“You were a child once, too”

I was nudging around online and just happened upon this excellent article by Tom Junod from a Nov. 1998 issue of Esquire Magazine here

You have to understand that I’m from Pittsburgh, where Mr. Rogers is a revered institution, and I once had the great good fortune to meet Fred and Joanne Rogers at one of my parent’s Christmas Eve parties (Yes, we lived in Mr. Rogers Neighborhood) and he wasn’t a hero of mine at that time, but he became a hero of mine when I would watch his show with Max and Charlie when they were very young. And what I recall most about meeting Fred (he insisted that people call him “Fred”) was how very much in person he was the same character he portrayed on his TV show. I mean, it was the same guy! Which I thought was especially cool, here’s this guy in my parent’s home on Christmas Eve, known to everyone at that party and just about everyone around the world and he was no different from the way he was on screen, the same tone of voice, the same polite, happy interest in everyone around him, the same guileless grace. Anyway, I love Mr. Rogers as he’s portrayed here.
In the article Junod writes that Fred Rogers was asked by an association of ophthalmologists to write a chapter in a book they were preparing on how to make kids be less afraid of visits to their offices. Junod writes,
“An ophthalmologist is a doctor who takes care of the eyes. Sometimes, ophthalmologists have to take care of the eyes of children, and some children get very scared, because children know that their world disappears when their eyes close, and they can be afraid that the ophthalmologists will make their eyes close forever. The ophthalmologists did not want to scare children, so they asked Mister Rogers for help, and Mister Rogers agreed to write a chapter for a book the ophthalmologists were putting together–a chapter about what other ophthalmologists could do to calm the children who came to their offices. Because Mister Rogers is such a busy man, however, he could not write the chapter himself, and he asked a woman who worked for him to write it instead. She worked very hard at writing the chapter, until one day she showed what she had written to Mister Rogers, who read it and crossed it all out and wrote a sentence addressed directly to the doctors who would be reading it: ‘You were a child once, too.’
And that’s how the chapter began.”
“You were a child once, too.” I think that about sums up our book and our inspiration for writing it. As Marcy said just the other day, “Sometimes I just like to be held.” and don’t we all. I wish Fred were still around. We could use his example in scary times like these.