339. The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Maxwell King
Genre: Non Fiction, Biography, Psychology
416 pages, published September 4, 2018
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
The Good Neighbor is a biography of an American original, Fred Rogers (1928–2003), known and beloved by millions of children as Mr. Rogers. In addition to creating his iconic children’s show, Fred was intensely devoted to children and their needs for understanding, compassion, equality, and kindness. Using original interviews, oral histories, and archival documents, author Maxwell King traces Rogers’s personal, professional, and artistic life through decades of work.
Quotes
“You rarely have time for everything you want in this life, so you need to make choices. And hopefully your choices can come from a deep sense of who you are.”
“Mister Rogers speaks directly into the camera to the little children who are quietly, intently watching: “It helps to say that you’re sad. Often it even helps to cry . . . let people know how you feel.” This is Rogers’s signature message: feelings are all right, whatever is mentionable is manageable, however confusing and scary life may become. Even with death and loss and pain, it’s okay to feel all of it, and then go on.”
“You don’t set out to be rich and famous; you set out to be helpful.”
“In a now-famous Rogers dictum, delivered in speeches and in his books, he advises adults: “Please, think of the children first. If you ever have anything to do with their entertainment, their food, their toys, their custody, their day care, their health, their education – please listen to the children, learn about them, learn from them.”
“The directions weren’t written in invisible ink on the back of my diploma. They came ever so slowly for me; and ever so firmly I trusted that they would emerge. All I can say is, it’s worth the struggle to discover who you really are.”
“Our job in life,” he said at a graduation ceremony at Thiel College in Greenville, Pennsylvania, early in his career, in 1969, “is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is—that each of us has something that no one else has—or ever will have—something inside which is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness, and to provide ways of developing its expression.”
“Fred Rogers never—ever—let the urgency of work or life impede his focus on what he saw as basic human values: integrity, respect, responsibility, fairness and compassion, and of course his signature value, kindness.”
“It always helps to have people we love beside us when we have to do difficult things in life.”
“What a difference one person can make in the life of another. It’s almost as if he had said, ‘I like you just the way you are.”
“In a speech given at an academic conference at Yale University in 1972, Fred Rogers said, “The impact of television must be considered in the light of the possibility that children are exposed to experiences which may be far beyond what their egos can deal with effectively. Those of us who produce television must assume the responsibility for providing images of trustworthy available adults who will modulate these experiences and attempt to keep them within manageable limits.” Which is exactly what Rogers himself had tried to do with the production of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”
“For his part, Fred McFeely always made sure his grandson knew, directly and sincerely, how much he enjoyed his company. “Freddy, you make my day very special,” McFeely frequently told the shy little boy, reminding him of his importance to the adults in his life.”
“The real issue in life is not how many blessings we have, but what we do with our blessings. Some people have many blessings and hoard them. Some have few and give everything away.”
“There are, essentially, two compelling reasons why I believe the reading public should care about Fred and his work: First, he recognized the critical importance of learning during the earliest years. No one better understood how essential it is for proper social, emotional, cognitive, and language development to take place in the first few years of life. And no one did more to convince a mass audience in America of the value of early education. Second, he provided, and continues to provide, exemplary moral leadership. Fred Rogers advanced humanistic values because of his belief in Christianity, but his spirituality was completely eclectic; he found merit in all faiths and philosophies. His signature value was human kindness; he lived it and he preached it, to children, to their parents, to their teachers, to all of us everywhere who could take the time to listen.”
“Every original and innovator doesn’t have to have psychedelic hair. There’s a cliché version of who’s an original. It’s always somebody making a lot of noise, and being disruptive of some status quo. His originality spoke for itself.”
My Take
The mark of a good biography or memoir is after you finish reading it, you feel like you have a deep understanding of the person who is a subject. This is definitely the case of The Good Neighbor. Author Maxwell King does a superlative job of conveying not just the biographical facts of Fred Rogers’ life (which are interesting in and of themselves, e.g. he hated Dartmouth and transferred away from there as soon he could), but essence of the man himself. You leave the book understanding what made Mr. Rogers tick and with a lot of respect and admiration for the life he lived.