Bonus Episode: Mister Rogers - Things Not Seen Episode with David Dault and Shea Tuttle

Welcome to The Neighborhood, a Mr. Rogers tribute podcast. As always, I'm your host Rick Lee James, and I'm so glad that you could be here with us this week for another wonderful bonus episode. If you've been listening for a while, you know that we have been featuring some wonderful guests on our bonus episodes, and it just so happens that both my co-host David Dalt and myself each had separate interviews on our other podcast, uh, with the guest that you're going going to be hearing from today. And we have bonus episodes featuring both of those podcasts. David hosts a podcast called Things Not Seen, and he had Shay Tuttle, the author of the book about Fred Rogers called Exactly As You Are, and they had a wonderful conversation. I recorded a conversation also with Shay Tuttle on my podcast, uh, Voices in My Head, and I'm featuring both shows on this podcast feed. We both went from similar but different angles, and we have completely different conversations. And it was a really enjoyable time to get to hear David. Uh, by the way, David is one of the best not only podcast hosts around and hosts of public radio and media, but he's just a great guy. And I've learned a lot from him over the years, and I'm so glad that he is allowing us to share really his episode of Things Not Seen on this episode as a bonus to the Welcome to the Neighborhood podcast. So if If you haven't had a chance to hear David's show and the way that he does interviews by himself on that show with a number of different guests, this is your chance to get to hear him in action. So listen to both of our interviews, and I'm posting one that I did with Shea Tuttle on Voices in My Head, and today's episode is David on Things Not Seen talking with Shea Tuttle, but it's all conversation about the life and the faith of Mr. Rogers. So I know you're going to enjoy this, and I'm going to turn it over to David now. Enjoy his show Things Not Seen and his interview with Shea Tuttle, author of Exactly As You Are.

This season of Things Not Seen is sponsored in part by Loyola University's Institute for Pastoral Studies. Find out more at luc.edu/ips. From PRX, the Public Radio Exchange, and Sandburg Media LLC, I'm David Dault with Things Not Seen. On today's show, we explore the magnetic strangeness of one of the most beloved figures in children's television. We look back at the life and career of Mr. Rogers with our guest Shea Tuttle. Rick Lee James, author of the book Exactly As You Are: The Life and Faith of Mr. Rogers. Stay tuned. This is Things Not Seen. I'm David Dault. Our guest today is Shea Tuttle. She's co-editor of the recent book, Can I Get a Witness? 13 Peacemakers, Community Builders, and Agitators for Faith and Justice. She holds a Master's of Divinity from Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta. And today we're discussing her recent book, Exactly As You Are: The Life and Faith of Mr. Rogers. Shea Tuttle, welcome to Things Not Seen.

Thank you so much. It's great to be with you.

I'm so fascinated at the angle that you took in this book, and I'm eager to get into it and talk to you about it because I think that there have been a lot of recent reflections on the life of Mister Rogers and the work of Mister Rogers, and they've kind of from an angle talked about his faith. But what I love about your book is that you go centrally into Mister Rogers as a person of faith and as a person whose work reflected that faith. And I'm wondering, given the recent attention that Mister Rogers has gotten, especially with "Won't You Be My Neighbor" and the biopic that has come out. What was it that made you think that now was the time to begin to talk explicitly about Mr. Rogers' faith?

That's a great question. I guess I don't really know. I mean, one thing to say is that I started working on this project before I knew any of those other things were underway. I didn't know about the documentary or the full-length biography, or of course, the feature film that's coming out was not public knowledge at the time. And so, I really, I just started it really because I was fascinated by Mister Rogers. I had been intrigued by him, I think, really since I was, you know, a preschooler watching the program. And I think that, that interest in him kind of never went away. And so, I started digging into him a little bit. Initially, I thought maybe for an essay. I just found out that there was so much to say. And I think I was surprised to learn how central his faith was to him and how much that was a part of really everything he did. And it became sort of more and more apparent that you couldn't really talk about him without talking about that. It was so central to who he was, and so central to everything that he did, that in order to capture him appropriately, that has to be a part of the telling of his story.

Well, let's take a couple steps back, because I think most of my listeners will know Mr. Rogers from his national television show on the Public Broadcasting System called Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. But he had been working in television for more than a decade before that. And if you're willing, walk us through a little bit about what his career was like before he launched the program Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood.

