This wasn’t good television - at least, good adult television. As soon as the children started to ask him questions directly, he seemed to get lost in their world, slowing his responses to their pace, and even hunching in his chair as if to insinuate himself down to their level. And he certainly tried, telling them that to understand children, “I think the best that we can do is to think about what it was like for us.” But the plan didn’t succeed.
Winfrey’s staff had decided that after she interviewed Rogers, it would be fun to have him take questions from the audience, and maybe provide some guidance to mothers. When Rogers came before Winfrey’s studio audience on a brisk December day in 1985, he found the audience composed almost entirely of families, mainly very young children with their mothers. McFeely, a central character on Rogers’s program) to be clear with Winfrey’s staff: If there are children in the audience, Fred knows he’ll do a poor job of helping Oprah to make the interview a success. He asked David Newell (who also played Mr.
Decades before, Rogers had programmed himself to focus on the needs of little children, and by now he had reached a point at which he could not fail to respond to a child who asked something of him - anything at all. He couldn’t help it, never could help it. The children and their needs would come first. He knew that if there were children in the studio audience, he wouldn’t focus on Winfrey’s questions, he wouldn’t pay heed to her legion of viewers, and he wouldn’t convey the great importance of his work. Why would he want to exclude them from a program showcasing his views on how they should be understood and taught?īut Fred Rogers knew himself far better than even friends like Newell, who had worked with him for decades. No children? How could that be? By the mid-1980s, Rogers was an icon of children’s television, known for communicating with his young viewers in the most fundamental and profound way. Rogers said he wanted no children - absolutely none - to be present when he appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago. Fred Rogers had given some very specific instructions to David Newell, who handled public relations for the PBS children’s show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
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