…Mister Rogers tribute I could find online, at the Emmy Awards site. But even it excludes some important facts about Rogers’s lifetime accomplishment:

• Rogers’s show, along with its mirror-opposite Sesame Street, are the two PBS shows still around from the days of the network’s even-more-underfunded precursor, National Educational Television. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood (originally MisteRogers’ Neighborhood) was far closer than the slicked-up Street to NET’s old homespun/threadbare aesthetic. Neighborhood‘s opening/closing miniature street scene once started and ended on a model of NET’s house-and-antenna logo.
• Different Rogers obits give different dates for Neighborhood‘s debut. That’s because it launched quietly in ’65 on an even smaller station hookup, the Eastern Educational Network. It went national on NET in ’68, just one year before the bigger and noisier Sesame Street launched.
• Sesame Street was a thorough product of the bureaucracy that would become PBS. It was written by committees, from “lesson plans” devised in other committees. It employed the cream of the New York ad-production community, including Jim Henson. It utilized all the latest tricks of video, film, and animation; particularly that newfangled toy called electronic videotape editing that had made Laugh-In and Hee Haw feasible.Rogers’s show, in contrast, was shot on a small stage in Pittsburgh. It was paced by Rogers’s gentle speech mannerisms and jazz pianist John Costa’s tinkly syncopations. On many if not most episodes, they stopped the tape only during the transitions between the human and puppet scenes.
• Rogers’s easygoing yet careful attitude extended to the show’s production. He ground out 130 episodes (writing all the scripts and songs) for the show’s first NET season. Another 330 were produced over the next seven years. (These early episodes haven’t been rerun in a long time.) Then in 1975 he stopped, to pursue other kid-advocacy ventures. Four years later he donned the sweater again, producing only an average of 20 shows a year for the next 22 years. (And you thought Johnny Carson’s last years were rerun-heavy.)He didn’t need to be locked in the studio week in and week out. His deliberately-squaresville schtick was timeless (the only big change was that the shows’ life-lesson aspects became preachier in the latter seasons). There are always kids, and they more or less always face the same questions and problems.
• Except on the soaps, nobody played the same “role” on TV longer than Rogers. His very survival, as a voice of sanity in a kiddie-media landscape which (even when he began) had always been predicated on frenetic action, is a sign that you don’t have to be the biggest or loudest or cutest kid to make it in the world.