February 19, 1968: Mister Rogers' Neighborhood premieres on NET, National Educational Television. In 1970, the network will become PBS, the Public Broadcasting Service.
Fred Rogers, born on March 20, 1928 in Latrobe, Pennsylvania -- he was 2 years ahead of golf icon Arnold Palmer at Latrobe High School -- was a puppeteer and an ordained minister. He had hosted children's TV shows before, out of the nearest major city to Latrobe, Pittsburgh. He broadcast out of the studios of Pittsburgh's NET/PBS station, WQED-Channel 13.
The show was aimed at "children of all ages," but especially at children from ages 2 to 5. Rogers' method of speaking to children, and the songs he wrote and sang for them, rubbed a lot of adults the wrong way, but he wasn't talking to them, he was talking to the kids. When he sang, "You are my friend, you are special," he wasn't putting up a front: He meant it. Children who watched his show recalled meeting him years later as adults, and found him to be just as nice in person as he had seemed onscreen.
The text of the show was divided in half, between Mr. Rogers' "real neighborhood," with places like a music shop, a handyman's store, a bakery, a dance studio, and so on; and "The Neighborhood of Make Believe," where the people from his "real world" would interact with puppets that Rogers would operate, led by King Friday XIII (Friday the 13th).
Rogers did the show every week until 1979. Thereafter, in between reruns -- which confused me as a kid, seeing him with all-dark hair one week and gray hair the next -- he would occasionally do a weeklong block of programming, based around a single subject, to help kids deal with difficult things they were facing in real life, including the divorce of one's parents and, in one particularly unnerving week, "Mister Rogers Talks About Conflict." The subject was war, and it was 1983, a very chilly year in the Cold War, and he thought it was time to discuss it in terms kids could understand.
And that fit a pattern on PBS. Whether it was Fred Rogers with kids, Julia Child with cooking, Bob Ross with painting, Carl Sagan with space, or Bob Vila with home repairs, PBS had hosts who managed to reach the viewer, no matter what their level of previous knowledge.
Fred Rogers debuted his show at the height of the Vietnam War. Due to his declining health, he stepped away from production, airing his last show on August 31, 2001, 11 days before the terrorist attacks that changed so much. He died on February 27, 2003. In 2012, a spinoff show began airing on PBS, taking one of the childlike characters from the Neighborhood of Make Believe: Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood.
In 1975, Pittsburgh native Michael Keaton had his first acting credit on the show, playing an acrobat who performed in the Neighborhood of Make Believe.
John Reardon, a singer with the Metropolitan Opera, who made occasional appearances on the show, died in 1988. Don Brockett, the chef, died in 1995. Bob Trow, the workshop owner who, in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe sketches, played Bob Dog and Robert Troll, died in 1998. Audrey Roth, who played telephone operator Miss Paulificate, died in 2016.
As of February 19, 2022, castmembers still alive include Betty "Lady" Aberlin; David Newell, who played Mr. McFeely, the "Speedy Delivery" mailman, named for Mr. Rogers' middle name; Joe Negri, the handyman and music-shop owner; François Clemmons, the policeman; and Chuck "Neighbor" Aber, the odd-jobs man. (UPDATE: Negri died in 2026, just a few days before what would have been his 100th birthday.)
In a 2011 episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History, "Nice" Peter Shukoff played Mr. Rogers, against YouTuber DeStorm Power as tough-guy actor Mr. T. The idea of Mr. Rogers doing a rap battle, hurling insults, threatening violence, and even using a profanity was shocking, almost as shocking as letting a white character win a rap battle against a black character -- but it proved to be one of their most popular episodes.
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February 19, 1968 was a Monday. Baseball and football were out of season. There were no games played in the NBA or the NHL that day. But there were 3 games in the American Basketball Association:
* The Kentucky Colonels beat the Indiana Pacers, 134-129 at the Indiana State Fair Coliseum (now the Corteva Coliseum) in Indianapolis. Darel Carrier scored 43 points for the Colonels.
* The Pittsburgh Pipers beat the Minnesota Muskies, 120-115 at the Metropolitan Sports Center in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minnesota. For the Pipers, Charlie Williams scored 35, and Connie Hawkins scored 33. For the Muskies, Mel Daniels, later to star for the Pacers, scored 33.
* And the Houston Mavericks beat the Oakland Oaks, 118-111 at the Sam Houston Coliseum in Houston.
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