Nov 22, 2019 4 min read

Fred Rogers first came into my life through a small, black and white TV that sat on our bedroom floor. In my memory, I’m about 8 and I’m lying with chin in hands, watching the screen from a probably unsafe distance.

Mister Rogers is standing next to a dry toilet bowl and he’s got his hand down near the bottom. “You see?” He says. “That opening is too small for a person to go through.”

I knew this episode was meant for someone much younger, but I kept watching – watching through that year and the next and the next, stopping to watch “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” whenever I happened upon it.

I’d never have admitted that to my friends, of course. This was back before the program and its gentle host were universally elevated to “cool.” For me, the program was calming and, yes, a bit weird. That Lady Elaine puppet scared me.

Lady Elaine is not in the new Mr. Rogers movie, which I got to see in a special Pittsburgh preview Wednesday night. “It’s A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” is the story of the relationship between Rogers and the jaded magazine writer who’s assigned to profile him. While resembling Rogers mostly in hairline and eyebrows, Tom Hanks captures the essence of the man, speaking in the slow cadence that generations of “Neighborhood” viewers will recognize.

The film is lovely and life-affirming and a little bit sad. I didn’t cry and neither did the friend sitting next to me, and we both are easily triggered weepers. Yes, the story of Lloyd Vogel, the writer character, is full of conflict, but I didn’t get pulled down into the sadness of that because Fred Rogers always appears again to lift him, and us, out of that dark part.

The theater that night was filled with people who knew Fred Rogers personally. I wondered what they thought of Hanks’ portrayal. I was comparing Hanks’ Mister Rogers to the Mister Rogers I saw on a smaller screen; many in the audience were watching a famous actor embodying their dear friend and colleague.

I met Fred Rogers once, only briefly, while working as a reporter for WTAE. He was just the same as TV Fred. Sometime after that, I produced a documentary about the ethnic traditions of Pittsburgh neighborhoods and sent Fred a taped copy.

A week later, the tape came back, along with a hand-written letter from Fred. He’d watched the tape and enjoyed it, but “the video stops in the middle of a story and then goes to black.” We’d sent him a faulty tape.

He’d watched it. Fred Rogers, who was becoming one of the most famous and probably busy people on the planet, had taken the time to watch a video that a stranger had sent him. How many of us would have taken the time? When Fred’s friends say he was as good as he seemed to be, I can vouch for it.

Unlike the television program, the new Mister Rogers movie is not for young children. Instead, it’s for us adults who are too far from age 8 to remember what that was like. If Fred Rogers had produced an episode to help grownups manage the pain of being a grownup, this would be it.

Only this time, Mister Rogers was not on a small screen, but on a very large one. He was right there in that dark theater, looking out at us, saying all the things he’s always said: Be kind, forgive, slow down, you matter – the things we knew so long ago, but had forgotten.