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Mr Rogers Birthday

March 20, 2012 by · Comments Off on Mr Rogers Birthday 

Mr Rogers Birthday, Today, March 20, is Mister Rogers’ birthday — the children’s TV host would have been 84. To celebrate him, PBS will be airing a new documentary on select stations (check local listings) called “Mister Rogers & Me,” about MTV producer Benjamin Wagner’s experience living in a summer home in Nantucket next to the famous entertainer. The documentary will also be available on iTunes and DVD.

Mister Rogers was a television pioneer, an educator and a cardigan-and-Keds fashion icon, but most of all, he was a person who wanted to help everyone feel good about themselves. I know because, like Wagner, I knew Mister Rogers.

Fred Rogers poses on the Pittsburgh set of his television show “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.”
My father, Jim Judkis, was the photographer for Rogers’s series of children’s books (“Going to the Potty,” “Extraordinary Friends,” etc.), and he would occasionally bring me to work with him. Sometimes, this resulted in me being on the show, as in the video clip below, with Rogers singing “Everybody’s Fancy.” I’m the toddler at 4:25 (“Girls are girls right from the start”).

People always wonder if Mister Rogers’s gentle personality on the show was an act or a character he played. It was not. Mister Rogers cared deeply for children, and each time I met him, I always remember him crouching down to talk to me at my level, so he could look me in the eyes. When my then 2-year-old brother had cancer, Mister Rogers, who was deeply religious, told my father that he prayed for him every day.

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