Sure, yeah. So he, um, around the time he finished college, he was planning to head to seminary. That was his interest and kind of the path that I think he and his family agreed was a good path And then he had this encounter with television. He was home on Easter break with his family, and his parents had a television. I think they were one of the first families in town to have one. They were a very wealthy family. And so he kind of got introduced to this new thing. And as he was flipping through the channels, or they were, somehow he came across a children's program, and he found it appalling. He thought it was insulting. There were people throwing pies in each other's faces. He thought that was really offensive, because it was demeaning, and he hated anything that was demeaning. And so, at least the way he tells the story is that pretty instantly he knew that that's what he wanted to do, that he wanted to work in television. He saw the power that it could have, and he wanted to use it in a better way than what he saw was happening. So, he, through some connections through his father, I think, he got a job at NBC in New York and spent a couple of years there working initially kind of, he described it as like a gofer. He would you know, go get coffee for the stars or whatever, and then eventually moved up to a role of, I think, like an associate producer role, and really was on his way to a role that might have had a lot of power when he found out that there was an educational television station that was starting in Pittsburgh, near home for him, and decided that he wanted to apply. So he got a job there, and he was part of launching this WQED, this educational television station, from the very beginning. He was supposed to be the program director, And then they decided they needed a children's program, and he said he would— I think the original agreement was that he would play the organ and sort of produce, and Josie Carey, who was an actress and a secretary at the station at the time, would host. So they sort of worked on this together, and pretty immediately he jumped in with some puppets to fill some slow time on air, and it kind of evolved over a number of years. Doing the Children's Corner in Pittsburgh. It became very, very popular locally. And then he had a chance also to do a program in Canada, in Toronto, and that's where he had the first, kind of the first version of the neighborhood. It was called Mr. Rogers, and I think it largely looked like the Neighborhood of Make Believe eventually looked on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. And so I think that was the first place he got to kind of develop his own priorities for television. And for what children should be seeing. So by the time he started Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, he'd had a lot of time and a lot of experience to develop his own skills when it came to puppets or, you know, writing storylines or writing songs and things like that, but also to develop his kind of philosophies around what he thought that work should be all about. And in the meantime, he had taken classes at seminary and he had taken child development classes, so all of that training as well as all of his experience went into forming what became Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, um, ultimately.

Well, let's talk a little bit about that philosophy because you mentioned that he had an early experience with television, and if I recall, this was around 1951, and you said his parents were some of the first to have television in their town of Latrobe, Pennsylvania. And what he saw there on television, he saw as demeaning, and he immediately knew— and this was fascinating to me— he didn't recoil from it, but he said, "I need to go there and I need to make that better." But he spent, he spent this decade developing what you have described as a philosophy of how young people think and what young people feel. Give us in broad strokes what he learned both in the seminary and in his work with child development specialists that sort of crystallized into his philosophy of how he should approach children's television.

Yeah, well, I think You know, the child development training I think was really important in terms of helping him to think through the lens of childhood. And Margaret McFarland, who was one of the experts that he worked with, would say about Fred that she thought his appeal to children came in large part because he never forgot what it was like to be a child. He remained in touch with his own childhood. So I think that was already a part of him, but I, I think the work in child development helped him to re-engage with how children are experiencing the world so that it's instead of coming kind of from the outside and putting onto children what we think they need, he was thinking in terms of what children are experiencing and feeling themselves and then figuring out how do we respond to that, which is a pretty different place, I think, to begin. And then I think that ended up sort of fitting in with also the way that his, I think his theological training, and again, probably the lens that he brought to it to begin with, really turned on this idea. I mean, it ended up, you know, as the title of the book exactly exactly as you are. I think he believed that we are loved by God exactly as we are, and that there's this sort of deep and unconditional acceptance of us and receiving of us that for him, I think, was bedrock. I think that was, that was the gospel as he understood it. That was what he believed every child and every adult and every anybody needed to know in order to be their best self in the world. And so I think for him, he took these two things of being situated from the perspective of childhood and what children need and what they're feeling. And then this belief that all of us are unconditionally loved, and he tried to put those two things together.

You've mentioned that he never forgot what it was like to be a child, and you, you reference in many portions of your book, Exactly As You Are: The Life and Faith of Mister Rogers, his relationship with Tom Junod. And I know that one of the things that Tom Junod wrote about in his 1998 article was that Mr. Rogers at one point spoke to a group of physicians and was talking about what it was like for a child to enter into an examination room, and he began his talk by saying, "Remember that once you were small too." I think that that really sums up what you're trying to say about the way that he approached this philosophy of working with children and children's entertainment, was keeping primary this idea that— the best word for it would be empathy. Would that be a word that you would use, or would you find a different word?

