“I like being your television neighbor.” “All right, Rogers, you’ve got the floor.”
This is Mr. Rogers in May, 1969. And he's nervous. Look at the way he moves the mic. Listen
to his voice. “Senator Pastore…”
He’s got a statement to read, but it's too long. “It’ll take about ten minutes…”
“Would it make you happy if you read it? “I’d just like to talk about it. If it's
all right.” So he adlibs.
The nation will watch these senate hearings on the future of public broadcasting. “The
dilemma for fiscal year 1970: The Johnson administration recommended an appropriation
of $20 million. The Nixon administration yesterday recommended that this be cut to 10 million. Public
broadcasting cannot survive that cut.” “I care deeply about children.”
And the gentle television host won over, through persuasion and kindness,
the mean, skeptical senator. “About how long a program is it?”
In just seven minutes. “Could we get a copy
of this so that we can see it?” This testimony gets turned into
LinkedIn posts about emotional intelligence. It is viral congressional testimony. In one
of the biggest documentaries of all time, it's a pivotal scene. It is good versus
evil. And then a miraculous conversion. “I'm supposed to be a pretty tough guy,
and this the first time I've had goosebumps for the last two days.”
Mr. Rogers saved PBS. Except the real story is totally different…and I think it is better.
“I'd like very much for you to see it.” “I’d like to see the program
itself or any one of them.” What really happened when Mr. Rogers
went to the Senate is something richer and truer that reveals a hero’s forgotten role, and it will
change how you think about the man in the sweater, the man in the suit, and maybe yourself, too.
To understand how these two guys got here, we've got to take a look at the surprisingly rocky
career path of Mr. Rogers and the mischaracterized one of this guy, Senator John Pastore.
But first, I want to tell you the kind of crazy story about how I got the idea
for this video. So let's take a trip. “This video is sponsored by Copilot.”
Don't worry. I'm not going to sing. All right, so what's going on here? So
this is about Copilot. Copilot gives you the flexibility of technology with the expertise
of a trainer that you actually get to work with. “What does your normal routine kind of look like?”
It's a huge mess. Yeah. It's just a…it's just a huge mess.
Let me tell you what happened. When I met Josh, I expected that we were going to be talking
for maybe ten minutes, and instead we had a real conversation. He wanted to get to know my routine,
because that's the idea behind Copilot. Your virtual coach will design a routine
that is customized to your needs. “It's about the flexibility,
when it comes to putting together the workouts.” During the course of this conversation with Josh,
I mentioned that I run a lot. I don't have a lot to do after my
run. That's what he designed the workout for, and I just offhandedly mentioned
that, yeah, I listen to podcasts while I run. “Yeah. So I tried to like no music, no podcasts
kind of thing. And I'm like, this is too…silent. So the last, few weeks I've been listening to The
Good Neighbor, like the story of Mister Rogers.” Ohhh.
Now, I'm not saying that Copilot will help you come up with video ideas. What I'm saying is
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to go.mycopilot.com/PhilEdwards. You'll find it down below too, to get 14 days free with your own
trainer. Without further ado, let's get back to the video and see where Fred Rogers got his start.
“Well, welcome to the Children's Corner.” This is a clip from the Mister Rogers show,
The Children's Corner. And it's typical. Josie Carey’s the cohost, but Fred Rogers doesn't
show up on screen, even if his characters do and give you “a royal performance.”
But what it really shows, and what I want you to take home from this,
is that the most stable man in the world, the literal embodiment of a cardigan, did not have
a straightforward path to becoming Mister Rogers. Fred McFeely Rogers was born in Latrobe,
Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburgh, a neighborhood that looked a lot like
his neighborhood. “And of course,
there's the trolley, always on schedule.” He was part of a really rich family. They
were in this steel town near Pittsburgh, but he was very rich, heir to the McFeely
Brick Company, among others. I mean, brick collectors, which have websites apparently,
they literally have McFeely bricks. This is where Mister McFeely name comes from.
“My name is Mr. McFeely. My business is called Speedy Delivery.”
I tell you this because Mister Rogers didn't have a lot of financial instability in his life,
but almost everything else was a risk. Instead of going into the family business,
he became a music major and headed into a brand new business with a
network in New York: “NBC television.” The children's TV was loud, full of ads.
