wfn.org | [PCUSANEWS] Joanne Rogers finds new book is just like sharing a

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Note #7982 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

Joanne Rogers finds new book is just like sharing a visit with Fred
03445
October 21, 2003

Joanne Rogers finds new book is just like sharing a visit with Fred

by Barbara Vancheri
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
reprinted with permission

PITTSBURGH - Joanne Rogers thought she had a simple way to mark her favorite
passages in an advance copy of The World According to Mister Rogers:
Important Things to Remember.

	She slid a paperclip onto the page to note a special entry. But then
she found another. And another. Before long, her paperback proof was studded
with metal markers.

	"It seems to me that I'm visiting with him when I read it," says
Joanne, who had been married to the host of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" for
more than 50 years when he died in February.

	The World According to Mister Rogers, published by Hyperion Books, is
a collection of rich but bite-size stories, anecdotes and insights organized
by chapters called "The Courage to Be Yourself," "Understanding Love," "The
Challenges of Inner Discipline" and "We Are All Neighbors."

	Those titles were inspired by Joanne's forward, which recounts how
she was part of a group of Rollins College students who piled into a roomy,
old Franklin car to show transfer student Fred Rogers the Florida campus.
They became friends and then a couple, once taking first prize at a dance for
their Raggedy Ann and Andy costumes.

	She provides a capsule history of his April 1952 proposal, by letter,
and her acceptance from a pay-phone booth. They were married and started a
family, and Rogers went into television and the ministry. "If I were asked
for three words to describe him, I think those words would be courage, love
and discipline - perhaps in that very order."

	If you ever heard Fred Rogers speak, you can imagine his voice
reciting the lines he carefully crafted. "He made such an effort to write
exactly as he would say something. He really worked hard at his writing, and
he used to say simpler is better," Joanne says.

	Take his comments on beginnings and endings:

"Often when you think you're at the end of something, you're at the beginning
of something else. I've felt that many times. My hope for all of us is that
'the miles we go before we sleep' will be filled with all the feelings that
come from deep caring - delight, sadness, joy, wisdom - and that in all the
endings of our life we will be able to see the new beginnings."

	Rogers' death has meant a new visibility for Joanne, who has been
scheduled for numerous radio and television interviews in connection with the
book's release.

	As a professional pianist, Joanne is no stranger to the public eye,
but she's found herself the somewhat reluctant focus of cameras and notebooks
of late.

	Now she's on a mini-tour for the book, the brainchild of Bob Miller
of Hyperion Books. He proposed the idea to Bill Isler, president of Family
Communications Inc., the non-profit company Rogers founded.

	Isler and other Family Communications staffers were so overwhelmed
after Rogers died of stomach cancer that they nearly said no. Miller promised
editorial help if Family Communications could assemble some of Rogers'
speeches, program transcripts, books, letters, interviews and never-published
writings.

	Joanne says, "It was a little while before they got me involved in
the whole thing and they said the publisher would like me to do the foreword
and I said, 'Oh my goodness, I'm not a writer. I can't do that. And Bill just
said we'll help you and I said, 'Okay, then.'"

	Joanne, who leaned on Isler and Family Communications staff members
Hedda Bluestone Sharapan and Cathy Cohen Droz, says, "I finally did what all
writers would like to do, say I'm done with it, you just take it and you do
what you want. I finally felt there wasn't anything more I could add to it."

	The small hardcover book is priced at $16.95. Family Communications
is donating profits to the Fred Rogers Fund, which will continue his work
promoting the healthy emotional, social and intellectual development of
children.

	Assembling the book has been therapeutic for everyone, says Joanne,
who is still spending her spare time writing thank-you notes for kind
gestures after Fred's death. The single paperclips have been doubled to
bookmark the extra-special favorites, some of which she may read on TV.

	Among them is this one:

	"In the external scheme of things, shining moments are as brief as
the twinkling of an eye, yet such twinklings are what eternity is made of -
moments when we human beings can say 'I love you,' 'I'm proud of you,' 'I
forgive you,' 'I'm grateful for you.' That's what eternity is made of:
invisible, imperishable good stuff."

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