
“I really try very hard in my life to remember that,” says Joanne Rogers, in a telephone interview from Florida.
Rogers was an essentially retiring man who spent his life in front of a television camera’s lens. Somehow Rogers turned that public performance into a private chat with the little people in living rooms around the world. His widow says he learned this art during his apprenticeship, floor-managing a show for Western star Gabby Hayes.
“He asked Gabby Hayes, ‘What are you thinking about when you’re talking to the camera?,’ and Hayes said ‘Freddy, I think about that one little buckaroo who’s out there, watching the show, and I speak directly to him.’ Fred took that to heart, and always remembered it.”
Joanne Rogers did not edit the collection — she was too overwhelmed after her husband’s death.
But while writing the forward she offered a three-word description of her husband’s essential qualities — courage, love, discipline — that helped give the collection its overall structure.
It was easy to recognize the quality of love in the warmhearted Mister Rogers. Equally central to his character, says Joanne Rogers, was his courage, his willingness to be frankly emotional and open with his young audience, along with his discipline: his drive to make his show, and his ministry, better each day.
“I always remind people that he was an ordained Presbyterian minister, and this was his ministry,” she says. “His work was his ministry, and he loved his work; my, did he love his work. That’s what makes me sad about losing him. Because I think he would have worked for a long time more if he could have, yet he accepted that with all of his heart and was ready to go to heaven.”
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