Fred Rogers

Fred McFeely Rogers (1928 to 2003), known professionally as Mister Rogers, was an American television personality, Presbyterian minister and author who created, ran and hosted the preschool series Mister Rogers' Neighborhood from 1968 to 2001. Born in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, he earned a music degree from Rollins College in 1951, worked on children's programming at the Pittsburgh station WQED, graduated from Pittsburgh Theological Seminary in 1962 and became a Presbyterian minister in 1963. He studied at the University of Pittsburgh's Graduate School of Child Development, where he began a thirty-year collaboration with the child psychologist Margaret McFarland. His programme was praised for treating children's emotional and physical concerns such as death, sibling rivalry, school enrollment and divorce, and he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2002.