I think that's right. I think, you know, part of the brilliance, I think, of what he did was that he was so aware of children's need to know that they are loved unconditionally. But I think what made that especially brilliant was that he extended that to everybody. I think he knew, because I think he felt that all of us walk around with a need to know that, and maybe on a deep level, some kind of uncertainty about it. And so to start from a place with everybody of saying, "First and last and everywhere in between, you are loved," I think was his response to knowing that need. And so, yeah, I think there's a kind of profound empathy in that he could know that about children, but he could also sense that within himself, and so then extend that to anyone.

Well, and as you have been working on this project, as it grew from an idea for maybe an article into a book, and as you have encountered these many people who have been influenced by the life of Mr. Rogers, If you could sum up in one sentence a taste of what we're in for in this conversation before we go to break, what was the overarching theme that you found in these conversations with these various people that had worked with Mr. Rogers through the years?

Well, I mean, I think it worked. I think that what he wanted to offer to people, this sense of acceptance and love that he worked really hard every day to convey, I think it worked. Because people found that profoundly affecting and profoundly affirming.

Wonderful. And we'll take that idea of the success of this project that Mr. Rogers was embarking on into this unfolding conversation. But for the moment, let's take a break. You're listening to Things Not Seen. I'm David Dalt, and we're speaking today with Shea Tuttle. We'll be back in a moment. This is Things Not Seen. I'm David Dalt. We're speaking today with Shea Tuttle about her recent book, Exactly As You Are: The Life and Faith of Mr. Rogers. So in our first segment, we were setting the broad strokes of the conversation and, and talking about Mr. Rogers, his background, how he got into children's television, and, and the events that began to shape his philosophy of how to engage in children's programming. And you mentioned one particular mentor of his, Professor McFarland, who worked with Erik Erikson and with Benjamin Spock there in the Pittsburgh area on childhood development. But another formative person for Mr. Rogers was a professor at what was at the time the Western Seminary and is now the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, Professor Bill Orr. And I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about what Bill Orr taught Mr. Rogers and what the basic theology was that Bill Orr was advocating for.

Yeah, I think in many ways, I think Fred always sourced his theology. When he spoke of it, he would refer back to Dr. Orr. I think Dr. Orr brought him— I think he gave a sort of theological foundation to what Fred already believed. You know, Fred grew up in a family that was very engaged in caring for the neighbor and for the neighborhood. So I think he already had some of these basic values that would form who he was and how he worked broadly in the world as well as in his television ministry. But Dr. Orr, I think, gave him a kind of theological framework for that. He taught systematic theology, so I think in that course, at least based on my own experience with systematic theology, you're learning to draw some of those lines. If we believe this, then we behave this way. And so for him, I think it became, you know, if we believe that God has created us in God's image and has created us good, then we behave in certain ways toward the neighbor. And then I think as Fred was learning what Dr. Orr was teaching sort of overtly in the Fred was also just a very keen observer of people, and so he was watching how Dr. Orr lived in his life, and so he often told the story of days when Dr. Orr would, you know, leave for lunch and come back without his coat in the middle of winter, and someone would ask, you know, "Well, what happened to your coat?" and he'd say, "Well, someone needed it," and they would ask, like, "But you need a coat," and he'd say, "Oh, I have another," and so he, you know, he talks about Dr. Orr as someone who lived theologically, and that he put into practice what he believed. And so I think Fred learned from him on all these different levels, sort of the, the theological framework for what he believed in, but then also the way of living that out in the world.

One of the things that was so profound for me in your book, Exactly As You Are: The Life and Faith of Mr. Rogers, was this description of Bill Orr and the way that he talked about the operation of evil in the world and the operation of goodness in the world. And if I'm recalling correctly from your book, Evil is that thing that wants to sit behind your eyes and say, "You're imperfect, you're bad, no one could love you," and that leads you then to reach out to others with that same sort of attitude. And one of the things that came out from that chapter about Bill Orr was that Jesus takes exactly the opposite tack. Jesus is not the accuser, Jesus is the advocate. And that it's really from this articulation of Jesus as the advocate of acceptance that Fred Rogers began to develop this philosophy of, "It's you I like, just as you are." And first of all, have I remembered that correctly, or would you say that differently?

