Feed the Fish

On kiddie pools and racism. On sharing a towel with Officer Clemmons. On how to say, and not to say, I love you.

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Episode Transcript

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It is so warm in my neighborhood today that I
thought I would just get some water in this little

(01:31):
pond and cool off my feet. In May of nine,
Mr Rogers Neighborhood has only been on TV for a
little more than a year. Mr Rogers arrives to his
house carrying a kiddie pool. Let's now go get the water,
all right. Of course, it's not a hot summer day.

(01:52):
Mr Rogers has taped in a sound stage at w
q e D in Pittsburgh, and the episode aired early
in May, so it was probably taped somewhere around mid April,
if not earlier. Some children think that when you grow up,
you don't really care for cool water on your feet
on a hot day. And I can tell you, as
a Pittsburgh native, April in Pittsburgh is not summer, but

(02:16):
I do. Yeah, So why is Fred so hot? Oh?
There's Officer Clemmons. High. Officer Clemens, come in mine, won't
you sit down? Officer Clemens is the friendly neighborhood cop
who stops by now and again for a visit with
Mr Rogers, and he's black. Not only is it unusual

(02:36):
to have a black authority figure on TV in the
late nineteen sixties, but his role makes Officer Clemens the
only black recurring character on all of children's television at
the time. It's so warm, I was just putting some
water on my feet. Oh it sure is. Would you
like to join me? It looks awten enjoyable. But I
don't have a towel or anything. Oh you share mine? Okay? Sure. France,

(03:00):
while removes his tall military boots, rolls up his pants,
and Mr Rogers gently soaks Francoise feet with the hose
that feels better already. A few years before this, in
a group of black teenagers protested segregation at a Florida motel.

(03:23):
They didn't do it by picketing or by sitting on
the lobby floor. They protested by jumping in the motel
pool for swim who water on a hot day. The
motel's owner, James Brock, responded by pouring what he said
was muriatic acid into the pool with the intention of

(03:46):
burning the protesters. The teens they were later arrested by
Florida police. Swimming pools remained a hotly contested space throughout
the so called Civil rights era, and that probably is
why Fred Rogers was so hot in April in Pittsburgh

(04:07):
in nineteen sixty nine. Is that enough? Well, I know
how busy you are, but sometimes just a minute like this,
we'll really make a difference. That we have great boots

(04:30):
to fill office with. Clemon, thanks you stopping by, so
have a good day, bye bye. Great to live in
a neighborhood with special people like Officer Clements. I'll bet
you there weren't ten white men in this country who
would share a towel with a black man. Here in America,

(04:51):
being black sometimes really presented a problem. And those swimming
pools people were behaving in a very, very unkind way.
And I talked to Fred about that, how helpless they
made me feel, and he said, we'll see, We'll see

(05:13):
what we can do. Francois, we hear a lot about
empathy these days. The word is everywhere. Really T shirts
and toad bags and Instagram accounts, all reminding us that
we can choose empathy, as if that's all it takes
to fix a world that so often feels broken. But

(05:34):
if we want to change the world, then we have
to take our empathy and do something with it. I'm
Carvel Wallace and this is Finding Fred, a podcast about
Fred Rogers from I Heart Media and Fatherly in partnership
with Transmitter Media. Yeah, the entirety of the episode in

(06:03):
which Fred silks Francoise feet is incredibly simple, but it's
also incredibly powerful. Fred was a master of modeling good
behavior for kids because he knew just how effective modeling
could be. Here he is in an interview from I

(06:23):
was at this nursery school and the director had invited
this man to come and sculpt in front of the children.
She said, I don't want you teaching sculpting. I want
you simply to sit with the children and do what

(06:45):
you feel you'd like to do with the clay. Well,
the kids started using clay that medium in the most
wonderful ways. And that wouldn't have happened if this gifted
sculptor hadn't loved clay. Right in front of them. This

(07:08):
idea of just doing what you love in front of
people as a way of teaching it, of spreading it.
Loving the Clay, as Fred would later call it, has
been sitting with me since I first heard it. It
echoes ideas I've heard in so many disparate contexts, show
don't tell attraction rather than promotion. So in that sense,
it's a timeless, almost interfaith concept, like love that neighbor

