Pause for a moment today and remember all the people who have helped you along. Mister Rogers would like that.
“No one of us gets to be a competent adult without other people taking an interest in us, without loving us,” he used to say.
For more than 30 years, Fred Rogers helped millions of children and parents with the lessons of love, kindness and friendship he delivered on public television’s “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” That sprawling and appreciative population now mourns him.
Rogers died early Thursday of cancer at his Pittsburgh home. He was 74. He had been diagnosed with stomach cancer shortly after the holidays, family spokesman David Newell said.
Rogers met his wife, Joanne, when they were both music majors at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla. In 1991, the college laid a stone in his honor in its Walk of Fame, right outside the house where he lived as a student.
He is survived “by his wife, Joanne; two sons, two grandsons and millions of grateful neighbors,” Katie Couric said on NBC’s “Today.”
During a 1997 awards ceremony in Los Angeles, Rogers received a career achievement award from the nation’s television critics, and he accepted it with a lesson.
“I realize more and more that even if we do all the right things in television scripting and production and editing and promotion, even if we should deliver the perfect program that everybody in the world would see, if we don’t have love for the people we’re working with and the audiences we’re working for, our whole industry will someday dwindle,” Rogers told the audience.
“Love and success, always in that order. It’s that simple and that difficult.”
He followed that approach on his program, which was produced from 1968 to 2000 at WQED, the Pittsburgh public television station.
The last first-run episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” was made in December 2000, but didn’t air until August 2001.
John Sinclair, chair of the music department at Rollins College, called his longtime friend “the epitome of a gentle spirit” and a great ambassador for the school. Rogers had known about the stomach cancer at the end of last year, Sinclair added, but went ahead with his duties as grand marshal of the Tournament of Roses Parade.
“Through his kindness, he educated all of us on what it was like to be accepting,” Sinclair said. “He liked everyone just the way they were.”
In later years, in appearances at the White House and the Daytime Emmy Awards, Rogers asked audiences to remember “the extra special people” who had helped them. He asked for a half-minute of silence.
“I’ll watch the time,” he would say. People would laugh, then grow silent. Many would be in tears later.
“Wherever they are, how pleased the people you’ve been thinking about must be,” he said afterward. “My hunch is, that besides me, there are many others in this life who often think about you and all that you’ve done for them.”
Millions are pausing now for another reason: Thank you, Mister Rogers.