October 29, 2019 • 30 mins
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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Speaker 1 (00:01):
It is so warm in my neighborhood today that I
thought I would just get some water in this little
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
(00:21):
house carrying a kiddie poole. Let's now go get the water,
all right? Of course, it's not a hot summer day.
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,
(00:43):
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
I do. Yeah. So why is Fred so hot? Oh?
There's Officer Clements. Officer Clemmons, come in mine, want you down.
(01:04):
Officer Clemons 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 to have a
black authority figure on TV in the late nineteen sixties,
but his role makes Officer Clemmens the only black recurring
character on all of children's television at the time. It's
(01:24):
so warm, I was just putting some water on my face.
Oh it, sure is. Would you like to join me?
It looks awten enjoyable. But I don't have a towel
or anything. You share mine? Okay? Sure. Francois removes his
tall military boots, rolls up his pants, and Mr Rogers
gently soaks Francoise feet with the hose that feels better already.
(01:52):
A few years before this into, a group of black
teenagers protested segregation at a Florida motel. They didn't do
it by picketing or by sitting on the lobby floor.
They protested by jumping in the motel pool for swim
wool water on a hot day. M hmm. The motel's owner,
(02:16):
James Brock, responded by pouring what he said was muriatic
acid into the pool with the intention of 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
(02:39):
Rogers was so hot in April in Pittsburgh in nineteen
sixty nine. Is that enough? Well? I know how busy
you are, but sometimes just a minute like this well
really make a difference. That we have great boots to
(03:07):
fill office with. Clemon, thanks for stopping by so long,
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,
(03:28):
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
(03:50):
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
(04:11):
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. The entirety of the episode in which
(04:40):
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 was at
(05:00):
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 you feel
(05:23):
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 idea of
(05:45):
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 context. Show Don't Tell attraction
rather than promotion. So in that sense, it's a timeless,
(06:05):
almost interfaith concept like love that neighbor, or do one
too 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.
(06:27):
My favorite like recurring Mr. Rogers moment is him feeding
his fish. This is my friend Eve Ewing. Eve is
a scholar and a writer and a professor 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. Must
feed the fish. Whenever he feeds the fish, there's like
(06:50):
this little jazz piano riff that plays give them a
little food, mimicking like the actions of the fish as
they go up and like open 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
(07:14):
to me. He was showing us 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
(07:34):
me more about the role that Fred Rogers played in
your childhood. I know that you're calling him Fred for
this podcast, but I can't bring myself to do that.
I haven't bigivener, he never got it and get no
permission to call this to rob 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
(07:58):
from Sesame Street have always 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
(08:18):
basically like have me watch 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
(08:41):
know them personally. That that I see that now in
retrospect as 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 presents for
(09:01):
kids who didn't always have that at home. He liked
to say that attitudes are cut, 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
(09:23):
make them feel good. One 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
(09:46):
me is one of the 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?
(10:09):
I have been thinking 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 self conscious calling Fred, but Fred has this.
I know your parents are not raised you to call.
(10:31):
We're going to let that go. We're gonna have to
edit this impost 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 And I
(10:56):
wonder how you parse that out? The idea that we
are not septing 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,
(11:17):
the idea that God's love is unconditional, and that you're
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,
(11:37):
So to me, what I hear when I hear it's
you I like or the idea of loving people unconditionally
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
(11:57):
that people harm others for so many complicated reasons that
usually have to do with some variation of they themselves
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,
(12:18):
you know, as the old saying goes like Jesus loves you,
Jesus forgives you. That doesn't mean I have to you know,
Mr rogers ministry doesn't have to be everybody's ministry. So
Mr Rogers is 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
(12:44):
a lofty goal. Not everyone is able to do that.
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.
(13:07):
We'll be right back. Fred Rogers was a master of
loving the clay, of demonstrating and modeling the graciousness and
(13:30):
neighborliness that he wished to see in the world, and
he did it on TV, where millions 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 to Mr Rogers, Fred also
had dozens and dozens of television neighbors, each of whom
(13:51):
demonstrated their own gifts and talents for the toddler audience.
