In his own remembrances, Fred Rogers's childhood was a little sad, with a loving but overprotective mother and a father whose life was devoted to the manufacturing business he hoped his son would take over. Born in 1928 in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, an industrial suburb of Pittsburgh, and raised in a cocoon of wealth, the creator of the television show Mister Rogers' Neighborhood was often confined indoors due to asthma or fever. “I had to make up a lot of my own fun,” Rogers says in an interview included in Morgan Neville's recent documentary film, Won't You Be My Neighbor? When he was ten, his grandmother bought him the Steinway concert grand piano that he would play his entire life. “Music was my first language,” he says. He found that he could express his emotions with notes: “I could literally laugh or cry or be very angry through the ends of my fingers.”