Yeah, no, that's exactly right. And I think that was fundamental to the way Fred viewed the world. You know, one of the things that I sometimes feel a little conflicted about is the way that Fred gets remembered often in sort of popular culture and popular memory as this icon of kindness. And on one hand, fair enough, he was a deeply kind person. But he never, to my knowledge, in my recollection, went on the program and said, "Hey, you should be kind," because he believed that our behavior grows out of what we see in ourselves. And I think he learned that from Dr. Orr, that if we have the sort of sense of ourselves that he would say is, you know, the way that Jesus sees us, then I think what Fred believes is the way that God sees us, that we are lovable and that we are good, then we will extend that to our neighbor. Absolutely. And so then, sure, we're kind, but it's not because somebody told us to be kind or reminded us to be kind. It's because we believe that we are lovable. And so then we have the grace to extend to other people. And yeah, for him, evil is just the opposite, that if we're feeling bad about ourselves, and if we're believing sort of these what he would see as lies about ourselves, then we are likely to turn that outward as well and believe the worst about other people.

Well, and this ties in with, I think, what was another touchstone for Fred Rogers, and that was a quote from the author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, where he says, "The essential thing about the universe is that which is invisible." And I've butchered the quote, and perhaps you can say it better. But this notion of an invisible quality in people that is good and is what is worthy of notice was so central to how Fred Rogers thought about things. And I'm wondering how you see the connection between something like that quotation from Saint-Exupéry and how Bill Orr's theology shaped Fred Rogers.

Yeah, so the way that Fred at least always recounted the quote in translation was, "What is essential is invisible to the eye." And he used that quote all the time. I mean, it came up all the time. And there were places that I found where he used it to express something about God, that God's presence is everywhere, whether or not we can see it. But he also used the quote to talk about the neighbor, that we can't always know what's essential about someone just by looking. And so I think he believed in this sort of a deeper reality and an internal reality that's more complex than we can usually easily know. And that was true about him, too. I think he was, he was a very complex person. He would note the irony of someone whose work was in television loving a quote about things being invisible to the eye, because television is such a visual medium. So I think that sense that when you encounter the neighbor, that there's a fundamental mystery there, because some things that are essential about them are invisible, is also part of what animates a posture of mercy, which is the kind of thing that I think Bill Orr was trying to advocate, that if we believe that there's more unseen than seen, and if that's true about ourselves as well as others, then we would do well to encounter others with a kind of grace for that.

Well, and one of the things that really is amazing is that he took that idea that there's something invisible, almost an invisible kingdom, that's worth talking about and noting, And he applied that to the interior life of a child. I think that a lot of children's programming then and now is of the opinion that kids are kind of malleable and it doesn't really matter and things— they'll get the joke and things will kind of flow off of them. And Fred Rogers never took that view, did he? He always thought that there was deep importance to the interior life of children and it was not to be trifled with. And I'm wondering if you could bring out some examples, both from his life and from his work, where he took that idea of the interior life of the child very seriously.

Yeah, yeah, I think, I think he took children so, so seriously. And I think that was countercultural then, I think it's countercultural now. To be fair, Fred took basically everything very, very seriously, but children And that was certainly true about his way of interacting with children. One of the main ways that that shows up to me is in the topics that he chose to address on the program. I think, you know, whenever— maybe this is changing because of the accumulation of knowledge about Fred and about the work that he did, but I think over most of his career, whenever he was caricatured, it was in a way as to suggest that he made everything sort of too simple or he made everything sweet and happy and fine. That was never true. I think the people who made that critique must not have really watched the show because on the program he was talking to children constantly about things that might make them afraid or ways that they might feel unsettled and navigating the world with them from that kind of childlike perspective that we talked about earlier because he believed that that was serious and real. And so Sometimes that also, I mean, it even came out in these very odd things that he would do where he would talk about things that make adults either uncomfortable or just make them snicker because it seems so weird. There was an article where the writer quoted this moment in the show where he talks about an apple and how, now I'm on the screen and you're, you know, out there, so you can't eat the apple, you can just see it, but I have it and I could eat it. He took very seriously the kind of child's eye-level view of the world and would sort of speak to that as a way, I think, of meeting children where they were. He also addressed divorce on the show. He did a special, either public service announcements or whole special episodes following times of national upheaval, because he knew that those things were serious to children and he wanted to address those.

Well, and when I was reading these portions of your book, Exactly as You Are, about this, this way that he approached whimsy. I thought a lot about a book by the philosopher James Kars called Finite and Infinite Games. And in, in that book, Kars talks about the seriousness of play. And you note that Fred Rogers was very serious about whimsy, and you mentioned earlier that he was serious about everything. But his observation was that play is serious work for children. It's part of how they learn to be human social beings. And so the seriousness of whimsy, I think, is an interesting thing for us to just explore for a moment. What we oftentimes think of these things as opposite, but how did he bring those two things together in his life and in his work?

