His mother, known around town for her extraordinary kindness and generosity, was a model for Fred and the source of the advice Macy found so inspiring: 'When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news,” Rogers once related on his show, 'my mother would say to me: ‘Look for the helpers. Viewers who regard him as the epitome of middle-class bourgeois habits may be surprised to learn that Rogers grew up very, very rich, in a mansion with a cook and a chauffeur. The future television icon was born in 1928 in Latrobe, Pa., an industrial city 40 miles outside Pittsburgh.

King is a skilled storyteller who captures the essence of not only Rogers the person but also the very particular American scene that produced him. Rogers treated with sober seriousness notions that the rest of us regard as platitudes - 'Love thy neighbor” - and devotedly lived them out. The man was (BEGIN ITAL)deep(END ITAL) - a quality that distinguished him from the characters featured in other children's shows, from Soupy Sales and Captain Kangaroo to, later, Barney the Dinosaur and Elmo the helium-voiced Muppet.

He was no superficial cartoon of niceness. But, as King is at pains to demonstrate, Rogers wasn't just about feeling good. King, a former journalist who now leads the nonprofit Pittsburgh Foundation, offers the full complement of heartwarming, feel-good stories we would expect from a book about Mister Rogers. The life of Fred Rogers - yes, he had one outside the confines of the living room where each day he changed into a cardigan and sneakers on camera - is recounted in 'The Good Neighbor,” a new biography by Maxwell King. 'Look for the helpers”: a small gift, one of many, for which we can thank the children's television personality Mister Rogers. Recalled Macy of her friend: 'He quoted Mister Rogers - he said, ‘Look for the helpers.'” Macy replied that the words of a friend helped buoy her spirits and guide her approach to the story, which also involved interviewing 'the people fighting back” against the scourge of addiction: doctors, social workers, first responders, health activists. In a recent interview on NPR, journalist Beth Macy was asked about the personal toll taken by her work reporting on the ravages of the opioid crisis - work that entailed spending hour upon hour with desperate addicts and grieving families. The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers

The good neighbor fred rogers