Nows and Forevers

One of the best things about Pittsburgh is it’s where Mr. Rogers began the work Baby Boomers and Gen Xers grow up.

Neither Pittsburgh, his adopted home, nor Latrobe, his native home, have forgotten Fred Rogers. There’s this memorial along the North Shore of Pittsburgh, across from Acrisure Stadium and overlooking the three rivers. There’s also a special section of the Heinz History Center in the Strip District, a memorial statute in downtown Latrobe, and a museum to his life and work at Saint Vincent College, also in Latrobe.

I don’t know why, but I’ve been to everything except for the memorial along the shoreline. I’ve passed by it many times, usually driving. But something drove me to stop by this afternoon. I’m glad I did.

Mr. Rogers was not only a televised companion to me growing up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, nor just a man of constant wonder as I got older and realized that he was even more special than we all thought.(See “Can You Say Hero,” in Esquire, well-worth the read.) He was all those things. But a year before I existed, my father — a reporter for WGBH-FM in Boston — was wowed by Fred Rogers when he spent a day or so with him.

If you know the Fred Rogers lore, then you know that he came to Boston, where WGBH-TV was about to take his program national. The show wasn’t on everyone’s TV yet. But word of mouth brought hundreds of kids and their parents to the WGBH studios — and my father, who was a young radio reporter who had been sent to interview him. My dad told me many times about that day and how he found Mr. Rogers to be one of the greatest men he ever met. And my father doesn’t impress easily.

The scene at WGBH opens the documentary about Fred Rogers. It was that day my dad spent with him.

You could write whole books about Rogers’ goodness, and still have plenty of stories left over. One, written about in Hartford Courant’s Northeast Magazine, sticks with me more than three decades after I read “Saving Beth Usher.” Rogers is just one of the characters in a story about how a girl woke up from a coma. (This, if you can find it, is also a great story.) But Rogers plays an important role: Responding to the parents’ request, and on his own, Rogers spoke to her before brain surgery and then checked on her often, and then he flew from Pittsburgh to Hartford and spent an afternoon with her, with his puppets and just talking to her. That Rogers would do that, on his own volition and without any desire for attention, says a lot. So does that after she woke up and until he died, he kept in contact with her.

My children didn’t arrive until after Mr. Rogers had died. He came with me and I talked to him about the show and the man. He’s too young to really understand the grand sweep of Fred Rogers’ life, and how the lessons he taught all of us — children and adults — still resonate today.

We need him, still. With all the pain and suffering in the world today, all the incivility in our country, Fred Rogers left us so soon.