Fred Rogers, who died last week, took his work more seriously than many of us can imagine. He started Mister Rogers Neighborhood on a local Pittsburgh station in 1954; it began to run nationally on PBS in 1968. Fred wrote all the scripts and the all the songs. He performed all of the puppets. His zippered sweaters, eventually to become his trademark, had all been made by his mother.

Beyond the television studio, he held a degree in music composition and was ordained by the Presbyterian Church in 1962; he was also (and continued to be) a lifetime vegetarian and lap swimmer who neither smoked nor drank.

It probably seems unnecessary to write a corny eulogy for a man whose TV persona virtually defined corniness for over three decades.

Mr. Rogers was an irresistible target for satirists, but those who lampooned him always seemed to do so with a weird tone of obligation––as though they could not do otherwise, as though anyone who courted such a enormously hokey image had to be on some hidden level passive-aggressive, or deeply cynical, or maybe worse.

We mock some public figures because we know their private lives to be full of bizarre, dirty secrets; we mock Mr. Rogers because we know of no such duplicity and we can't quite believe it.

I remember the first time I saw Mr. Rogers speak outside of his own television show—I was fifteen, and he was addressing some group on CSPAN—and what got me was the fact that he really was the same person I remembered from television when I was a kid. He spoke articulately, using complex words and sophisticated diction. And yet, somehow in spite of that, he really was the same person who had spoke to me every day at four-thirty. He was infinitely more complex and yet, all things considered, he was no different.

In other words, Mr. Rogers' gift was to talk to us on our level without ever "talking down." He could tailor his words to the needs of his audience, but the self that spoke them remained the same.

Furthermore, he could speak to children as though they were adults and to adults as though they were children.

On another occasion, when receiving induction into the Television Hall of Fame, he told the industry's mightiest figures that fame was a four-letter word, and that they should seriously contemplate the responsibility that came with their cultural power.

Looking back upon Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, I am surprised by how up-front he was about the necessarily illusions of his own medium.

If he really had been some cynical con who lit up a Lucky Strike after the tapes stopped rolling, then surely he would have clung to the false fronts that his TV persona provided him. Instead, he regularly showed us that it was he who did the voices for most of the characters in the Land of Make-Believe.

Once he even took us on a tour of the studio where his program was filmed. He let the actors talk to us. He let us see that the couch where he spoke to us every day was just another prop on a set. All in all, it was a neat move: In order to teach us to value our imaginations, he always let us know what was imaginary and what was not.

Furthermore, because he always let me know what was real and what wasn't, I was always ready to let him talk to me seriously.

He talked to us about divorce and about death. He told us that expressing our feelings through art were as valid as playing sports (A move that would inspire some of us, later on, to write about the arts at college). He devoted a multi-episode "opera" to teaching against war. Even then I was surprised at his decisions and, disarmed, could hardly help but pay attention.