“He wants you to drive try Bonomo’’s Turkish taffy.”
Fred Rogers wasn't even working on that. He was behind the scenes on operas and variety shows.
(Opera singing) “Kate Smith is one of the three most
popular women in the entire world.” “Oh, well.”
So he wasn't really taking this crazy risk. He'd gone into this new industry of hard
charging TV people with a Mr. Rogers style personality, and he'd succeeded.
But then he made the decision to go back to Pittsburgh, to an educational station called WQED.
That's where he and Josie Carey started Children's Corner in 1954. But Fred wasn't on camera. And I
think this is important for understanding what's going on at the hearing, too. WQED was a community
supported station. It wasn't a wealthy one. “My first children's program was on WQED
15 years ago, and its budget was $30.” At the time, educational television, it was this
random hodgepodge of stations around the country. “In 1966, there were 124 stations, including
Hawaii, and in such a distant territory as American Samoa.”
They were funded by the largesse of individuals or maybe corporations or state and local governments.
There was no national infrastructure. There wasn't a PBS. So Rogers did Children's Corner
for years as a behind the scenes…everything. As this was going on, he got his degree from
seminary and was ordained. They wanted him to go to a normal church at first, but he said, no,
my ministry is going to be helping children on TV. Let's remember how early in the evolution of TV he
is doing this. I mean, it's kind of a crazy thing. It's like if you went to seminary today and said
that your ministry was going to be Snapchat Stories. They took Children's Corner to NBC
for money, but Fred insisted that it must also continue on WQED. Then it all dried
up. Mr. Rogers was probably wondering if he had, like, wasted his life. But
instead of floundering, he reinvented his show. He went to Canada for the CBC to host Misterogers
— one word — and it's basically the show we know now. He came out from behind the camera.
There were puppets and it was slow. Can I just point out the “u” in neighbourhood here? Canada!
When that ended, he was at another crossroads. And this chaos, this was the career path before PBS.
So he kind of scrambled. Look at this ad from 1966. Here is Horne's department store’s hottest
Piccadilly knits. And here's an ad for their boy, Mr. Rogers, who did a short run on the
local ABC station with Horne’s as his sponsor. T hat tided him over until he returned to WQED,
landing the show on a small network. “This is the Eastern Educational Network.”
When the show ran out of funding yet again, thousands lined up to protest.
“Children around the country stand for hours regardless of cold rain.”
And it worked. He got a grant from the Sears Roebuck Foundation during the credits of the
first new episode, and his WQED show became part of the National Educational Television
Network. “NET. the public television network.” That's why you see the NET logo on model houses.
I really feel this is what we were hoping for, he said.
Mr. Rogers Neighborhood was born. “I shall get ready to have some time
with you in this very special studio.” It was a huge source of educational TV
funding. It was funded largely by the Ford Foundation, but that wasn't going to last forever.
If they could replace NET and get even bigger, all those local stations could
afford to buy Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and give the show a steady stream of income.
“Now, with the help of the Sears Roebuck Foundation and National Educational Television,
as well as all of the affiliated stations, each station pays to show our program. It's a unique
kind of funding in educational television.” I'm giving you this, Mr. Rogers LinkedIn to
show you who this nervous man really is. And after all that, he was facing off against a
guy who seemed like he couldn't care less. But things aren't always the way they seem.
“The keynote address was delivered by Senator John Pastore of Rhode Island,
a first generation Italian-American.” Here's John Pastore with President Kennedy.
And here he is with Lyndon Johnson when PBS is being created.
That's because he was the father of PBS. Or as he says, “I don't pretend to be the father of it,
but I'm certainly been a great proponent of it and a great advocate of it. And I've
been in the vanguard of those who have been trying to keep this thing going.”
That chaos that Fred Rogers had been living in, John Pastory was trying to fix it in
the mid 1960s, something called the Carnegie Commission— I've heard them pronounce Carnegie
that way in Pittsburgh, got to trust me — they came together to say that there should
be a public television program for action. “This report proposing the establishment
of a corporation for public television is at the heart of the president's recommendations
to the Congress and of the actual bill which the Senate began considering today.”
And look who is at those hearings, trying to make public TV happen.
