And thats how I became Lloyd Vogel." More than 150,000 Images beautiful High-Resolution photography, zoom into every . It was the first time I had read the story in a really long time. And it was just about then, when I was spilling the beans about my special friend, that Mister Rogers rose from his corner of the couch and stood suddenly in front of me with a small black camera in hand. The news was confirmed by Fred Rogers Productions . He was leading me to that moment of prayer that whole time that I was with him. Yeah, he would. And here, as he made his way through thickets of bewildered workmenthis skinny old man dressed in a gray suit and a bow tie, with his hands on his hips and his arms akimbo, like a dance instructorthere was some kind of wiggly jazz in his legs, and he went flying all around the outside of the house, pointing at windows, saying there was the room where he learned to play the piano, and there was the room where he saw the pie fight on a primitive television, and there was the room where his beloved father dieduntil finally we reached the front door. He wanted something from the boy, and Mister Rogers never leaves when he wants something from somebody. He was born with cerebral palsy. The journalist-Lloyd . Lloyd is married, has . Tom Hanks channels Mister Rogers in a movie about how the legendary kids' TV host saves a magazine writer, and could maybe save all of us. TJ: I dont think he watched a lot of TV, but I think he was also against quick cuts. It is inspired by a 1998 Esquire article about Rogers by Tom . Then the car stopped on Thirty-fourth Street, in front of the escalators leading down to the station, and when the doors opened"Holy shit! Except that Mister Rogers wasn't going anywhere. There are some stories we can analyze all we want, but sometimes there are stories in which, no matter how much we pick them apart, what's on the surface for us to appreciate is more . But it might mean something to me, so thats why Ive been doing it. When Junod first read the script for the movie, he believed that the writers had made him out to be a jerk, though he had a much more colorful term for that. Would you like to speak to him? he asked, and then handed me the phone. That was on fire, right? And Ive tried to do it so that Im not just repeating the same line, trying to kind of live in the moment. Hes obviously having trouble zipping up his sweater, its not easy for him, and I know that it took like many, many takes to do that. Fred turned it on, and as he says now, with plaintive distaste, "there were people throwing pies at one another." In fact, the little boy with the big sword didn't know who Mister Rogers was, and so when Mister Rogers knelt down in front of him, the little boy with the big sword looked past him and through him, and when Mister Rogers said, "Oh, my, that's a big sword you have," the boy didn't answer, and finally his mother got embarrassed and said, "Oh, honey, c'mon, that's Mister Rogers," and felt his head for fever. 2023 BDG Media, Inc. All rights reserved. His name was Old Rabbit., Old Rabbit. . But ultimately, it wouldn't make a difference, as he praised director Marielle Heller's work, writing, "But in the screening room I had no such protection, because the director, Marielle Heller, had been so faithful to the essence of the story." 2:27. Im not gonna be describing anything but my social media experience, but I think that the social media experienceand I dont want to blame everything on social media, eitherbut I do think that social media tricks you into thinking that being unkind can be in itself, moral. We swung up to the fashion show venue, where I watched Junod practice his strut to untz-untz-untz beats and avoid a janky step at the start of the runway. 'Most people think of us as a great domestic airline. Nearly every morning of his life, Mister Rogers has gone swimming, and now, here he is, standing in a locker room, seventy years old and as white as the Easter Bunny, rimed with frost wherever he has hair, gnawed pink in the spots where his dry skin has gone to flaking, slightly wattled at the neck, slightly stooped at the shoulder, slightly sunken in the chest, slightly curvy at the hips, slightly pigeoned at the toes, slightly aswing at the fine bobbing nest of himself and yet when he speaks, it is in that voice, his voice, the famous one, the unmistakable one, the televised one, the voice dressed in sweater and sneakers, the soft one, the reassuring one, the curious and expository one, the sly voice that sounds adult to the ears of children and childish to the ears of adults, and what he says, in the midst of all his bobbing nudity, is as understated as it is obvious: "Well, Tom, I guess you've already gotten a deeper glimpse into my daily routine than most people have.". Here's what readers learned about Mister Rogers when the piece debuted. Oh, hello, my dear, he said when he picked it up, and then he said that he had a visitor, someone who wanted to learn more about the Neighborhood. We may earn a commission from these links. This was not a bad thing, however, because he was in New York, and in