The years passed, and even if the growing Jeff didn’t watch the Neighborhood quite as often as he had when he was younger, he kept a place in his heart for Mister Rogers. Later they continued to correspond Mister Rogers wrote to say how glad he was that Jeff’s surgery had gone well. Pam and Howard Erlanger wrote a letter to the television star about Jeff’s desire to meet him, and they got a handwritten answer that led to a breakfast meeting at a hotel in Milwaukee, where Fred Rogers was visiting to promote the local PBS station.
Jeff and his sister, Lisa, both watched the Neighborhood so often that they knew all the words to Fred Rogers’s songs. When asked in an interview why Jeff chose Fred Rogers, Howard and Pam explained that their son “always said that Mister Rogers told him that he was special and that he was just fine the way he was, and it gave him confidence and it made him feel good, and Mister Rogers just seemed to love him.” It was the family’s own version of “Make-A-Wish,” proposed on the eve of major surgery to fuse Jeff’s spine. In 1975, Jeffrey Erlanger, a five-year-old boy from Madison, Wisconsin, confined to a wheelchair, asked his parents, Howard and Pam, if he could meet Mister Rogers rather than going to Disneyland. In this excerpt, King explores the backstory of a powerful and game-changing moment that changed the national perception of children with disabilities. It’s a deep, honest dive into the history and values that shaped one of the most beloved figures in television history. Maxwell King’s book The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogersis the first full length biography of the man behind Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.
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