This seed money to get the show on the road.” In that Mister Rogers documentary,
critic David Bianculli says Pastore “made his congressional bones by attacking television.”
It's true that Pastore attacked television, but it was commercial television stuff like
the Smothers Brothers. Can you tell I'm a little mad about this?
The Smothers Brothers said Pastore thought television was all filth,
gore and violence. That is why he fought so hard to make public television a thing.
He believed in public TV, and that mission. “The proposal to establish a public corporation to
achieve this goal is both daring and imaginative.” And he needed a strategy. There had been proposals
from the Carnegie Commission to use a tax on television sets, BBC style,
but Pastore knew he couldn't get that through and other options had drawn faint praise.
So, tactically, he decided to start small. “$9 million. We're talking about $9 million.”
And it passed, but without a permanent source of funding, which was part of the plan.
It allayed some of the skeptics’ fears. “The bill itself merely proposes that
the Public Television Corporation be given $9 million of money for its first year.”
It leaves the question of subsequent financing open. So it was always part of the plan that they
come back in 1969 to sing for their supper. They requested $20 million and the Nixon administration
threw back ten. Now, this paled in comparison to later Nixon attacks on PBS, but it was a reduction
in scope and Pastore always hated the idea. “Once you go down the hill, I'm afraid
you're going to run right up against a barrier and then smash. It's all over.”
So Pastore and Rogers both wanted to keep PBS growing. They had to figure
out how to do it together. So now you have the context
to understand what actually happened when Mr. Rogers went to the Senate.
“But Mr. Rogers Neighborhood is the dilemma of public broadcasting in a capsule.”
Pastore wasn't the skeptical senator. He loved public TV.
“I think it's the most dynamic and and impressive phenomenon of this century.”
And Fred Rogers wanted PBS to help educate more children, but also to give his show a stable
foundation for maybe the first time ever. “The rest of the stations want the program
desperately, but they cannot afford the $5,200 a year required to produce the daily series.”
They didn't have a relationship before the hearing, but Pastore and Rogers
weren't fighting. They were dancing. “We don't have to bump somebody over
the hand to make drama on the screen.” Fred appealed to Pastore’s well known aversion to
violence on TV. Pastore let the man speak, encouraging him even though he was nervous.
“Could I tell you the words of one of the songs, which I feel is very important?”
“Yes.” And the crowd was wowed.
But I want to show you this interview clip Pastore did after the hearing, because he
converts this stand out moment between him and Rogers into a clear argument for more money.
“We've had these dedicated people that have come in here who have shown us what
they're doing with children, programs, and my vote will be for the $20 million.
And together, they got it. I think it is important that we
tell the truth about this story. Now, I'm not a robot. I didn't tear up when I was reading about
subcommittee hearings. And at the same time, I know that John Pastore’s career actually touched
on arguably more important things than public television, like the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I
also understand the appeal and drama of the story. Nice man makes mean man good. Yay!
But that is a story for children and we're grown ups.
The real story of this hearing is a deeper and richer one that adults deserve to hear. That's
because these two men, they are animated by something that children have a hard time
understanding: a sense of purpose. Fred Rogers took great risks in his career as a pastor,
as a performer, because he believed in his ministry to children and their care.
In John Pastore, for public TV, he fought against a skeptical public and later on,
a presidential administration. Maybe we think that Mr. Rogers wanted us to stay children because we
only saw him speaking to them, even as we all grew older. But that is never what Fred Rogers wanted.
He wanted children to grow up to do the boring and complicated and sometimes confusing work that
comes with having a sense of purpose in your life. And I can say that with some confidence, because
that is exactly what he and John Pastore did. “Know that there's something deep inside that
helps us become what we can, for a girl can be some day a lady, and a boy can be someday a man.”
“I think it's wonderful. I think it's wonderful. It looks like you're just earned
the $20 million.” (Applause)
Hey, that is it for this one. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks again
to Copilot for sponsoring this video. They made this possible,
so thank you to them for that. Go ahead and click that link if you want to give it a try.
it really has changed my routine in a positive way. And I think it could be yours as well.
So yes, thank you to them again. The links to the sources for this video are down in
the description. There's also a link to the Patreon reaction video. And other than that,
I think that's it for me. So thank you so much for
watching and I'll see you in the next one. All right. Bye.