In the book, I talk about how I think this was— there was a kind of tension for him, at least for a while, and I think— I'm sure he wouldn't have put it in these terms, but attention, in my view, between seriousness and whimsy, that especially through the time when he was working on the Children's Corner with Josie Carey, most of the show was improvised. And so, they would be on camera, he, you know, with the puppet behind the set, and Josie out in front of the camera, and they would make up storylines as they went. And they're, I mean, they're delightful, they're very whimsical, they're silly, they're clever. I think he and Josie had a very kind of easy chemistry. I think they're both very smart, and so they could sort of work off of each other and what they were doing. I think that was a lot of fun for him, but I also think at some point, especially as he's taking these child development courses and he's learning more, developing his sort of philosophy of all of this more, he started to become uncomfortable with some of the things that would emerge in their conversation. If there was anything that seemed to be a little bit humor based on anything sort of flat-footed that can have a demeaning quality under it, that would really bother him. And I think, you know, he and Joseph used to argue about their word choices after the fact, because he would be concerned about a word being— that a word might suggest to a child something that wasn't true.

This is Things Not Seen. We're speaking today with Shea Tuttle about her recent book, Exactly As You Are. We'll be back in a moment. This is Things Not Seen. I'm David Dault. Each week on our program, we bring you a rich conversation about culture and faith. Today we're talking with Shea Tuttle about her recent book, Exactly Beautifully As You Are: The Life and Faith of Mr. Rogers. Well, we started out the conversation noting that Mr. Rogers was not explicit oftentimes about his faith and his background as a trained seminarian when he produced his show Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood. But earlier in his career, on a program called The Children's Corner, he did produce, possibly for the Presbyterian Church, a one-off version of the program that showed The Children's Corner on Sunday and it had an explicitly religious theme. And you mention in your book, Exactly As You Are, that the theology of this one-off episode sort of lands flat-footed. And I wonder if you could walk my listeners through what you think didn't work about that moment that Mr. Rogers tried to be explicitly religious on television.

Sure, yeah. So I should say that I, I don't know a whole lot about how this how this particular episode came to exist. There's sort of the— I think it's something like the Presbyterian Historical Society, the people who have the recording and have it online, they sort of surmise that it was for, you know, maybe for VBS or for Sunday school curriculum because it's clearly explicitly religious in a way that his other work is not. But I'm not quite sure exactly where it came from or why, but I do find it really interesting to see what happens when he tries to do something that is more explicit and how, yeah, like you said, like it really, it just doesn't really work. It seems to me that what they did is they took a sort of really a pretty great storyline from the Children's Corner with the usual cast of puppets and people and they, there's a storyline about putting on a play together. They're doing, uh, The Elf and the Shoemaker, I think, and so there's you know, the story that children might know and they're doing it in this creative way with King Friday and, you know, these different characters embodying these parts and they're preparing for it and they look like they're happy because it's not his turn to be in the play, it's his turn to be the encourager and he would rather be the encourager than be in the play. There's some really interesting stuff about King Friday who's, you know, supposed to be this, you know, poor shoemaker but he's not so sure about that because he's a king and so He wants people to know that he's only playing a part. He's not actually poor, and he wants to be able to have like a gold, you know, gold tool to make his shoes with. So there's some really fun stuff. They, you know, they have Grandpère, who back in Children's Corner time didn't speak any English. It was all in French, and so that's a really fun little element of the story. But then it's like they just shoehorn like other stuff into it. So like out of nowhere, they just say something, Josie Terry says something like, "Oh, Grandpa's so nice, he's so gentle and soft like a lamb." And then she goes into this song about the lamb, you know, and so all of a sudden there's this religious thing happening that doesn't really have anything to do with the rest of it. And so I think at the time, I think, like with many, many things, Fred really, he got better at a lot, over the many years that he was in television. I think his, as I said before, his work with puppets improved, I think his songwriting improved, I think his crafting the story, all of that improved. And I think, I think his way of integrating his theology into his work also improved. But at this early point, it felt very stilted. It was like in one moment we're in this, you know, lovely sort of whimsical story. And then in the next moment, we're doing something that's religious, but without seeming like it has much of a purpose or function in this context. And I think for Fred, you know, he did sometimes feel uncomfortable about talking about faith. There were years where he wouldn't really tell people that he was ordained because he didn't want people to misunderstand his intentions or to misunderstand what that might have represented. And so I think when he would trying to be explicit, his discomfort kind of showed through. And it was very awkward. Whereas later on, when he got to weave his theology in much more creatively and intuitively, it was beautiful and very rich. But in this case, it was pretty limited, and the theology itself was pretty limited.