(07:32):
or do oneto others. And the other thing about it
is that rather than pushing me to become some hero,
some great leader of men, the idea of loving the
Clay just calls on me to be the best version
of myself that I can be, and then to let
that be seen. My favorite like recurring Mr Rogers moment

(07:53):
is him feeding his fish. This is my friend Eve
Ewing Eve as a scholar and a writer and a
fessor and a poet and a comic book writer. She's
like everything, you don't just be writing, you know, I
just write like essays and stuff as well, and about
those fish. Let's feed the fish. Whenever he feeds the fish,
there's like this little jazz piano riff that plays. Give

(08:16):
them a little food mimicking like the actions of the
fish as they go up and like open and close
their mouths to get the food. Seeing this adult engage
in this small moment of caring for another living creature
that requires just like a pause of patience and quiet
is just so beautiful to me. He was showing us

(08:39):
how to be good, not just through saying like be good,
don't do drugs, don't rob people, or whatever, but actually
just like doing it, like feeding the fish, or helping
your neighbor with something, or being nice to somebody that
you know that other people are maybe not nice to
all the time. Tell me more about the role that
Fred Rogers played in your childhood. I know that you're

(09:01):
calling him Fred for this podcast, but I can't bring
myself to do that. I haven't begivener he never got
it and get no permission to call this derive by
his first name. Well, you know, that's a lot. I
think he's just you know, somebody that I can say
that's always been there in my life in the same
way that Maria and Gordon from Sesame Street have always

(09:22):
been there. There's a way in which that can sound
like kind of sad that these TV adults played this
role in my life, but my mom was working full
time out of the house and my dad was home
with me. And he will say quite proudly and candidly
that his strategy was to basically like, have me watch

(09:43):
PBS all day, and he will attribute much of my
success as an adult to this parenting strategy. But I
think that I think as an adult, I've come to
realize that that was very intentional, That these were adults
entering my life that I could view as like trustworthy,
carrying adults, even if I didn't know them personally. That

(10:05):
that I see that now in retrospects like a form
of public intervention or like a public service. That was
very intentional. M. Fred Rogers was one of the first
makers of TV You to recognize that it could be
a constant positive presence for kids who didn't always have

(10:26):
that at home. He liked to say that attitudes are caught,
not taught. It's what happens when you watch someone love
the clay in front of you. And he didn't just
demonstrate how to work with the clay, or tie your
shoes or draw with crayons. He actually showed kids that
doing the right thing can make them feel good. One

(10:49):
thing I've learned in my forty five years on this
planet is that doing the right thing does not always
feel good. Sometimes it can take a lot of effort
to overcome habit or instinct to do the right thing.
One of the key ways that Mr Rogers showed us
how to be good was accepting people, accepting people as
they are, and that, for me, is one of the

(11:10):
most difficult lessons from Fred Rogers. It's particularly difficult these
days with Nazis marching in the streets and conspiracy theorists
on cable news. If being good means accepting those people
as they are, well, first, I'm not sure if I
can do it. But am I supposed to do it?
Is it supposed to feel good? I have been thinking

(11:33):
a lot about just how to understand this moment and
also how to understand where Fred fits into that. And
one specific question that I've been asking everyone is that
Fred has this? Uh not now I feel selfconscious calling Fred,
But Fred has this. I know your parents are not
raised you to call. We're gonna let that go. We're

(11:56):
gonna have to edit this im post um. There's this
thing about I like you the way you are or
it's you I like, it's you I like, and these
are these are really and this is a really fascinating
for me theological concept. I even ask my therapist about this,
and I was like, what about the bad people? Like?
What about it doesn't matter? And I wonder how you

(12:20):
parse that out. The idea that we are not accepting
and tolerating of certain people's behavior because it does harm
the least of us. Man, that's so tricky. Um. I'm
not a theologian, although I've spent a lot of time
around theologians. So my non theologian reading of that is
that's the idea of grace. That's what grace is, right,
the idea that God's love is unconditional, and that you're

(12:44):
great just the way you are, just just by being you.
That's enough. Now, I think that there's a subtle difference
between that idea and saying that everything you do is fine. Right.
So to me, what I hear when I hear it's
you I like or the idea of loving people unconditionally

