Can You Say, ‘Icon’? : There have been nearly 25 years of beautiful days in the neighborhood since Fred Rogers put on a sweater and began talking earnestly to youngsters--and many of his faithful viewers aren’t so young anymore

He has been the subject of endless parodies; eyes still roll in casual derision at the mention of his name. He’s a child development specialist, a husband of 41 years, author, father of two sons, a grandfather, an ordained Presbyterian minister, a vegetarian and a daily swimmer.

He’s also an icon of public television, known for his quiet, slow speech, his child’s-eye view of the world, his signature cardigan and sneakers.

Until recently however, Fred Rogers, the host and heart of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” could hardly have been described as “cool.” That may have changed.

On a recent “Arsenio” show, there was uncool Rogers leading the king of late-night cool and his studio audience in song:

“It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood . . . . “

The good-time crowd dropped its usual raucous hoots of “woo-woo-woo” and followed along in earnest, without a smirk.

“Would you be mine, could you be mine, won’t you be my neighbor?”

Hall presented Rogers with one of his own characteristically flamboyant jackets: bold patches of color, massively padded shoulders, a twin to the one Hall was wearing. Rogers obligingly slipped into it and the two of them stood together.

“This gives new meaning to ‘Boyz N the Hood,’ ” Hall said, and it was tribute, not ridicule.

Hall asked Rogers for his answer to the nation’s social ills. Rogers, enunciating his words as quietly and clearly in person as he does on his show, responded with the basic tenet of his philosophy. “Let everybody know that they have value in this life.” The applause was loud and long.

A soulful audience response to Rogers is a frequent phenomenon now as he makes an unusual number of public appearances celebrating his show’s 25 years on PBS (next month).

In a nation increasingly hungry for less complicated, truly kinder and gentler times and desperate for public figures who have never proven false, Fred Rogers may be on his way to becoming a new kind of American hero: modest, respectful, encouraging and compassionate.

First-generation viewers, watching again with their preschoolers, remember how he made them feel safe and valued. College students fight tears when Rogers visits their campuses and tells them, “I like you just the way you are,” something he often says on his show.

Teen-agers and adults without young children are even tuning in, longing for positive messages and civility.

The mail that daily pours into the show’s production offices here contains not only heartfelt, crayoned missives from 5-year-olds, but also notes from their elders in appreciation of Rogers’ aura of sincere, simple decency.

Jonathan Shipley, 19, majoring in broadcasting at Washington State University, wrote to say that he still watches the show that had helped him “to understand myself better as a child.” Now he tunes in because “all you see (elsewhere) is everything that’s going wrong in the world.”

Christina Poggio, 31, wrote that she had rediscovered the program with her three young children. “The one thing that comes back to me when I watch now,” she said from her California home, “is the feeling of being protected . . . being home.”

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Experts throw bouquets too. Rogers is “extraordinary,” said Dorothy Singer, a child development specialist at Yale University. “He has a true understanding of how a preschool child functions. Some adults may be annoyed when he speaks slowly, but speaking slowly and clearly helps children process information. He also uses the camera very carefully, without a lot of cutting back and forth, so children don’t get confused.”

Nancy Curry, a professor in the child development program at the University of Pittsburgh, was Rogers’ fellow student in the 1950s at the Arsenal Family and Children’s Center. It was there, she said, that Rogers “first tested himself in front of an audience of children.”

He is successful, Curry feels, because he “tapped into the basic developmental pushes that chil dren experience. Those things don’t change over time. Every child needs to learn to become an individual. Every child struggles around aggression. He taps into those universals.”

What earns these kudos is a leisurely paced half-hour that Rogers uses to teach not the ABCs of the alphabet but the ABCs of emotional development, through a combination of puppetry, visits to places where things are made and in-studio guests who talk about their lives. It’s also where Rogers, speaking directly to the camera, gives each young viewer the sense that he or she has a special friend.

“I think the space between the television screen and the child at home is hallowed ground,” Rogers said at Family Communications Inc., his nonprofit production company in Pittsburgh. “If you can just be some sort of agent for whatever is the truth, and try as hard as you can to offer somebody something that’s real. . . .”

He paused. He was tired, fighting a cold, and concerned about a daughter-in-law who was ailing, but he was also anxious that his visitor might be chilled in the office, tinkering with the heater and offering his coat for warmth.

“Mass communication is tough,” he resumed. “Take the ‘mass’ away and it’s not so tough. That doesn’t mean that all children don’t have certain birth tasks that we can address, and that’s what we’ve tried our best to do,” in a medium he got into “because I didn’t like it. I felt there were better things that could be done.”