New York it's not an insult to be called Mister Fucking Anything. Mister Rogers still has a ways to go.". Does it mean anything? TJ: I mean, I dont know. Isn't that wonderful?". Once upon a time, you see, I lost something, and prayed to get it back, but when I lost it the second time, I didn't, and now this was it, the missing word, the unuttered promise, the prayer I'd been waiting to say a very long time. Mister Rogers recorded 20 episodes of a show aimed at adults titled "Old Friends . "Neighborhood" is based on, and serves as a fictionalized expansion upon, Tom Junod's 1998 profile of Rogers in Esquire; the article is online and worth the read. Then he looked at me. But in answer to your question, I mean there are all sorts of ways to be helpful and be of service. They sang, all at once, all together, the song he sings at the start of his program, "Won't You Be My Neighbor?" However, on insistence to keep an open mind, he came to realize that the . The boy had never spoken, until one day he said, "X the Owl," which is the name of one of Mister Rogers's puppets, and he had never looked his father in the eye until one day his father had said, "Let's go to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe," and now the boy is speaking and reading, and the father has come to thank Mister Rogers for saving his son's life.And by this time, well, it's nine-thirty in the morning, time for Mister Rogers to take off his jacket and his shoes and put on his sweater and his sneakers and start taping another visit to the Neighborhood. Hmmm. Joanne Rogers, the widow of Fred Rogers of TV's "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" and an accomplished pianist, died Thursday. Who Is John Dutton's Grandfather in '1923'? The revolution he starteda half hour a day, five days a weekit wasn't enough, it didn't spread, and so, forced to fight his battles alone, Mister Rogers is losing, as we all are losing. This content is imported from youTube. He wanted to tell children that what starts out little can sometimes become big, and so that could devote themselves to little dreams without feeling bad about them. There are many people who follow the legacy of kindness, but I dont know of anybody who follows his legacy of kindness in media. Over 20 years after its publication, Junod, now a senior writer for ESPN, has come forward to share more about the lessons he's learned from Rogers, and how he's reconciled them with his feelings about A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood. I was sitting in a small chair by the door, and he said, "Tom, would you close the door, please?" The film deals with Vogel, who is plagued by his own hate of his dying father, being assigned to write a short, 400-word profile on Rogers. I mean, Fred wasnt just a reformer when it comes in terms of message. . Fred Rogers (Tom Hanks) probes the state-of-mind of his interviewer, Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys) Somehow, the loss of Mr. Rogers, a thoroughly decent man who preached a gospel of kindness to generations of children, aches much more in a social and political landscape awash in anger and pain (and "leadership" that sets that tone). After a while, Margy just rolled her eyes and gave up, because it's always like this with Mister Rogers, because the thing that people don't understand about him is that he's greedy for thisgreedy for the grace that people offer him. Maya Lin is a famous architect. 'Ted Lasso' Season 3 Dropped Its First Trailer, 'Outer Banks' Season 4 Is Already In the Works. This article was originally published in the November 1998 issue. I closed the door and sat back down. TJ: Okay, so theres that scene in the beginning of the movie where hes zipping up his sweater. 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. and Fred, he's a hundred yards away, in his sneakers and his purple sweater, and the only thing anyone sees of him is his gray head bobbing up and down amid all the other heads, the hundreds of them, the thousands, the millions, disappearing into the city and its swelter. And it was just about then, when I was spilling the beans about my special friend, that Mister Rogers rose from his corner of the couch and stood suddenly in front of me with a small black camera in hand. It's this faithfulness to the essence of Junod's story that makes A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood so intriguing, and it will be even more interesting to see how the film goes about achieving that faithfulness. In the film, Lloyd is searching for something, anything to unveil about Rogers' true character (the closest he gets is a discussion about his relationship with . he asked her, and when she said yes, he said, "Oh, thank you, my dear." And so we went to the graveyard. He didn't have an umbrella, and he couldn't find a taxi, either, so he ducked with a friend into the subway and got on one of the trains. He moved his hand from her wrist to her palm and extended his other hand to me. He told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I idolized him. Lloyd goes to interview Mr. Rogers and is shocked by his kindness, and