I have never not saying I've always been a 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 and Mr Rogers
Neighborhood Francois Clemens played the police officer, the singing police officer.
(14:13):
My nickname was Buttercup, and the older I get, the
more I love that name. A little Buttercup. And they
used to say, body, Cup, come over here, child and
sing this song for me. And I would come over.
I sing for my aunt Clara, my ant Hattie, my
aunt Emma. Clemens is something of a phenomen a Grammy
winning singer of opera and jazz. He founded the Harlem
Spiritual Ensemble, which preserves and performs traditional American Negro spirituals.
(14:39):
Francois was part of Mr Rogers Neighborhood for more than
twenty years, but that footbath episode in nineteen six nine
made him an icon. I had no idea that scene
would have that kind of an effect. Everywhere I went,
people wanted to tell me their private story about that scene.
(15:00):
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 once white. Yes they are, aren't They
and their friends. But long before he met fred Francois
(15:24):
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
mother's love, Oh there's nothing like family. I questioned that
(15:45):
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.
They responded to me in a way that I thought
(16:06):
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
was the one that was very sad. And to know
(16:27):
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,
we're gonna we're gonna take you downtown and buy you
(16:48):
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 one to dress decently and be clean. So in
my mind I said, I have to wait and see
what they're gonna do. Who these people are they gonna
(17:11):
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
happy to be on your program as long as it
(17:34):
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.
(17:55):
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. Uh caused me a lot of
(18:20):
hours 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
(18:41):
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
(19:02):
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
(19:25):
just by being you and I like you who just
the way you are? Can 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
(19:46):
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 Tom,
(20:07):
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 every time I
come to a show that he's filming, he's saying that.
Why was he saying that to me today? There was
(20:28):
something in his voice, something in his eyes. It was
important to me to ask him, Fred, 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 been talking to you
(20:51):
for two years and you heard me today, that was
such a the lines 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 thing I can tell people.
(21:15):
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 and completely was a near
(21:36):
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. I remember calling
(22:00):
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. So that's not what
(22:21):
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 nine
it was a radical act to show a black man
(22:43):
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 a normal
pressure on them from certain corners in our society that
(23:05):
condemn homosexuality. And the thing he said to me was, France,
while 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 work and research
(23:29):
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 especially on
(23:52):
a children's television program. It simply could not be done.
How did that make you feel? It was one of
the lowest, one of the lowest moments of my life.
(24:14):
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 for Francois, he
(24:35):
still didn't believe 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, how important it
(24:58):
is that there's a face on that children's show appearing
fairly regularly. Francois the ghetto kid needs to know that
they too 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, no disgrace to the race.
(25:24):
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 many people who tried to say, well,
(25:48):
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 there was a period of time with when
it was obsessive. I can't be myself, I can't have
a normal life. What a sacrifice. Francois Clemens made an
(26:11):
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 of Fred's stated commitment to commercial free television
(26:32):
for kids, he still felt worried about protecting advertisers 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 as the price of being a part of
(26:52):
a work like Mr. Rogers Neighborhood that did do so
much good for so many people. Fred Rogers of meant
liberation for Francois Clemens, but not complete liberation that would
be for Francois to find on his own. But he
did learn from Fred. For nearly three decades, he watched
(27:14):
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
what I have made the same kind of personal sacrifice,
(27:35):
would you? Francoise 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
(27:56):
showed up at Mr Rogers porch just as Fred was
starting to soak his feet. H 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
(28:18):
think of things like that, he Fred French or 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?
(28:42):
It 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
(29:02):
ways to say I love you. There are many ways
to say I care about anyways, so many ways, many
ways to say I've sung it a million times and
I still love it. There's the singing way to say
(29:26):
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 ways to say I love you. I'm so proud
(29:48):
of you. Friends. Oh, thank you Fred. Next time they
called it Fred time. He slowed a 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.
(30:13):
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 Isaacs and Andrew Berman. Music
by Blue Dot Sessions and Alison Layton Brown And thanks
to the team at I Heart. I'm Carvelo Wallace. Thanks
(30:36):
for listening.
