Dear Mister Rogers Children Pour Out Questions In Letters To A Gentle Grown-Up In Their TV Neighborhood

Fred Rogers’ neighborhood isn’t confined to his television series or a Pittsburgh TV studio, and certainly not to make-believe.

When he doffs the spelled-out “Mister” along with that familiar zip-up cardigan, then sets out from the TV screen into the material world, Rogers carries his neighborhood with him.

For instance, hear Rogers, on a visit to New York, describing a warm encounter the day before at a South Bronx kindergarten.

“In the class,” Rogers reports in that familiar calm voice and even calmer pace, “we were all talking when one little boy came to me and took my hand. And he l-o-ooked at it. And then he turned it over and he looked at it ve-r-ry carefully.

“And finally I just took his hand and I did the same thing.

“And I said, ‘You know, you have beautiful hands!’ And he just beamed! “And then all of the kids around him immediately offered their hands for me to see. I think they were just waiting to find out whether I respected their brother or not.

“It was a wonderful day,” Rogers says. “Just a wonderful day.”

As it might have been for anyone who lives by this neighborly tenet: that he or she is special and of value, and so, by extension, is everybody else.

Children get that reassuring message every weekday on “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” (7:30 a.m. on Spokane’s KSPS-Channel 7), the same as children have for three decades.

What’s more, they really do get it.

As evidence, pick up Rogers’ latest book, a treasury of letters from young viewers titled “Dear Mister Rogers, Does It Ever Rain in Your Neighborhood?” (Penguin Books). Whether in their own words or by proxy through their parents, these little correspondents demonstrate how seriously they take what Fred Rogers stands for, how intently they ponder its far-flung implications.

Three-year-old Caitlin, upset at the sight of some buildings being demolished, suggested to her parents that “maybe Mr. Rogers could talk about tearing down houses.” Rogers didn’t fail her.

“It can be scary to think that someone might be tearing down a house that belongs to a family,” he wrote her back. Then he added, “Your mother and father will do all they can to keep you safe and to keep your home safe.”

Isaac, 3-1/2, wondered if Mister Rogers is real and, more to the point, whether he “poops.” Rogers offered tender reassurance that he is indeed real, adding, in part, “One thing for certain is that all real people ‘poop.’ That is an important part of how our bodies work.”

The book “is not some herald of my demise,” said Rogers, still boyish-looking at 68, when asked about its timing.

“It’s just that we had collected so many wonderful letters through the years, and we wanted to share some of them,” he said.

They are worth everyone sharing.

Full of musings and questions and the frankest of disclosures, these letters are of universal interest. And no wonder. Whatever it is that kids seek, grown-ups have been seeking it since childhood.

“There’s something inside each one of us, I think, that isn’t all brave and strong,” Rogers says, “and I think that part looks for some kind of confirmation about the rest of who we are.

“Now, I haven’t said that too well,” he allows. “In fact, I’ve never said it before.”

Which is all to say that Fred Rogers is one of us. He is no guru. No Dear Abby. No more special (as he would be the first to assert) than anybody else on Neighborhood Earth. And no less conversant with the doubts that touch us all.

Instead, he’s a fellow with a smile and a heart wide open to many things, including confirmation - for instance, while riding on the airport’s people mover when he got to town two days earlier.

“A man beside me beamed and said, ‘Look who I’m standing beside!”’ Rogers said.

“I told him, ‘You know, it’s really fun to go through this life with this face.”’