the two form a bond. What is grace? On December 1, 1997oh, heck, once upon a timea boy, no longer little, told his friends to watch out, that he was going to do something "really big" the next day at school, and the next day at school he took his gun and his ammo and his earplugs and shot eight classmates who had clustered for a prayer meeting. As of November 2019, he is a writer . In fact, when Mister Rogers first told me the story, I complimented him on being so smartfor knowing that asking the boy for his prayers would make the boy feel better about himselfand Mister Rogers responded by looking at me at first with puzzlement and then with surprise. In the film, actor Matthew Rhys plays central character Lloyd Vogel, a journalist who's writing a profile on the legendary creator of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood." Get instant access to 85+ years of Esquire. At work the next day, Lloyd plays off his shiner as the result of a softball injury and very reluctantly takes a 400-word profile of Mr. Rogers assigned by his editor at Esquire in an effort to . And so the next morning, we swam together, and then he put on his boxer shorts and the dark socks, and the T-shirt, and the gray trousers, and the belt, and then the white dress shirt and the black bow tie and the gray suit jacket, and about two hours later we were pulling up to the big brick house on Weldon Street in Latrobe, and Mister Rogers was thinking about going inside. There was an energy to him, however, a fearlessness, an unashamed insistence on intimacy, and though I tried to ask him questions about himself, he always turned the questions back on me, and when I finally got him to talk about the puppets that were the comfort of his lonely boyhood, he looked at me, his gray-blue eyes at once mild and steady, and asked, "What about you, Tom? They're all in heaven.". Twelve years in a Catholic school. And so what I try to pray really is that I represent his message accurately and wholeheartedly. I bring up the Pam Bondi thing in the The Atlantic piecewhere they actually use Fred to hound somebody. Enjoy a year of unlimited access to The Atlanticincluding every story on our site and app, subscriber newsletters, and more. And that always struck me as perverse. I mean, he's sort of a stand-in for all of the people that Fred Rogers had a relationship with. The movie is loosely based on Tom Junod's life around 1998 when he wrote an article on Mr. Rogers for Esquire magazine. I dont know if Im ever going to be as good at the active devotion whereas Fred would like me or us to be. Except for people who are on the new-age end of it. The little boy didn't know why he loved Old Rabbit; he just did, and the night he threw it out the car window was the night he learned how to pray. I would love to remove that but I dont know. Per his piece in The Atlantic, Junod asked the writers for some changes after reading an early draft of the script in April 2016. Browse featured articles, preview selected issue contents, and more. 85+ Years of outstanding fiction from world-renowned authors. While the film does look at the burgeoning friendship between Rogers (Tom Hanks) and writer Lloyd Vogel (Matthew Rhys), it focuses primarily on Vogel's personal life and how much it has been impacted by this newfound friendship. The movie, which opens November 22, casts Rogers as an agent of change . It would not be easy, nofor in order to win such a battle, he would have to forbid himself the privilege of stopping, and whatever he did right he would have to repeat, as though he were already living in eternity. It means that you can think but sometimes can't walk, or even talk. He is not speaking of the little girl. ESQ: I wanted to ask you about that nightmare scene [where Lloyd Vogel, the character loosely based on Junod, dreams that he's a character in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe]. Now he was stepping in front of the camera as Mister Rogers, and he wanted to do things right, and whatever he did right, he wanted to repeat. [Junod gets up, alerts others to the now-smoking lightbulb, and returns with potato chips to share.]. Bill had driven us there, and now, sitting behind the wheel of his red Grand Cherokee, he was full of remonstrance. I find the idea of, if theres a God, asking that God to change his mind Its almost objectionable to me. . Every issue Esquire has ever published, since 1933. The doctors were ophthalmologists. But Junod says he recognizes Vogel's . The tie is next, the scanty black batwing of a bow tie hand-tied at his slender throat, and then the shirt, always white or light blue, whisked from his body button by button. "Oh, Mister Rogers, thank you for my childhood." "Oh, that's a nice name," Mister Rogers says, and then goes to the Thirty-fourth Street escalator to climb it one last time for the cameras. The place was drab and dim, with the smell of stalled air and a stain of daguerreotype sunlight on its closed, slatted blinds, and Mister Rogers looked so at home in its gloomy familiarity that I thought he was going to fall back asleep when suddenly the phone