Feb 21, 2018 3 min read

The year 1968 is remembered for its tumult and rancor – the protests, the assassinations, tanks rolling through the streets, water cannons scattering crowds, helicopters in the air over the jungles of Southeast Asia. All those images will be played and replayed as the world looks back this year, a half-century after that volatile passage.

There was more to 1968, though, than the unsettled feeling that the world was about to slide irretrievably off the rails. Into this moment walked a man of unfailing gentleness and understanding, who talked in simple terms about honesty and everyday human emotions like anger and sadness. Someone you would like to have as a neighbor.

It was in fact, Fred Rogers. It was 50 years ago this week that “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” made its debut. Hosted by Rogers, a Latrobe native and an ordained Presbyterian minister, it was produced by Pittsburgh public television station WQED, and aired on educational television stations around the country before they fell under the PBS banner.

The era in which “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” emerged was full of revolutionaries, whether it was people in the street advocating for change, musicians in recording studios testing the limits of pop music, or filmmakers looking for new ways to tell stories on the big screen. In 1968, it had only been a little bit more than a decade since television sets became widely available in American homes, and Rogers’ epiphany was that the medium could be used for something other than brain-dead diversion.

As Jonathan Merritt outlined in The Atlantic magazine in 2015, Rogers was dismayed by what he saw on television while he was studying at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He found televised pie fights, to cite one example, to be “demeaning behavior,” and, as Merritt describes it, “a missed opportunity.”

“In the wake of World War II, thousands of veterans returned from battle and started families,” he wrote. “These shell-shocked heroes risked creating a generation of emotionally stunted children. Television was the perfect vehicle for teaching kids to cope with life’s difficulties and express their feelings, but it was used mostly for mindless entertainment … ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood’ helped young viewers process stress incurred during intense periods of cultural upheaval.”

Geared to viewers aged 2 to 7, the first viewers of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” are now in their 50s, and could well have grandchildren who are learning lessons from Rogers. Although “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” ceased production in 2001, and Rogers himself succumbed to stomach cancer in 2003, there were more than enough episodes stockpiled that the program continues to air on PBS stations around the country.

Rogers explained that his program’s message was “if somebody cares about you, it’s possible that you’ll care about others. ‘You are special, and so is your neighbor’ – that part is essential: that you’re not the only special person in the world. The person you happen to be with at that moment is loved, too.”

The world needed the kind of empathy and compassion that Rogers offered in 1968. It still needs it today.