Overlooked No More: Margaret McFarland, Mentor to Mister Rogers

Overlooked is a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths were given little notice by The Times.

Nearly everyone knows about Fred Rogers, the beloved host of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" who taught millions of children about love, kindness and the magic of make believe. But far fewer people are familiar with Margaret McFarland, the child psychologist who mentored him and helped shape his groundbreaking television show.

Rogers first met McFarland in the 1950s, when he was a puppeteer and a producer on a Pittsburgh public television show called "The Children's Corner." During lunch breaks he attended classes to earn a master's degree in divinity.

When Rogers expressed an interest in learning about the psychology of children, one of his professors recommend that he meet McFarland, who was regarded as one of the most respected child psychologists in Pittsburgh.

She saw great potential in Rogers.

"Fred Rogers is a man who has not closed off the channels of communication between his childhood and his manhood," McFarland told The Washington Post in 1982. "Repression, you see, is not his major defense."

But she felt it was a disservice that "he worked off-camera, behind the scenes, manipulating his various puppets." So she told him: "Fred, the children need to see you. They need you to help them distinguish between reality and fantasy."

Rogers was ordained as a minister and was invited to appear as Mister Rogers on a show in Canada in the early 1960s. He returned to Pittsburgh in 1966 to start "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" on WQED-TV. The show aired for the first time nationally, on public television stations, in 1968. McFarland became his chief consultant.

She and Rogers met nearly every week to discuss scripts and songs that Rogers had written. Her advice became so valuable to Rogers that he took "extensive handwritten notes" and recorded their meetings on audiocassettes, "which I often overheard him replaying in his office," recalled Arthur Greenwald, a producer and writer who worked with Rogers.

She would work on the show for 20 years, and spoke regularly with Rogers until around her death in 1988. (Rogers died in 2003.)

"She will make just one suggestion, and it raises the whole level," Rogers told The Pittsburgh Press in 1987, adding that she was "an enormous influence on me."

His book "Mister Rogers Talks With Parents" (1983, with Barry Head) is dedicated to McFarland. And the creators of "Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood," the modern-day animated spinoff of "Mister Rogers," honored McFarland by naming the main character's little sister Margaret.

Even though the show first aired more than a half-century ago, it still resonates. In 2018 a documentary about Rogers grossed more than $22 million, and last year he was portrayed by Tom Hanks in the acclaimed movie "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood."

Margaret Beall McFarland was born on July 3, 1905, in Oakdale, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh, the youngest of three girls of Robert and Gertrude (Messer) McFarland. Her father died when she was 5, an event that would later pique her interest in child psychology.

"All of the subsequent phases of what it means to be loved by a male and loving to a male were lost to me," she told The Pittsburgh Press in 1987. "I wanted a kind of fathering."

She graduated from Goucher College in Baltimore in 1927, received her master's degree from Columbia University in 1928 and later earned her Ph.D. from Teachers College at Columbia University.

After graduating, she became principal of the Kindergarten Training College of Melbourne, Australia, then returned to the United States to serve as director of the children's school at Mount Holyoke College, a women's college in South Hadley, Mass., where she was promoted to associate professor of psychology in 1948.

She returned to her hometown in 1951 and was an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh when she met Rogers.

At the time, she was also working as the executive director of the Arsenal Family and Children's Center, a training ground for pediatric students to study child development; it was founded in 1953 by Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician and best-selling author. He and McFarland collaborated with Erik Erikson, the developmental psychologist known for coining the phrase "identity crisis." (Arsenal is now a preschool and social service agency.)

McFarland believed that an adequate understanding of child development was, as she wrote, "crucial in the solution of many of the problems with which man is grappling." She would often bring in a mother and child to her classroom, ask her students to observe their behavior, then spend hours afterward discussing their interactions.

McFarland was also fond of teaching by parable, gently guiding her students toward clarity by telling stories and asking questions rather than providing critiques. Her methods made a lasting impression.

"There was something very unique about the way she connected with people," said Judith A. Rubin, a therapist who helped people deal with trauma through art. Rubin worked with McFarland at the Arsenal Center and appeared as the "art lady" on "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood" in the show's early years.

"I think she had Fred Rogers's capacity to make the person feel as if they were extremely important and interesting," she added.

Serious and reserved, McFarland was content to avoid the spotlight, even as "Mister Rogers" became a staple for generations of children. She preferred to be a "counterpart to the creative person," said Hedda B. Sharapan, a senior fellow at the Fred Rogers Center and a child development consultant at Fred Rogers Productions.

"She gave him the road map of child development and then said, 'Now you take the journey in the way that's right for your creative spirit,'" Sharapan said. "Fred somehow, with Margaret's help, was able to tap into his own childhood."

In 1979, during a symposium honoring Rogers, Erikson surprised her in front of more than 1,000 people at a banquet by acknowledging her research with a special presentation.

"We almost had to drag her out of the chair to stand up," Douglas Nowicki, a friend who is the chancellor of Saint Vincent College in Pennsylvania, said in a phone interview. "She would never have come if she had known in any way she was going to be recognized or honored."

Greenwald, the producer who often worked with Rogers, once suggested that they go out to lunch with friends to celebrate McFarland's birthday.

"Almost predictably, Margaret wouldn't hear of us making such a fuss, and instead invited us to her house, where she would prepare the lunch," he said. "We agreed, because why not? And because beneath that frail exterior was hundreds of years of stubborn Scottish-Presbyterian willfulness that you'd be crazy to mess with."

She loved to feed others. "How she found the time to create the fanciest cookies (in her own kitchen) I'll never know," Rogers wrote in an obituary about her.

McFarland never married or had children. She lived alone in the home in which she grew up, surrounded by her extensive book collection.

Later in life she learned she had myelofibrosis, a rare bone marrow disease, but she continued conducting research, and was absorbed in the study of ego development as late as 1987.

News reports of her death at 83, on Sept. 12, 1988, were modest, much like McFarland herself. The New York Times, like several other major newspapers, published a brief obituary by The Associated Press. In Pittsburgh, however, original obituaries appeared in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and The Pittsburgh Press.

Her books, which numbered in the thousands, were donated to Saint Vincent College, where the Fred Rogers Center was established in 2003, the year of Rogers' death.