Rogers has been praised for his own unfashionable insistence on using “real time,” including quiet moments that enable young viewers to better absorb what they see and hear. A full minute of silence goes by on one program, as the camera observes a kitchen timer ticking away.

The fragmentation of television worries him.

“In the locker room after I swim, they often have the early-morning programs on, interviewing someone. You can actually tell when the host is trying to get the person to shut up so that they can go to a commercial. I just wonder what subliminally that means in a culture, when that is done over and over and over again.”

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Rogers, 64, came to his vocation in a roundabout way. Born in 1928 to a family involved in “manufacturing and banking,” in a town near Pittsburgh, he graduated from Rollins University in Florida with a degree in music composition and studied piano at Dartmouth. Immediately after college, he found his way to NBC in New York and became an assistant producer and floor director. In 1953, he and his wife, Joanne, returned to Pittsburgh, where he was offered a production job with a new public-television station, WQED.

One of the programs he developed and produced there was “The Children’s Corner,” a forerunner to “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” that lasted seven years. The host was Josie Carey; Rogers was the behind-the-scenes puppeteer.

His work on that show tied into studies in child development that he had just begun pursuing at the University of Pittsburgh.

He also found time to attend the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. He was ordained in 1962; his “church” was to be his work with children and families.

In 1963, a 15-minute children’s show called “Misterogers” that he developed for the Canadian Broadcasting System became the basis for the show that is seen today.

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Few people have been more influential in Rogers’ life than the late Dr. Margaret McFarland, the respected psychologist who in 1952, with Dr. Benjamin Spock, founded the program in child development and child care in the department of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh.

McFarland was a primary factor in the shaping of the “Neighborhood.” Rogers, who still refers to decades of taped discussions the two had until her death in 1988, quotes his mentor frequently.

“I always remember her saying,” Rogers said, “ ‘Offer the kids who you really are because they’ll know what’s really important to you.’ She was always encouraging me to go to the piano on the program. She said, ‘They’ll find their own way, but show them that there’s a way that really means something to you.’ ”

Rogers took her advice, using not only the piano, but also his favorite puppet alter-egos in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, to help children understand and feel comfortable with their own emotions. Rogers, who operates the puppets, is never seen during these daily segments, in order to provide viewers with a clear separation between reality and fantasy.

“Behind the puppets he reveals more of himself, maybe, than he does face to face,” Curry observed. “They certainly represent the array of human foibles, and Fred seems comfortable sharing those with other people--Lady Elaine’s troublemaking capacities, King Friday’s omnipotence, Daniel Tiger’s shyness, Cornflake’s corniness and naivete.”

“I can think of parts of me that are all of them,” Rogers concurred. “We’re complicated, we human beings. There are so many facets to us. I think we fool ourselves if we don’t recognize that there is some part of us that is aggressive, some part of us that is passive. To be able to explore that is one of the challenges in life.”

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Rogers’ passion for music is central to the show. At one time he had hoped to be a concert pianist, and it is no surprise that Yo-Yo Ma, Van Cliburn and the entire Marsalis family are among the many musicians who have appeared on the program.

“My piano teacher at Dartmouth said, ‘Unless you would rather die than not be a concert pianist, you probably won’t be.’ And I don’t think I had that kind of burn,” Rogers said. He is appreciative of his wife’s talents, and of her sacrifice: She chose to put her own career as a concert pianist on hold for many years, Rogers said, in order to be with her family.

Rogers’ use of music to express emotion is part of the experiences he draws from his own childhood to inform the show’s content. An only child until he was 11, Rogers was brought up at a time “when children were seen and not heard,” so one of the “acceptable ways” he learned to channel his anger was through the piano.

“He’s not the kind of person who will throw a sneaker across the room,” said David Newell, Rogers’ director of public relations and the actor who plays Mr. McFeeley, the show’s “Speedy Delivery Man.”

“You can tell he’s upset because he goes to the piano and plays. It’s a thinking time and a way to get past the tension. He would never treat people without respect by shouting at them.”

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On the show, it is Johnny Costa who takes the music Rogers writes “and makes it sound wonderful” as songs and sound effects and to punctuate scenes and dialogue.

Costa, a jovial extrovert and respected jazz pianist, has been with Rogers since the beginning. “I laugh a lot and joke around,” he said, “and Fred is a lot more reserved, but my touch at the piano is quiet and soft, and that’s what his delivery is.” He chuckled. “I wish I had a dollar for every time I’ve played that theme song.”