Well, one of the things that you note is that early on, when he was working to develop Mister Rogers' Neighborhood into a national program, taking it from a local program, a regional program. He made overtures to churches, and in particular the Presbyterian Church, to provide funding and to help to secure the resources to make that leap. And the church never really responded, did it?

Right. Yeah, I think, I think he really, you know, he needed funding to be able to make a program. And I think he went through seminary, again, while he was working on The Children's Corner. So, I think he always in some ways was thinking about the ways that those things intersected. And so, and then he was ordained. The ordination was, I think it was like ordained as an evangelist, but the charge was to this ministry through the mass media to children and families. And so I think he thought, it seems to me, that the church was gonna sort of fund him to be this sort of television minister to children, you know. And I don't think the church, I don't know if they ever had that intention, maybe it was cost prohibitive, I don't know. But when it came down to it, he found that they might be willing to put up a little money here or there, but never the kind of immense funding it would take to sustain an ongoing program. And he was very angry about that. And I don't know whether, it's a little hard to sort of suss out whether that was like, just that he knew he needed funding and that was a logical place, or if he really believed that this was the right thing for the church to do. It comes across that at the time he might have believed it was, that he saw, again, he saw television as this really powerful tool. And so why on earth wouldn't the church be using it when they're supposed to care about the hearts and minds of children? And I think later on he was glad that the church didn't do that. But at the time, I think he was very angry that they wouldn't. And found that to be a real failing that he knew, you know, you say you care about these things, but how are you supposed to compete with the other, the other kind of forces in the world that are acting on children with, he says something about, you know, glue sticks and crayons, like that's never going to do it. You know, we have to do something more powerful and more creative. And that, you know, never happened.

Well, and I saw, because there was a missive, a letter that you quote at length in the book, exactly as you are, where he reaches out to religious organizations to say, not only fund my program, but also to invite them into the production of programs of their own. And exactly as you said, that this is a missed opportunity. And you said that it made him very angry to basically be the only program that was trying to do what he was doing. And I wonder, as time went by, other programs like Sesame Street adopted a lot of the conventions of television. They used quick cut, They used a lot of flash and speed and brevity. And Mr. Rogers insisted on having a very different production style, one that was much more slow-paced. Even, I imagine, against a lot of pressure to try and step up his game to compete, for lack of a better word, with other types of children's programming. What was it that made him resist those calls to change the fundamental structure of the neighborhood to be more like other children's programming?

You know, I think part of it, at least, was that he knew that those changes wouldn't be true to him. He was a person who was very— I want to say that he was a person who moved slowly through the world, and that's true, although he also moved quickly through the world. I mean, he, you know, people will talk about how he's a very fast walker. Some of his, I think, coworkers were a little concerned because he would drive pretty fast. I think he went quickly in terms of he got a lot done, and he had a very, I think he had a very hungry mind, and, you know, was ambitious in some sorts of ways. But his way of operating in a moment, I think, was very slow. And so, people talk about this when they, you know, when they would talk with him, just how sort of slow and intense and present he was in those moments. And I think it was really important to him that the program be true to him. He was so intent on being the same person on camera as off because he believed that anything other than that was not taking children seriously. He believed that it was dishonest with children, and he thought that— he often said that, you know, the most important thing you could do for a child was to be an honest adult in their life. And so he, he wanted to have this kind of deep integrity, I think, of the program reflecting who he was. I also think that he, he knew that it worked. And I mean, over time, I think that maybe became harder to see in some ways, as, as more programming shifted and his did not. I don't, I don't know the numbers of ratings, but, you know, they didn't stay as high as they once were. And so there may have been a point when he felt like it's not maybe as effective as it was, but I think he also saw that children who would encounter even something like Sesame Street and leave that scattered or sort of wound up or whatever, would settle for him and really listen and be tuned in. And I still see it. I've seen it with my own children. I've seen it with other kids. But there's something about him that, and his presentation and his intensity and his slowness that brought children to him.

