When I was a child Mr. Rogers – the host of the wonderful kid’s TV show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” – was the coolest guy in the world.<\/p>\n
I remember, when I was just out of college, I had a huge crush on a cute girl named Cara. One day, during one of our many long walks together (which led to nothing, because my crush went only one way), she told me that when she was a little girl she not only watched Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood every day, but she really believed that Mr. Rogers was her boyfriend. I confess a certain schadenfreude<\/i> in the knowledge that as Cara grew up she would realize that her crush went only went one way. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n
The really wonderful thing about Fred Rogers is that he really was exactly the way he seemed on TV. He would talk to grown-ups with just the same tone of earnest and serious respect that he used when talking to the young viewers of his show. I remember once seeing him on a talk show (I think it was with David Letterman, but I’m not sure now) and he was exactly<\/i> the same with this guy in the other chair, while talking in a very learned way about such serious issues as child education, as he had been all those years when talking about King Friday and his puppet friends. Personally, I found this to be incredibly heartening.<\/p>\n
My friend Paul used to live in Pittsburgh, back when Fred Rogers still lived in his house just off the campus of Carnegie Mellon University. One day Paul was getting into an elevator with his son Thomas, who was seven years old at the time. The door opened and Fred Rogers walked in, and then it was the three of them.<\/p>\n
Paul realized that he had only a limited amount of time – until the elevator doors opened again – to impress his young son with the fact that they were in an elevator with Mr. Rogers. So Paul turned to Mr. Rogers and said, in as casual a voice as he could muster “Nice day, isn’t it?”<\/p>\n
According to Paul, Fred Rogers immediately assessed the situation, realized what was going on, and intuited what was being asked of him. Turning to Paul and his young son, he replied “It’s a beautiful day in this neighborhood.” Then the elevator door opened, and he was gone.<\/p>\n
Whereupon Thomas looked up at his dad, eyes wide open with astonishment, and said “Wow, you’re friends with Mr. Rogers?”<\/p>\n
That is just so cool.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When I was a child Mr. Rogers – the host of the wonderful kid’s TV show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood” – was the coolest guy in the world. I remember, when I was just out of college, I had a huge crush on a cute girl named Cara. One day, during one of our many long … Continue reading “Mr. Rogers”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=533"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/533\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=533"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=533"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=533"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}