(13:07):
is that I don't believe in monsters. I really don't.
I don't believe that the vast majority of people who
do harm do so because they're inhuman. I I believe
that people harm others for so many complicated reasons that
usually have to do with some variation of they themselves

(13:28):
have been harmed and have never been given any opportunity
to heal from that harm, or because our society disregards
others because they're considered marginal. Now that being said, uh,
you know, as the old saying goes, like Jesus loves you,
Jesus forgives you. That doesn't mean I have to you know,

(13:49):
Mr Rogers, ministry doesn't have to be everybody's ministry. So
Mr Rogers as a person who came out and said,
I love everybody unconditionally, and that's not something everybody is
able to do. And that is okay, you know, I
think that that's fine. Accepting people as they are is
a lofty goal. Not everyone is able to do that.

(14:11):
I guess most of us can't always do that, and
sometimes it's way more complicated than just accepting someone. How
do you accept someone when the thing that they're doing
is hurting you or hurting your family or your community.
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(16:48):
Fred Rogers was a master of loving the clay of
demonstrating and modeling the graciousness and neighborliness that he wished
to see in the world. And he did it on TV,
where million of children could mimic what Fred was modeling,
but they could also learn how to love the clay
in their own way. Even though Mr Rogers neighborhood belonged

(17:09):
to Mr Rogers, Fred also had dozens and dozens of
television neighbors, each of whom demonstrated their own gifts and
talents for the toddler audience. I have never not sang.
I've always been able to sing a song. It was
all at first, you know. It's kind of like a trick.
My aunts and uncles and cousins would ask me to sing,

(17:31):
and Mr Rogers neighborhood Francois Clemens played the police officer,
the singing police officer. My nickname was Buttercup, and the
older I get, the more I love that name, a
little Buttercup. And they used to say, Buttercup, come over here,
child and sing this song for me, and I would
come over. I sing for my aunt Clara, my and Hattie,
my aunt Emma Clemens is something of a phenomen a.

(17:54):
Grammy winning singer of opera and jazz. He founded the
Harlem Spiritual Ensemble, which preserves and performs traditional American Negro spirituals.
Francois was part of Mr. Rogers neighborhood for more than
twenty years, but that footbath episode in nine made him
an icon. I had no idea that scene would have
that kind of an effect. Everywhere I went, people wanted

(18:19):
to tell me their private story about that scene, somewhere
having discussions in their homes and that scene came on,
they said, Mom, look, mom, Dad, look dad, there's Francois
and Mr. Rogers with their feet in the same pool.
One's black and one's white. Yes they are, aren't They

(18:42):
and their friends. But long before he met fred Francois
was like a lot of the kids who would eventually
grow up watching Mr. Rogers, He was lonely. Francois told
me that his parents were clinically depressed. So we learned
to look to other people for affection and care. Some
of the things people say, Oh, there's nothing like a

(19:04):
mother's love, Oh there's nothing like family. I questioned that
from a very very young age, when my parents did
not act right in the sense of trust and love
and nurturing. I turned to a teacher, or to a
social worker, or to a parent of one of my peers.

(19:27):
They responded to me in a way that I thought
my parents should have. But some of that care was
a little bit more like charity than love, and growing
up in America in the eighteen fifties meant that help
was sometimes suffused with racism. The truth is the simple
answer is I was two people in one and that

(19:48):
was the one that was very sad. And to know
that there are people who disliked me, who pushed me
away simply because of my color, I could not deny it.
I didn't try to deny it. But then there were
those who said, oh, you need a new suit. Come
come with us. We're gonna go buy you a new suit.
Or they said, look at that boy's shoes. Come on,

(20:11):
we're gonna we're gonna take you downtown and buy you
a pair of shoes. It would have confused the average kid,
but since my parents weren't doing it, and I knew
that I needed a new suit, I had a sense
of wanting to dress decently and be clean. So in
my mind I said, I have to wait and see

(20:32):
what they're gonna do. Who these people? Are they gonna
push me away? Are they gonna see to it that
I have a winter coat. Francois was singing at a
church the first time he encountered Fred. When he invited
me to come onto the program and to have a
regular singing part. I said, Fred, I will be very

(20:54):
happy to be on your program as long as it
doesn't interfere with my singing. And he looked at me
and he told me, lady, He said, Francois, that is
the moment that I loved you, because you were not
gonna kiss my ass, and that's what everybody else was doing.