Well, we mentioned earlier in the program that his family was a very generous family in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, and were very committed to service and very committed to the church. And even though his father, Jim Rogers, was a very successful industrialist in Latrobe, there's a quote that you attribute to him that the church should always be a little bit in the red. In other words, the church should not necessarily be measuring itself by worldly business success. And I wonder if you see a parallel between that philosophy of, of of Fred Rogers' father, Jim Rogers, that the church should always be a little bit in the red, and his unwillingness to necessarily go for higher ratings or go for a kind of quick win in terms of response from viewers, and instead stick to this very pedestrian but very focused method of children's programming.

Sure, yeah, I think that's a great connection. And I think, you know, there's a kind of fundamental I don't know if Fred ever put it this way, but I feel like there's a kind of fundamental gospel truth to that, right? That like the story of Jesus' life, you know, it leads toward death. Like there's, you know, there's a part of the call of the Christian story is that you go through death to get to life. So I always find it sort of funny when, you know, churches— I think the parallel is like church attendance with TV ratings. Like if our whole goal is big attendance, I think we've missed something, you know, about the about the story and what the story calls for. And so I do think there's a real parallel there with, you know, churches being in the red, like churches are not out for just accumulating more and more and more, and the program, you know, the success of that not being measurable in how many people are tuning in.

If you're just joining us, this is Things Not Seen. I'm David Dault, and we're speaking today with Shea Tuttle about her recent book, Exactly As You Are: The Life and Faith of Mr. Roger. We'll be back in a moment. This is Things Not Seen. I'm David Dalt. We're speaking today with Shea Tuttle about her recent book, Exactly As You Are: The Life and Faith of Mister Rogers. Well, at one point near the end of the book, Exactly As You Are, you have this line about Mister Rogers that really stuck with me. And you talked about the magnetic strangeness of Fred Rogers. And I wonder if you could elaborate on that a little bit for my listeners. When you use this phrase, magnetic strangeness, what do you mean about Mr. Rogers?

Thanks. Yeah, I think there's a— there's this other, you know, odd thing that happens again in my cultural remembrance of Fred, that I think he gets a little bit flattened in a bunch of ways, but he gets made into this sort of like nice, happy, nostalgic memory. And in reality, I think it's so important to who he was to be able to recognize how weird he was. Like, he was very strange. This sort of hit home for me when I had a friend read, you know, an early, just bit of material, really, that I had worked on. And he, it didn't occur to me until after he read it, when he explained to me that he is British. He did not grow up with American television. And so, he hadn't really ever watched Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. And so, to read this to him, the main takeaway was, "Wow, this guy was really unusual." He was a very strange person. And it was helpful for me to remember that that's a part of, you know, who Fred was, and I think a really important one. I think, you know, again, this kind of very strong, very deep sense of self that he had, and this real drive to be true to that self, sometimes just made him really unusual and pretty unflinching in being unusual. I mean, I think everybody is weird in their own way, but we often sort of compensate or we react to ourselves or whatever, to kind of disarm that or to disarm others' responses to that strangeness. And Frank just refused. I mean, I don't even know if it occurred to him, but he didn't do that. He was just sort of himself, whatever that meant. And so some of these moments of, you know, talking about the apple and then staring at the apple and smiling or naming some odd connection in a moment that he saw or just being comfortable with silence. And even like eye contact through silence, which I think unnerved people both in person and when they watched the program. Those things were just a part of who he was, and he wasn't going to shift that. And to me, that really is some of the magnetism that I sense when I watch him or listen to him, is that partly it's just puzzling, and I can't figure him out. I mean, even after spending a whole lot of time you know, working on his writings, or listening to people talk about him, or watching interviews, or watching the show, I can't figure it out. And I think that's part of what draws me to him, is that he's unusual, and he's complicated. And so, I just keep looking. Like, I want to figure it out, so I keep looking. And I think that was part of his power. I think that remains part of his power.

You mentioned the phrase "unusual and complicated," and I think that that was true both on screen and off. And so in your book, Exactly As You Are, you talk about some of the ways in which he used Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, the program, to speak to political issues of the day, to speak about war, to speak about racism, but in ways that children could understand. But that complexity and that willingness to kind of weigh into a conflict also was very present behind the scenes with his staff and with his fellow performers. And I'm thinking in particular about a moment of contention between Fred Rogers and Betty Aberlin, who played Lady Aberlin on the show, later in the, in the course of the, of the series, when he didn't re-air a week-long episode series on conflict. And Betty Aberlin wrote him a very I think, angry letter about her disappointment of his refusal to engage in conflict when she thought that he needed to speak up. And I wonder if you could sort of tell us a little bit about that situation.