It is so warm in my neighborhood today that I
thought I would just get some water in this little
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
(00:21):
house carrying a kiddie poole. Let's now go get the water,
all right? Of course, it's not a hot summer day.
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,
(00:43):
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
I do. Yeah. So why is Fred so hot? Oh?
There's Officer Clements. Officer Clemmons, come in mine, want you down.
(01:04):
Officer Clemons 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 to have a
black authority figure on TV in the late nineteen sixties,
but his role makes Officer Clemmens the only black recurring
character on all of children's television at the time. It's
(01:24):
so warm, I was just putting some water on my face.
Oh it, sure is. Would you like to join me?
It looks awten enjoyable. But I don't have a towel
or anything. You share mine? Okay? Sure. Francois removes his
tall military boots, rolls up his pants, and Mr Rogers
gently soaks Francoise feet with the hose that feels better already.
(01:52):
A few years before this into, a group of black
teenagers protested segregation at a Florida motel. They didn't do
it by picketing or by sitting on the lobby floor.
They protested by jumping in the motel pool for swim
wool water on a hot day. M hmm. The motel's owner,
(02:16):
James Brock, responded by pouring what he said was muriatic
acid into the pool with the intention of 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
(02:39):
Rogers was so hot in April in Pittsburgh in nineteen
sixty nine. Is that enough? Well? I know how busy
you are, but sometimes just a minute like this well
really make a difference. That we have great boots to
(03:07):
fill office with. Clemon, thanks for stopping by so long,
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,
(03:28):
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
(03:50):
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
(04:11):
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. The entirety of the episode in which
(04:40):
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 was at
(05:00):
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 you feel
(05:23):
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 idea of
(05:45):
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 context. Show Don't Tell attraction
rather than promotion. So in that sense, it's a timeless,
(06:05):
almost interfaith concept like love that neighbor, or do one
too 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.
(06:27):
My favorite like recurring Mr. Rogers moment is him feeding
his fish. This is my friend Eve Ewing. Eve is
a scholar and a writer and a professor 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. Must
feed the fish. Whenever he feeds the fish, there's like
(06:50):
this little jazz piano riff that plays give them a
little food, mimicking like the actions of the fish as
they go up and like open 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
(07:14):
to me. He was showing us 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
(07:34):
me more about the role that Fred Rogers played in
your childhood. I know that you're calling him Fred for
this podcast, but I can't bring myself to do that.
I haven't bigivener, he never got it and get no
permission to call this to rob 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
(07:58):
from Sesame Street have always 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
(08:18):
basically like have me watch 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
(08:41):
know them personally. That that I see that now in
retrospect as 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 presents for
(09:01):
kids who didn't always have that at home. He liked
to say that attitudes are cut, 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
(09:23):
make them feel good. One 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
(09:46):
me is one of the 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?
(10:09):
I have been thinking 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 self conscious calling Fred, but Fred has this.
I know your parents are not raised you to call.
(10:31):
We're going to let that go. We're gonna have to
edit this impost 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 And I
(10:56):
wonder how you parse that out? The idea that we
are not septing 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,
(11:17):
the idea that God's love is unconditional, and that you're
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,
(11:37):
So to me, what I hear when I hear it's
you I like or the idea of loving people unconditionally
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
(11:57):
that people harm others for so many complicated reasons that
usually have to do with some variation of they themselves
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,
(12:18):
you know, as the old saying goes like Jesus loves you,
Jesus forgives you. That doesn't mean I have to you know,
Mr rogers ministry doesn't have to be everybody's ministry. So
Mr Rogers is 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
(12:44):
a lofty goal. Not everyone is able to do that.
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.
(13:07):
We'll be right back. Fred Rogers was a master of
loving the clay, of demonstrating and modeling the graciousness and
(13:30):
neighborliness that he wished to see in the world, and
he did it on TV, where millions 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 to Mr Rogers, Fred also
had dozens and dozens of television neighbors, each of whom
(13:51):
demonstrated their own gifts and talents for the toddler audience.