(21:19):
Those are his words. Officer Clemens first appeared in the
neighborhood in August of nine. He says it took a
while for him to get used to working with Fred Rogers.
He was a very unusual positive energy. It was not negative,
but it was just so damn unusual. And by that
I mean those puppets caused me a lot of hours

(21:44):
of thinking, what on earth was a grown man doing
plan with those puppets. I'm a ghetto boy, that was
I knew some black men who well halfway trying to
act right, but I never knew none who could play
with no puppets, you know, so I could. I just
couldn't wrap my head around it. And so I was

(22:05):
looking at him. I was looking at him carefully. But
ultimately Francois found in Fred a kindred spirit, a willing,
creative collaborator, and a true friend who loved him in
a way that Francois hadn't quite experienced before. Fred raw
just recognized something in me before I did. When I

(22:27):
got with Fred and he began to do these little
extra things, that was over and beyond the call of Judy.
I I was confused by that. Why is this white
guy sticking with me? Why is he so persistently wonderful?
So when he said, you're special, and you know how

(22:49):
just by being you and I like you, whow just
the way you are, and you make every day a
special day. One instance in particular stands out to Francois.
Many years later. Mr Rogers was rapping the show the

(23:10):
way he always rapped the show, changing his shoes, removing
a sweater. You've made it a special day for me,
you know how, by just your being yourself. Yeah, there's
only one person in the whole world like you, and
I like you just the way you are. See you,

(23:31):
Tom I. I don't even know how to explain it,
except we had locked eyes all the way across this
big studio, and I dared to say to myself, he's
talking to me, But he talks. He says that every day,
every time I come to a show that he's filming,
he's saying that. Why was he saying that to me today?

(23:52):
There was something in his voice, something in his eyes.
It was important to me to ask him, Fred, h
were you talking to me? I had never had somebody
say that to me in my whole life. Oh Lord,
I can't tell you. When he said, yes, yes, I've

(24:14):
been talking to you for two years and you heard
me today. That was such a divine explosion. I can't
explain it any other way. It was inside of me,
it was outside of me, it was in him, it
was in our eyes. I saw divinity. That's the only

(24:37):
thing I can tell people. I have never experienced anything
like it since. And I just collapsed in his in
his arms. For Francois, the prospect of being accepted fully

(24:58):
and completely was a near religious experience, but it was
also a complicated one because Francois had a secret, a
big secret that he had been keeping from almost everyone.
Would Fred accept him even if he knew that secret too?
Would Fred truly like him just the way that he was.

(25:24):
I remember calling Fred on the telephone. I said I've
got to tell you something and he said yes, And
that's when I really said to him, I'm gay. Fred.
He said to me, I will always love you, Francois.

(25:44):
So that's not what we're discussing. What we are discussing
is the role that you will be able to play
on Mr rogers neighborhood and what does it mean if
you choose to come out. Fred Rogers loved and accepted
Francois Clements and in ninety nine it was a radical

(26:06):
act to show a black man and a white man
sharing a footpath, but having an openly gay man performing
on a children's show that felt to Fred even riskier.
And the thing that he impressed upon me was the advertisers.
There would be enormous pressure on them from certain corners

(26:28):
in our society that condemn homosexuality. And the thing he
said to me, Fransoile, They're going to say terrible things
about you and about me and about our program, and
he said, all of our work, all of our valuable

(26:51):
work and research will be lost. Is that what you want?
And I, of course no, of course not. Then he said,
you you cannot come out. You come out, They will
not tolerate, they will not tolerate a gay person. And

(27:15):
especially on a children's television program. It sevenly could not
be done. How did that make you feel? It was
one of the lowest, one of the lowest moments of

(27:37):
my life. Realizing that, I think that was the moment
I decided to go back into the closet and stay.
Francois had spent years learning to love and accept himself,
and here he was presenting a crucial part of that
self to Fred. And though Fred reiterated his unconditional love

