Friday, February 28, 2003
There goes the neighbourhood - THE COMMENTARY
By Joseph Planta
VANCOUVER – When you've amassed a fair bit of milage as a columnist, you've amassed a fair amount of text that's attributable to your name. I've been doing this for nearly four years now, over some 500-odd, and not-so odd pieces. When I read the headline in my e-mail that Fred Rogers, Mr. Rogers, died, I thought of the column I had written on him back in 1999. I can't remember why I wrote the piece at the time, because in research for this piece, I read that he stopped producing episodes of his Mister Rogers' Neighbourhood in 2000. I dug into the recesses of my archives to find that column I'd written.
At the time, National Post scribe Katrina Onstad had decried that children's television – with its Teletubbies and Barneys – was encouraging "children to be stupid." I seconded the motion in a column writ on August 20, 1999, recounting the stupidity of children's television compared to that when I was growing up. For me, it was Mister Rogers, Mr. Dressup and Sesame Street. While Sesame Street is still around, however not being as influential as it once was, television is full of "Pokemon, the Power Rangers, a purple blob named Barney, some fruits in pajamas and a bunch of freakish clumps who call themselves Teletubbies."
PBS put out a statement yesterday morning saying that "Fred Rogers is a man who truly made the world a better place." In death it's often the norm to expound platitudes that the deceased may even question were they still living. However in Fred Rogers' case it's clear that he did leave this world a better place and that he is definitely deserving of all the superlatives that we can muster hours after his passing.
I grew up watching Mr. Rogers, because he seemed like a nice man. On the flip side, I'd also watch the BCTV News Hour growing up, and while folks like Bill Vander Zalm and Brian Mulroney looked smarmy and sneaky, Mr. Rogers looked warm, kind and downright nice. Fred Rogers believed that children were so full of possibility that he made it his life's work to nurture the imagination of young people with lessons of good, music and of course, make-believe. Not to the point of Asperger's did Mr. Rogers go, no, he encouraged simple imagining of better things, knowing that some of the kids who watched him every afternoon, would switch off the television set and return to a world that wasn't so pristine, whether it was outside their door or even in their own home.
Fred Rogers was forever a part of public television. I don't think you can think of public television, especially of the children's variety without thinking of Sesame Street and Fred Rogers. Come to think of it, I think of Fred Rogers in the same breath that I'd think of Bill Moyers or the Metropolitan Opera or Robert MacNeil and Jim Lehrer. Fred Rogers is forever a part of the tapestry that is public television, fulfilling and then some, the desire of the equally pioneering Edward R. Murrow back in the infancy of the medium – that television is more than just lights and wires in a box, and that it does have the "potential to educate, illuminate and inspire."
Four years ago yesterday, Fred Rogers was inducted into the Broadcasting Hall of Fame, one of the many accolades he received. In his speech he said: "We can either choose to use the powerful tool of television to demean human life or we can use it to enrich it." Everyone in the news reports I've read and seen yesterday, irrespective of medium, have come to the conclusion that Fred Rogers in his silent, low-key and pleasant approach did more to raise the consciousness of television than some of his louder and prettier contemporaries. He enriched the lives of generations and will continue to do so thanks to the longevity of television. That in itself is an oxymoron, but Fred Rogers lasted so long in television and will continue to do so. An oft-forgotten fact is that Fred Rogers got his start on the CBC, at the same time of another legend in children's television, one Ernie Coombs. Coombs of course, better known as Mr. Dressup.
Yesterday afternoon, whilst preparing this editorial, I did some browsing on the pbs.org website. There were the requisite tributes to Fred M. Rogers, whereby I learned that his middle initial stood for McFeely, a name he invoked on his program, the name of the delivery man. I also clicked onto some pages for parents, where it had about a page's worth of notes on how to inform children on the death of Mr. Rogers. I thought to myself, how appropriate it was that before Mr. Rogers it was unlikely that there be a repository of information available for adults to access lest someone like Buffalo Bob Smith or Captain Kangaroo died.
In that theme song he sung for so long, as he changed his shoes and donned a sweater, Mr. Rogers beckoned: "Let's make the most of this beautiful day." How wonderful it was, that for all those years, children everywhere had Mr. Rogers' neighbourhood to go to whether it was for entertainment, education or escape. In a time when we're worried about terrorism in our cities and a war in Iraq, may Mr. Rogers' simple lessons in civility and kindness for ourselves and each other have some resonance in our hearts and minds. The good Lord broke the mould when he made Fred Rogers, for he was the quintessential nice guy, deeply moral and highly regarded. Our world – this mere neighbourhood – is so much smaller, so much darker without this wonderful, wonderful man.
- 30 -
Questions and comments may be sent to: editor@thecommentary.ca
An archive of Joseph Planta's previous columns can be found by clicking HERE .