Won’t You Be My Neighbor Day is March 20

Maxwell King is the best-selling author of "The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers." The book took seven years to write after discovering that there was not already a biography of Mister Rogers.

“I later learned from Joanne Rogers, Fred's wife, that numerous people had approached Fred to do a biography. And he had turned them down. So I argued with Joanne for a while, and finally she agreed,” said Maxwell in a recent interview.

From the book we learn that Fred Rogers had a difficult childhood. He was lonely, shy, and didn't have a lot of friends. He was introverted. He came from a very wealthy family in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. And his parents, although they were wonderful to him and very caring, very supportive, were overly protective. 

He also had a puppet theater in the house where he grew up. Later on television, the puppets were both an expression of facets of his own character, and a wonderful device for him to talk with children about social and emotional needs. 

In his teenage years, Fred’s grandmother bought him a piano and that turned out to be transformative. He actually wrote over 200 songs and 13 operas on that piano.

The other great impact on his life was when he was bullied. He was often chased on the streets and called Fat Freddie. His parent’s advice to him was just to pretend like he didn’t care. 

In high school, he was president of his senior class, editor of the yearbook and a National Merit Scholar. 

Things turned around for him, but the difficult experiences caused him to be both intellectually and emotionally interested in childhood. 

Fred Rodgers went to Presbyterian seminar and did have a ministry degree. That background drove his interest in topics like respect and integrity and fairness and compassion and kindness.

King writes that what's interesting is that most people who just see his program on TV think, "Oh, this is just this sweet, simple, kindly man." Actually, he is a very complicated person. He was driven and intensely focused. He was very deliberate about everything that he did in his life and in his work. But, he could be distant and self-absorbed, because he was thinking about all the things that he wanted to do. 

One of the characteristics of Fred Rogers was that he ran counter to what a lot of the expectations were of the time. He worked at a time when television was going faster and faster and faster. While that was happening, Fred was going slower and slower and slower, and was very deliberate in his pacing. And I think that's a really important lesson. It was very important to Fred, that, as the world speeds up, slow down, take time, and particularly he felt, take time for relationships, take time for people and you have to slow down he felt to have the time to be kind and thoughtful and caring.

Learn more about local plans -- including Neighboring 101 classes and an Acts of Kindness challenge -- on the MU Extension website. Use the search bar to locate events and articles on neighboring.