My mother desperately hoped my sisters and I would watch Mr. Rogers, but he creeped out all of us and we'd start to cry when he came on. Thank god for Captain Kangaroo.

Tom, thanks for that link. I loved Mr. Rogers.

Cashmere, I'm very glad to hear your back is doing better. It's such a tricky thing, the back!

I loved Captain Kangaroo as a child. My mother still gets reminded that she took away my Captain when she put me in morning school. Um, no VCR in the 50s.

From Tom's Mr. Rogers link, see me melt in awwww

15. The sweaters. Every one of the cardigans he wore on the show had been hand-knit by his mother.

I just got my household porn catalog. I NEED the Recharge Station/Whiteboard: [link]

I can't even think about Mr. Rogers for too long or I get all teary at how thoroughly, down to the bone decent he was, and how that decency was a kind of genius.

JZ speaks my heart.

One of my marathon training team members brought up the Rogers haters last Saturday. Totally random and upsetting.

As I've probably said a hundred times here, an ex-BF and his da both worked at WQED in Pittsburgh and introduced me to Fred in passing. He exuded grace (in the spiritual sense) and the down to the bone decency of which JZ spoke. Just an amazingly real fellow. Did he snap at the staff sometimes, why yes he did. Was he a person with his own issues (his kids troubles, as mentioned), why yes he was. BUT, he was a man who lived his convictions more fully than anyone I've ever even heard of.

I get the schmarm affect, but I also chalk that up to the era and production values.

Some idiotic bloviator, possibly for the Washington Post but I'm too lazy and too irritated by the bloviating to double-check

WSJ -- and true to form for their opinions page, it was basically using the Mr. Rogers rant as the hook for yet another round of the same old bloviating about how everything that's wrong with our society is the fault of the damn liberals and their damn feel-good 1970s. Little to no actual Rogers content, and I wouldn't even give them the excuse to pump up their hit count.

I NEED the Recharge Station/Whiteboard:

That's pretty cool.

My father wouldn't let my brother watch Mr. Rogers because he thought that he was gay and would be a bad influence on my brother. Seriously. Thankfully, dad has matured.

Mr. Rogers gave me the major creeps, on the line of "If I knew you in real life, I'd be hiding behind my mother" creeps.

Awww, that makes me inexplicably sad. God knows his show was earnest and simple and sometimes sappy, but it always seemed perfect for its target audience. And from everything I've ever heard about him or read of him, he took it so damn seriously. He worried about kids with distant or overworked or absent parents, who spent too much time with the TV as a babysitter, and he wanted to make a small space that was, as much as possible, quasi-parental, low-key and loving and (inasmuch as a TV show can be) attentive to the kids themselves.

My favorite Mr. Rogers story ever: He was touring grammar schools in NYC, and at a particularly run-down and overcrowded school in Harlem spent an entire day with the biggest kindergarten class. For nearly the first hour, the kids just goggled at him in silence: they'd never imagined that the people in the shiny box actually existed outside that box, and some of them had never seen a white person (who wasn't a cop) that close up. He talked, and sang, and read a story.

Finally one child drifted up to the front of the room, hesitated, and then said softly, "Can I see your hands please?" Mr. Rogers held out his hands, and the 5-year-old scrutinized them closely, tentatively touching them and turning them over to look at the palms and the backs, all amazed that he was touching the hands of someone from the shiny box.

As the child was backing away, Mr. Rogers said, "Is it okay if I see your hands too?" And the kid's face lit up as he raised his hands for inspection. Mr. Rogers examined them, palms and back, and gave them a squeeze and said, "What beautiful hands you have!" And hey presto, the entire class jumped up and formed an excited, twittering line, all waiting for him to look at their hands. Which he spent the entire rest of the morning doing.

I'm such a dork, but I love that man.

oh my, I'm sitting here sniffling over Mr. Rogers ... and I didn't watch him when I was a kid (after my time).

Cash, glad to hear the back's behaving.

juliana, nice chair ... but I'm longing for the big chair and a half with storage ottoman. Just as well it doesn't come in blue.

vw - at least you know your doctors are sharing information!