(27:57):
for Francois, he still didn't be leieve that the wider
world was ready to accept Francois just the way he was.
Fred was faced with the question of weighing the needs
of his friend with the preservation of his own larger mission,
reaching as many children as possible. There were those in
the black community, Oh, my goodness, who said to me,

(28:21):
how important it is that there's a black face on
that children's show appearing fairly regularly. Francois, the Ghetto kid
needs to know that they two can go from the
ghetto to Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. They they really impressed upon
me how important it was that there would be no scandal,

(28:45):
no disgrace to the race. Boy did I I zipped
it up then, So even though there were things going
on a stone wall, I absolutely did not have the
luxury of coming out if I were going to be
continue on Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. And I've said this too

(29:09):
many people who tried to say, well, he rejected you,
and he would didn't want you on the program, and
this is that blah blah. I can't tell you how
much I thought about that. I say that was that
was a period of time with me when it was obsessive.
I can't be myself, I can't have a normal life.

(29:29):
What a sacrifice. Francois Clemens made an enormous sacrifice. In
a very real sense. That sacrifice may have been responsible
for thirty years worth of Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, because who's
to say how long a show with a gay black
man would have even stayed on the air In the
late nineteen sixties. And there's another irony that, for all

(29:53):
of Fred's stated commitment to commercial free television for kids,
he still felt worried about protecting adver tizers from the
pressure of Francois coming out. So where did that leave Francois.
He had to swallow his pain, and he had to
carry it. He had to accept this denial of honesty

(30:15):
as the price of being a part of a work
like Mr. Rogers Neighborhood that did do so much good
for so many people. Fred Rogers Love meant liberation for
Francois Clemens, but not complete liberation. That would be for
Francois to find on his own. But he did learn

(30:35):
from Fred. For nearly three decades, he watched Fred Love
the Clay demonstrate practical care and real goodness, and he
saw how the transmission of that care through millions of
TV screens could have a domino effect, and he decided
that that result was too good to endanger. Would I
have made the same kind of personal sacrifice? Would you?

(31:00):
Ka Frenchoise professional singing career took more and more of
his time. His final scene on the show was in
and he hadn't appeared dressed as a police officer in
almost a decade. But in that last episode, he showed

(31:21):
up at Mr Rogers Porch just as Fred was starting
to soak his feet. You know, I've been sitting here
thinking about different ways people have of showing love to
each other and to themselves. I like to think of

(31:43):
things like that, Hey, Fred French, well clemens, Hi, welcome,
thank you, How you doing fine? How are you today?
My feet were tired, so I thought I'd just soaked
them for a while in this water. Does it make
him feel better? It does? Would you like to try? Sure?

(32:06):
Does feel good? I was thinking about many different ways
of saying I love you. Singing is one of my
ways of saying I love you. Oh I know that.
Do you have time to to give a song to
my friend and me? I sure do. There are many

(32:26):
ways to say I love you. There are many ways
to say I care about any ways, So any ways
anyways too, sad. I've sung it a million times and
I still love it. There's the singing way, too, Sad,

(32:50):
I love you. I get such a dose a Fred love,
That's what I call it. I'm so blessed. I'm very grateful.
Many worse to sa I love you. I'm so proud

(33:13):
of you. Friends. Oh thank your Fred. Next time they
called it Fred time. He slowed the pace down and
that gave him the opportunity to express his love and
care for other people and reach out and touch our
hearts as well. Finding Fred is produced by Transmitter Media.

(33:37):
The team is Dan O'Donnell, Jordan Bailey, and Mattie Foley.
Our editor is Sarah Nick's editorial help from Michael Garoffalo.
The executive producer for Transmitter Media is Gretta Cone. Executive
producers at Fatherly are Simon Isaac's and Andrew Berman. Music
by Blue Dot Sessions and Alison Layton Brown. And thanks
to the team at I Heart I'm Carvelo wall Us,

(34:00):
thanks for listening. Teething can be a real nightmare for
your little ones. Highlands Naturals Baby oral pain relief tablets
can help ease the pain. It's gentle, natural active ingredients
like camemeo and arnica soothe your baby's mouth, and gums
made with ingredients derived from plant minerals and other sources
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(34:22):
serious pain relief for your teething baby. Highlands is a
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