I have never not saying I've always been a 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 and Mr Rogers
Neighborhood Francois Clemens played the police officer, the singing police officer.
(14:13):
My nickname was Buttercup, and the older I get, the
more I love that name. A little Buttercup. And they
used to say, body, Cup, come over here, child and
sing this song for me. And I would come over.
I sing for my aunt Clara, my ant Hattie, my
aunt Emma. Clemens is something of a phenomen a Grammy
winning singer of opera and jazz. He founded the Harlem
Spiritual Ensemble, which preserves and performs traditional American Negro spirituals.
(14:39):
Francois was part of Mr Rogers Neighborhood for more than
twenty years, but that footbath episode in nineteen six nine
made him an icon. I had no idea that scene
would have that kind of an effect. Everywhere I went,
people wanted to tell me their private story about that scene.
(15:00):
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 once white. Yes they are, aren't They
and their friends. But long before he met fred Francois
(15:24):
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
mother's love, Oh there's nothing like family. I questioned that
(15:45):
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.
They responded to me in a way that I thought
(16:06):
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
was the one that was very sad. And to know
(16:27):
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,
we're gonna we're gonna take you downtown and buy you
(16:48):
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 one to dress decently and be clean. So in
my mind I said, I have to wait and see
what they're gonna do. Who these people are they gonna
(17:11):
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
happy to be on your program as long as it
(17:34):
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.
(17:55):
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. Uh caused me a lot of
(18:20):
hours 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
(18:41):
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
(19:02):
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
(19:25):
just by being you and I like you who just
the way you are? Can 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
(19:46):
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 Tom,
(20:07):
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 every time I
come to a show that he's filming, he's saying that.
Why was he saying that to me today? There was
(20:28):
something in his voice, something in his eyes. It was
important to me to ask him, Fred, 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 been talking to you
(20:51):
for two years and you heard me today, that was
such a the lines 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 thing I can tell people.
(21:15):
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 and completely was a near
(21:36):
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. I remember calling
(22:00):
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. So that's not what
(22:21):
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 nine
it was a radical act to show a black man
(22:43):
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 a normal
pressure on them from certain corners in our society that
(23:05):
condemn homosexuality. And the thing he said to me was, France,
while 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 work and research
(23:29):
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 especially on
(23:52):
a children's television program. It simply could not be done.
How did that make you feel? It was one of
the lowest, one of the lowest moments of my life.
(24:14):
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 for Francois, he
(24:35):
still didn't believe 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, how important it
(24:58):
is that there's a face on that children's show appearing
fairly regularly. Francois the ghetto kid needs to know that
they too 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, no disgrace to the race.
(25:24):
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 many people who tried to say, well,
(25:48):
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 there was a period of time with when
it was obsessive. I can't be myself, I can't have
a normal life. What a sacrifice. Francois Clemens made an
(26:11):
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 of Fred's stated commitment to commercial free television
(26:32):
for kids, he still felt worried about protecting advertisers 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 as the price of being a part of
(26:52):
a work like Mr. Rogers Neighborhood that did do so
much good for so many people. Fred Rogers of meant
liberation for Francois Clemens, but not complete liberation that would
be for Francois to find on his own. But he
did learn from Fred. For nearly three decades, he watched
(27:14):
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
what I have made the same kind of personal sacrifice,
(27:35):
would you? Francoise 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
(27:56):
showed up at Mr Rogers porch just as Fred was
starting to soak his feet. H 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
(28:18):
think of things like that, he Fred French or 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?
(28:42):
It 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
(29:02):
ways to say I love you. There are many ways
to say I care about anyways, so many ways, many
ways to say I've sung it a million times and
I still love it. There's the singing way to say
(29:26):
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 ways to say I love you. I'm so proud
(29:48):
of you. Friends. Oh, thank you Fred. Next time they
called it Fred time. He slowed a 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.
(30:13):
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 Isaacs and Andrew Berman. Music
by Blue Dot Sessions and Alison Layton Brown And thanks
to the team at I Heart. I'm Carvelo Wallace. Thanks
(30:36):
for listening.
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