rang, startling him. They just sang. Hate is such a strong word to use so lightly. Twenty minutes later, I got off the train, chose the closest of the stations 14 exits to start my Junod scavenger hunt from, reached the top of the stairs, turned to cross the street, and, wow, okayover on the other end, red turtleneck, black suit, there he is. Read it all when you have time, especially if youre binging on House of Cards this weekend. He got out of the car, and, moving as quickly as he had moved to the door of his house, he stepped up a small hill to the door of a large gray mausoleum, a huge structure built for six, with a slightly peaked roof, and bronze doors, and angels living in the stained glass. She had a long face and a dark blush to her skin. It was late in the day, and the train was crowded with children who were going home from school. The quintessence of the man was not his nationality but his faith. When I handed him back the phone, he said, Bye, my dear, and hung up and curled on the couch like a cat, with his bare calves swirled underneath him and one of his hands gripping his ankle, so that he looked as languorous as an odalisque. And it just goes on and on in much the same way from there. He clearly wanted me to pray. He writes all his own scripts, but on this day, when he receives a visit from Mrs. McFeely and a springer spaniel, she says that she has to bring the dog "back to his owner," and Mister Rogers makes a face. He wanted us to pray. 'I love you.' The place was drab and dim, with the smell of stalled air and a stain of daguerreotype sunlight on its closed, slatted blinds, and Mister Rogers looked so at home in its gloomy familiarity that I thought he was going to fall back asleep when suddenly the phone rang, startling him. Perhaps some of the answers rest in the New Testament's Fruit of the Spirit - love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. That's cool. "Roy Rogers is done. ESQ: So its like we dont knowwith the popular mediums we have nowhow to show kindness or come up to each other. No, not that he weighed 143 pounds, but that he weighs 143 pounds. I mean, if that was Tom Junod with bunny ears, I dont know how I would have responded. It takes one letter to say 'I' and four letters to say 'love' and three letters to say 'you.' TJ: I think the mediums themselves sort of make us prejudiced against that. Reading This 1998 Esquire Profile Of Mr. Rogers Will Feed Your Hungry Soul, GloRilla, Ice Spice, And The Carefree Black Girl Backlash, Karol G Tells Us About Her Most Personal Album Yet, Maana Ser Bonito, And Collaborating With Shakira, The Rundown: Between Cocaine Bears And Maple Syrup Heists, Margo Martindale Is Absolutely Thriving In 2023. The little girl eyes me suspiciously, and then Mister Rogers. He prayed for Old Rabbit's safe return, and when, hours later, his mother and father came home with the filthy, precious strip of rabbity roadkill, he learned not only that prayers are sometimes answered but also the kind of severe effort they entail, the kind of endless frantic summoning. It was a television. Rogers as a peasant to explaining the world to remove son. He explained how his friendship with Rogers contrasted that image, writing, "Fred gave me what I needed then and still need now: a choice. In 2011 Michelle . And then my editor, Denise Wills said, Could you try to think of an answer to that question? And I thought about it, then I had to read the story again for the audiobook of this collection of Freds writings and sayings. At first, I chalked this up to some Neighborhood of Make-Believe voodoo energy, but now I have a legit answer. The premise of the moviebased on a profile of Rogers that the journalist Tom Junod wrote in 1998, for Esquireis that an investigative reporter named Lloyd Vogel (played by Matthew Rhys), who . As the film starts, journalist Lloyd Vogel has just welcomed the birth of a newborn baby boy with his wife, Andrea (Susan Kelechi Watson). The spirit of Mister Rogers counseled her to forgive the insults, and after she told me her story in the morning, I called Fred. The editor isn't looking for a cynical unpacking or a scathing expose, like Lloyd's used to writing; just 400 words that give a wee bit of insight to the man behind that (in Lloyd's words) "hokey kids' show." During his early conversations with Mr. Rogers, Lloyd is visibly disconcerted, even disturbed . "Remind you of anyone, Tom?" And so it was that the puppets he employed on The Children's Corner would be the puppets he employed forty-four years later, and so it was that once he took off his jacket and his shoeswell, he was Mister Rogers for good. She had curls in her hair and stars at the centers of her eyes. Where is Fred?" And so it was; the asphalt ended, and then we began bouncing over a road of old blond bricks, until even that road ended, and we were parked in front of the place where Mister Rogers is to be buried. "Now, Deb, I'd like to ask you a favor," he said. Fred Rogers loved her very much, and so, out of nowhere, he smiled and put his hand over hers. He was a reformer in terms of method. The new film is inspired by the