Sure. Yeah. Fred did this really amazing series. It's referred to as Conflict Week, at least. I don't know that that's what it was called at the time, but that's the way it gets referred to, where it was sort of taking on The Arms Race, and I think it only aired a couple of times and then they stopped airing it. And I think that was in response to negative responses from the public or from, I don't know if it was from funders. I actually don't know a lot about that. It was a little bit hard to track down other than that it aired and then it didn't. And so it actually was hard for me to even get a chance to watch it because they don't even allow people to see it anymore, because Fred apparently didn't want it to be aired. So anyway, this is what Betty Averill later on is upset about, that he sees— it's around the time of the Iraq War and President Bush, and she's very political, and she's saying like, how can you not re-air this series when it's so needed, and when it could testify to kind of a kingdom of God peaceful, alternate reality, by contrast to what we have. And so, she's very angry about this. And yet, writes this, I mean, scathing letter. It's in itself, it's a work of art, just really brilliant, you know, scathing letter. And it's amazing to just get this glimpse into what was happening there behind the scenes.

And I wonder, as you've been working on this project, how engaging in the life of Fred Rogers has touched you and has touched your faith?

It's been such a joy. And part of the joy of that for me has been that Fred's theology, it sort of represents what I hope is true. And I think for me, I'm a person who has always claimed faith or perhaps been claimed by it, however you want to think about that. But I've also always struggled with it and had plenty of doubts and uncertainties. And I'm— that doesn't concern me as much as it used to. I'm okay with having doubts and uncertainties. But it's a little bit hard for me to say with a kind of broad confidence, like, this is what I believe is true about God and about the world. And there was something so freeing about being able to say, this is what Fred Rogers believes is true about God and about the world and about you and about me. And that what he believes is all about love and mercy and grace. And this fundamental affirmation of goodness and belovedness. And so it was sort of freeing to get to testify to all of that through Fred in a way that, you know, I hope isn't— I don't think it's using him because I think it's true to what he believed, but it's been great to get to tell his story in a way that can testify to those truths that I claim but can't always sort of 100% propane, maybe is the way to put that. So, so it's been a delight. It's been so much fun. And it's— he's also just a lovely person to get to spend time with. And so it's— yeah, it's been really great.

Well, Shea Tuttle, I love Mister Rogers and watched him when I was a child. And I have spent a lot of time researching him and his life. And I had thought that I had read just about everything out there and had learned all the stories. But I found in your book a fresh approach and things that I had never known before. I loved it. I delighted in reading it. I cried a couple times, and I know that my listeners will love to engage it as well. And so thank you so much for taking time today to talk to us about it.

Oh, thank you, David. That means so much. Appreciate it.

We've been speaking today with Shay Tuttle. She's co-editor of the recent book Can I Get a Witness? 13 Peacemakers, Community Builders, and Agitators for Faith and Justice. She holds a Master's of Divinity degree from Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She lives in Virginia with her family, and today we've been discussing her recent book, Exactly As You Are: The Life and Faith of Mister Rogers. Things Not Seen is produced by Sandberg Media, LLC. We're distributed nationally by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Today's show was recorded at the William Adams Studios in beautiful Hyde Park, here on the South Side of Chicago. Our studios have a home courtesy of the Zygon Center for Religion and Science, part of the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. Neither Zygon nor LSTC is responsible for the content of this program. Our theme music is composed by Jean Keeje. Our show is made possible in part through the generosity of our supporters on Patreon. You can find out how to help us create great programs by going to patreon.com/notseenradio. That's patreon.com/notseenradio. You can follow us on Twitter @notseenradio. Visit us on Facebook and like our page to receive regular updates about the show and to find out more about our guests. That's facebook.com/thingsnotseenradio. And you can sign up for the free podcast subscribe to the podcast, listen to old shows, send us an email, and find out more about our guests if you visit us on the web at thingsnotseenradio.com. I'm David Dault, and we'll be back next week with more conversations about culture and faith. Please join us.

Thank you for joining us here this week in the neighborhood. Music featured on today's podcast was Nouvelle Noel by Kevin MacLeod. And all other music was by Benjamin Tauset at bensound.com. That's bensound.com. Special thanks to my guest, David Dolt. And I also want to thank the @MrRogersSay community on Twitter. Thank you for being there every single day. I'm your host, Rick Lee James. My Twitter account is is @RickLeeJames. My website is rickleejames.com. My other podcast is Voices in My Head: The Rick Lee James Podcast. And I look forward to being with you again next time. Until then, remember, you make each day a special day. You know how? By just being you. There is only one person in this whole world like you, and people can like Make you exactly as you are.