With the protectiveness he feels toward his viewers, it is no surprise that Rogers, who says that “the best time of the ‘Neighborhood’ is when you turn it off and do something with what you’ve seen,” reflects often on the plethora of poor role models television provides.

It will only get better, he said, “if producers and purveyors of television give themselves the mandate to make it better.

“You know,” he said, “people will watch even if it’s good.”

Imposing censorship is not the answer, he feels: “It has to come from within (those who make it). If they have any concern for the development of society, they’ll offer what is healthy.”

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Rogers steps somewhat gingerly around his own role as joke fodder.

“It has hurt,” he said, “because I am who I am and nobody likes to be made fun of.”

Johnny Carson, he said, who spoofed Rogers’ show on “The Tonight Show,” helped him see some of the jokes as “some kind of affectionate response.” After Rogers did a spot on “The Tonight Show,” when Carson had made obvious his amusement with his gentle guest, Rogers said the talk show host told him, “ ‘We would never do this if we didn’t like you.’

“That was very curious to me,” Rogers said. “But the same thing happened with Eddie Murphy when I met him. He said, ‘Hey, Mr. Rogers!’ and he hugged me.” (Murphy frequently satirized Rogers during his “Saturday Night Live” days.)

The takeoffs Rogers “really hates” are those “that could be really damaging for kids,” such as the time a comedian on a local afternoon talk show in the South mimicked Rogers while giving instructions for making a homemade blowtorch, or when a series of racist telephone messages were recorded in a poor imitation of his voice.

“That was the only time we ever resorted to any kind of suit,” Rogers said.

The choices Rogers makes for the show are often as compassionate as they are educational. The reason that he carefully explains most of his actions for viewers is that “we have a lot of kids with special needs who watch.” He is rarely seen eating because “I would so like to be able to offer it through the glass.” He held his arms out in an all-embracing gesture. “There are so many who need so much. The little ones.”

Rogers’ commitment to his viewers was in evidence during a November taping at WQED. (He now tapes only 15 new shows each year; the schedule is filled mostly with reruns of the past nearly 700 episodes.) Every aspect of his deceptively simple show must be valid from a child developmental standpoint, from the music, all of which he writes, to the message-laden puppet vignettes in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.

As an early snow fell outside, Rogers was re-creating a summertime scene he had done 25 years before with Francois Clemmons, a singer with the Harlem Spiritual Ensemble. In the scene, Rogers invites Clemmons, playing a mail carrier, to join him in cooling his feet in a small wading pool.

Stills from the late-’60s program show them sitting side by side, their feet in the water, a contrast in black and white, making a subtle statement of unity. (Rogers later said that although he “can’t remember” if the statement was deliberate, “I can’t help but think that somewhere in the back of my mind I was pleased that we could have those four feet in that pool.”)

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Today, Clemmons was greeted with affection by Rogers and members of his longtime crew, many who have been with the show from its beginning. It soon proved to be a difficult shoot, however. Technical problems and Clemmons’ nervousness led to many retakes. In the frigid studio, Rogers, frequently coughing, was stuck with rolled-up trousers and wet feet until the scene worked.

He quietly questioned camera angles, lighting, music cues and his own delivery, occasionally using humor to lighten the mood.

“Fire the writer,” he said at one point, meaning himself. Later, as he read an alphabet book on camera--”A is for Animal”--he suddenly gave a hacking cough. When he recovered he continued in character, “F is for Phlegm.” The crew broke up.

There was no way anyone was going to take a break, though, until the taping went right. Fred Rogers, ever soft-spoken, is indisputably the man in charge.

Rogers’ constant reinforcement of a child’s self-worth, the major focus of the show, has its roots in his close relationship with his grandfather, who encouraged him from the time he was a little boy. Not only did Rogers name Newell’s character after Grandfather McFeeley, but some of the most familiar phrases he utters on the show were inspired by him.

“Almost every time at the end of the program I’ll say, ‘You’ve made this day a special day by just your being you,’ ” Rogers said. “My grandfather McFeeley may not have used those exact words, but just about every time we visited him, he would say something like that to me.

“If you have somebody in your life who is really supporting your individuation and your exploration, it’s one of the biggest gifts you could ever be given. I hope that in some way, electronically, I’ve passed on at least a hint of what he gave to me to others.”

What’s in the future for this “emotional archeologist”? A discussion format for older viewers, Rogers hopes, but he wonders: “Do you think people can think of me as somebody who communicates with adults?”