TV Talk: Mister Rogers gets a new statue at his alma mater

The late Fred Rogers carried the words found on a plaque at his alma mater, Rollins College, in his wallet: “Life is for Service.”

Now Rogers’ life of service to children through PBS’s “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” will be honored with a sculpture to be unveiled on the Rollins campus in Winter Park, Fla., in October. This week’s announcement precedes what would be the Latrobe native’s 93rd birthday on Saturday.

The bronze sculpture will join statues on Pittsburgh’s North Shore and in Latrobe in memorializing the children’s show host who died of stomach cancer in 2003.

While the two Western Pennsylvania statues feature Rogers alone, Rollins’ “A Beautiful Day for a Neighbor” depicts Rogers surrounded by seven children while performing with the Daniel Striped Tiger puppet on his right hand. The back of the statue features characters and locations from the Neighborhood of Make-Believe.

“I think I’d even seen Fred say that he didn’t in any way want to be put on a pedestal,” said British sculptor Paul Day, who crafted the statue for Rollins in his French studio over nine months in 2020. “He obviously showed great humility and great wisdom deflecting attention away from himself and back towards the children.”

Day said he took into account that Rogers would not want to be portrayed “as some sort of heroic” figure when designing the statue.

“I like my work to build stories and to bring things into context,” Day said. “I’ve never been interested in just doing a representation of a person. I want to put a person into an environment and allow the environment and the person to work as a sort of stage, as a piece of theater.”

In researching Rogers, Day found a picture book filled with images that captured “the spirit of Fred’s love and openness to children,” listening to them, watching them and interacting with them.

“That seemed to be the answer, really: not to have Fred alone, but to have him doing what he always loved to do,” Day said. “And also to show him with some of the characters that made up his television program, because it’s not just a tribute to Fred, it’s also a tribute to everyone who helped him make that program a success.”

Surely, Rogers would appreciate how an international friendship and serendipity led to the statue’s creation.

Rollins grad and trustee Allan Keen was vacationing in France in May 2019 when he met Day, responsible for four major monuments in London including memorials to the Queen Mother and the Battle of Britain.

After leaving France, Keen traveled by the Chunnel train to England, emerging at London’s St. Pancras Station to discover one of Day’s statues, “The Meeting Place,” a scale model of which Keen had seen in France.

Above the statue hung a piece of neon art that looked familiar to Keen, who Googled it to discover it was a piece by an artist whose work is featured in Rollins College’s boutique hotel, The Alfond Inn.

“I see this piece of art connect to Rollins, and that’s when a bell went off in my head,” Keen said by phone from Florida last week. “We’ve done some things to honor Fred Rogers, including a walking tour, and this was in the midst of that two years of incredible publicity because of the Tom Hanks movie after that great documentary. But Fred Rogers is clearly our most famous alumnus, and we had not done anything I would consider to be permanent.”

Keen contacted Day to see if he would have an interest in creating a sculpture, then he took the idea to Rollins’ president, Grant H. Cornwell. Keen raised $275,000 before entering into a commission agreement with Day.

While Day grew up on American pop culture imports of the 1970s, including “The Banana Splits,” “Sesame Street” and “Tom and Jerry,” he’d never seen “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

“When he mentioned that his college would like to commission a statue of one of their old students, Fred Rogers, it meant nothing to me,” Day said via Skype last week from his home in Burgundy.

When Day Googled “Fred Rogers,” he found page after page of links to articles.

“I started to watch episodes of the ‘Neighborhood’ while I was working in my studio that summer,” Day said, “and obviously it quickly sank in that we were dealing with somebody who had made a very significant mark on the lives of millions of people, someone who based his life’s work on a very deep understanding of the Christian faith, who didn’t preach the Christian faith through his message but lived it in what he did.”

Day traveled to the U.S. in August 2019 to install a sculpture at a friend’s house in Akron, Ohio, and made a side trip to the campus of Saint Vincent College, home to the Fred Rogers Center, to meet Joanne Rogers, who died in January 2021.

“We sat down on the settee next to Joanne and just instantly fell under the spell of her charm and her warmth and her gentleness,” Day said. “She made us totally at home, and we hit it off like a house on fire.”

While Keen initially had envisioned a statue of Rogers alone, he ultimately bought into Day’s vision even as it pushed the cost of the 7-foot-tall, 3,000-pound statue and its installation to $700,000.

A final spot on campus has yet to be chosen for the Rogers statue, but Keen thinks a thematically appropriate spot for the tribute to Rogers, an ordained Presbyterian minister, may be in a courtyard between Knowles Memorial Chapel and the Annie Russell Theater.

Molds made from Day’s original clay sculpture for casting the bronze statue have been produced. Later this month, Day will make final adjustments to his piece during a visit to a foundry in the Czech Republic that is casting the bronze. The finished statue is expected to arrive by boat in Florida this summer.

“I want for people who grew up with Mister Rogers to feel a sense of nostalgia and a sense of reconnection with perhaps that part of their childhood that may often be forgotten,” he said, “so that some of those wonderful things they experienced together with the program come back, to nourish a sense of your own childhood, perhaps, but above all to have a great sense of wonder at the beauty of childhood.”