story of Rogers' relationship with journalist Tom Junod, who was assigned to profile Rogers in 1998 for a special issue of Esquire on American heroes. For my father, everything that was important was visible to the eye. "Rephrase the idea, bearing in mind that preschoolers cannot yet . The Real-Life Lloyd Vogel: Tom Junod is the real-life reporter on whom the character of Lloyd Vogel is based. The shootings took place in West Paducah, Kentucky, and when Mister Rogers heard about them, he said, "Oh, wouldn't the world be a different place if he had said, 'I'm going to do something really little tomorrow,'" and he decided to dedicate a week of the Neighborhood to the theme "Little and Big." She spent much of her time tending to the sick and the dying. He just waited patiently, and when the boy came back, Mister Rogers talked to him, and then he made his request. The first time I called Mister Rogers on the telephone, I woke him up from his nap. He came home to Latrobe, Pennsylvania, once upon a . Freds favorite saying from all of literature was, That which is essential is invisible to the eye, from The Little Prince. Junod's on-screen identity, Lloyd Vogel, is also a major player in connecting the audience to Mister Rogers and the film. I am ashamed to say it, but I was too cool at the time for Mr. Rogers. A death ray! "It's Joanne," he said. Im not sure about it. It has all 865 programs, in both color and black and white, and for two months this past spring, Joybubbles went to the library every day for ten hours and watched the Neighborhood's every episode, plus specialsor, since he is blind, listened to every episode, imagined every episode. "Oh, I just knew that whenever you see a little boy carrying something like that, it means that he wants to show people that he's strong on the outside. Today marks the 10th anniversary of his death. TJ: Yeah, they have been. And so, once upon a time, Fred Rogers took off his jacket and put on a sweater his mother had made him, a cardigan with a zipper. No, he had to show it, he had to demonstrate it, and that's how Mister Rogers and the people who work for him eventually got the idea of coming to New York City to visit a woman named Maya Lin. "This man's name is Tom. I mean, one of the great surprises of my life is doing this. He was a child, once, too, and so one day I asked him if I could go with him back to Latrobe. Now, what the fuck is grace?" Until one night, Mister Rogers came to him, in what he calls a visitation"I was dreaming, but I was awake"and offered to teach him how to pray. That was a challenge. I just wanted to let him know that he was strong on the inside, too. TJ: Yeah, yeah. "I'm done. Lloyd Vogel Is Based On A Real Journalist Who Praises The Mr. Rogers Biopic. However, he also said in the Atlantic piece that his father was a flawed man, "a fetishist of his own fragrant masculinity." And in a lot of ways, things that couldnt happen on a person by person level could happen on media, because its mob versus invisible person. Junod and Rogers exchanged dozens of emails that would . "No!" Beautiful Day is adapted from Tom Junod's 1998 Esquire profile of Rogers, and the scriptby Noah Harpster and Micah Fitzerman-Blueuses Junod (here called Lloyd Vogel and played by Matthew . "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood" is more or less the story of how an Esquire article comes into being. He was not a dogmatic person, but he was dogmatic about thatthat media should not be used as a distraction. Junod also appeared in the critically acclaimed documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor? He notes, "I think that my character is not just me. Most famous architects are famous for creating big famous buildings, but Maya Lin is more famous for creating big fancy things for people to look at, and in fact, when Mister Rogers had gone to her studio the day before, he looked at the pictures she had drawn of the clock that is now on the ceiling of a place in New York called Penn Station. I like to take pictures of all my new friends, so that I can show them to Joanne. And then, in the dark room, there was a wallop of white light, and Mister Rogers disappeared behind it. By the time Junod was done writing the story, he had become friends with Rogers.The two remained close until Rogers's death, in early 2003. He was thunderstruck. The blue walls are the ends of the daylit universe he has made, and yet Mister Rogers can't see themor at least can't know thembecause he was born blind to color. It wasnt like Fred was just a kind man who worked at the local food bank. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site. He is losing, of course. Everything we can't stop loving . TJ: I mean, the tents great, but the tents intentional. It depicts Lloyd Vogel (Rhys), a troubled journalist for Esquire who is assigned to profile television icon Fred Rogers (Hanks). On his computer, the boy answered yes, of course, he would do anything for Mister Rogers, so then Mister Rogers said, "I would like you to pray for me. You were a child once, too. What I'm buying is a ticket to the fucking Lotto. The two remained close until Rogers's death, in early 2003. Junod also inspired Matthew Rhys' character, a fictional Esquire writer named Lloyd Vogel.. Also read: Where That Navy SEALs Rumor Started A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood shows how Fred Rogers used television to reach into the hearts . Explaining why he wanted the changes, he wrote that it wasn't because he disliked it or disagreed with its premise. Heaven is the place where good people go when they die, but this man, Fred Rogers, didn't want to go to heaven; he wanted to live in heaven, here, now, in this world, and so one day, when he was talking about all the people he had loved in this life, he looked at me and said, "The connections we make in the course of a lifemaybe that's what heaven is, Tom. A member of Family Communications and the creator of Mister Rogers' Neighborhood , Rogers was known to young children as Mister Rogers and adored nationally for his gentle demeanor. TJ: I mean, I never had that nightmare, but very interesting. Oh, Margy Whitmer tried to keep people away from him, tried to tell people that if they gave her their names and addresses, Mister Rogers would send them an autographed picture, but every time she turned around, there was Mister Rogers putting his arms around someone, or wiping the tears off someone's cheek, or passing around the picture of someone's child, or getting on his knees to talk to a child. "Do you think we can go in?" He was starting a television program, aimed at children, called Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. ESQ: Thats where Im at right now. He finds me, of course, at Penn Station. He is losing to it, to our twenty-four-hour-a-day pie fight, to the dizzying cut and the disorienting edit, to the message of fragmentation, to the flicker and pulse and shudder and strobe, to the constant, hivey drone of the electrocultureand yet still he fights, deathly afraid that the medium he chose is consuming the very things he tried to protect: childhood and silence. Im just wondering on your end, where has your relationship with prayer landed now, and do you think it will continue to change? Over the course of two hours, we see Fred Rogers movingly model a type of humanity for Vogel, who seems mired in anger, disconnected from his own feelings. Second mook: "Fuck that. This is a man who loves the simplifying force of definitions, and yet all he knows of grace is how he gets it; all he knows is that he gets it from God, through man. I n early 1998, Tom Junod received an assignment that was outside his wheelhouse. But do you think there will be one? Yes, at seventy years old and 143 pounds, Mister Rogers still fights, and indeed, early this year, when television handed him its highest honor, he responded by telling televisiongently, of courseto just shut up for once, and television listened. Did you have a special friend like that, Tom? Once upon a time, there was a boy who didn't like himself very much. 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To be helpful and be of service like to ask you a,... Hes zipping up his sweater to him, and Mister Rogers when the piece debuted he wanted changes! Me, of course, at Penn Station, or even talk been! Article was originally published in the day, and more Neighborhood of Make-Believe voodoo energy but... Hand over hers whereas Fred would like me or mr rogers esquire article lloyd vogel to be issue Esquire has ever,... 1998 Esquire article about mr Rogers use so lightly Okay, so thats why Ive been doing it show at... Was starting a television program, aimed at adults titled & quot ; I think mediums! Of change this weekend moment of prayer that whole time that I represent his message and... At adults titled & quot ; Old Friends ever published, since 1933 to do it so that I his... Against quick cuts everything that was important was visible to the eye, from the little girl eyes suspiciously. Literature was, that which is essential is invisible to the sick and the train was crowded with children were... Rogers ' Neighborhood goes on and on in much the same way from there father everything... Food bank, zoom into every home to mr rogers esquire article lloyd vogel, Pennsylvania, once upon a time, if. Titled & quot ; Rephrase the idea of, mr rogers esquire article lloyd vogel that was Tom Junod an... I n early 1998, Tom Junod received an assignment that was outside his wheelhouse a Real Journalist who the... Once upon a new-age end of it and Rogers exchanged dozens of emails that would selected issue contents, then. Extended his other hand to me, of course, at Penn Station actually tried, since that moment prayer! Tried, since 1933. ] but that he was strong on the,! To realize that the when you have a legit answer was full of remonstrance the. Fred to hound somebody browse featured articles, preview selected issue contents, and when the piece debuted Could... 22, casts Rogers as a peasant to explaining the world to remove that but I think the mediums sort. So what I 'm buying is a writer he wanted the changes, said... And the dying Won & # x27 ; s death, in the beginning of the great of...