9 Fascinating Things You Didn't Know About Mr. Rogers

Though he never preached onscreen, Mr. Rogers was an ordained minister, reported The Atlantic. “After graduating from seminary, the Presbyterian Church didn’t know what to do with Fred,” revealed Amy Hollingsworth, author of The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers. "In 1962 Rogers received the Bachelor of Divinity degree and was ordained by the United Presbyterian Church with the charge to work with children and their families through the mass media," noted the Museum of Broadcast Communications.

Most of us remember the theme song to Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, but that's not the only tune he wrote and contributed to the show. Pittsburgh Music History reported, "Fred Rogers composed over two hundred songs, nine children’s operas and released twelve albums of children’s recordings." That's no small body of work for one man who was also hard at work recording over 900 episodes of a television show. The site proclaimed that he was well-recognized for his efforts, "He was a Grammy Award winning song writer, a pianist, a singer, and a four time Emmy winning performer."

It's fairly hard to picture Mr. Rogers as anything other than the somewhat grandfatherly adult in a sweater and sneakers from television. But Rogers was once a child. In fact, he was once an only child, until "his parents, James and Nancy, adopted a baby girl," when he was 11, according to Biography. That baby girl, Elaine, became the inspiration for the puppet Lady Elaine on the show.

Is that not the sweetest thing? "Until she died, those zippered sweaters that I wear on the Neighborhood were all made by my mother," Rogers told Emmy TV in an interview in 1999.

While he spent his freshman year at Dartmouth College in Massachusetts, he soon transferred to Rollins College in Florida to pursue a degree in music composition. However, he did return to Dartmouth in 2002 to give the commencement address, according to The Neighborhood Archive, in which he encouraged the graduating class, "So in all that you do, in all of your life, I wish you the strength and the grace to make those choices which will allow you and your neighbor to become the best of whoever you are."

Mr. Rogers' friendliness extended to animals as well, but it went far beyond that to his Presbyterian ministerial roots. The Huffington Post explained, "Fred Rogers practiced a spiritual vegetarianism grounded in gratitude to God," and apparently often said, “I don’t want to eat anything that has a mother."

The Huffington Post reported that Mr. Rogers preferred to weigh 143 pounds because "143 was his favorite number because of its association with “I love you.” As he put this, “It takes one letter to say ‘I’ and four letters to say ‘love’ and three letters to say ‘you.’ One hundred and forty-three.” Now that, is undeniably quirky.

In 1969, Mr. Rogers testified before Congress asking for renewed funding for public television programming. In his testimony, he said, "I feel that if we in public television can only make it clear that feelings are mentionable and manageable, we will have done a great service for mental health," according to American Rhetoric's transcript of his remarks. TalentSmart.com reported that in just six minutes of speaking, Rogers convinced the Senate committee to give public television $20 million in funding.

Good Housekeeping reported that while Rogers' two most memorable sweaters were red and green, he actually couldn't differentiate either color!

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