Interview with David Newell
This is a transcript of an interview with David Newell on Conversations at KCTS 9 which aired on July 17, 2009.
Other Transcripts:
DN: No, you know, I don’t. People ask me that a lot and I really enjoy what I do. This is my 41st year doing Mr. McFeely, and I’ve loved every day of it. It’s been a pleasure working all these years with Fred Rogers. He passed on as you know in 2003 but we’re carrying the legacy on. And I’ve never got tired…I’ve always looked forward to working, going to work.
EC: Tell me about the first time you met Fred Rogers, and what were the circumstances?
DN: The circumstances were…the summer of 1967, I was in London, I was visiting my cousin who was living there, and I got a telegram at the American Express office—that was how you got messages those days—and it said that, a mutual friend said that Fred Rogers is expanding Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood to go national, and I, my mutual friend, have given Fred your name...
DN: And to make a long story short, he set up an interview for me. And I knew who Fred was because he was well-known in Pittsburgh. And I met him and we talked for an hour, I was the last interview he did, and he hired me. We spoke about everything, he showed me the scripts, he told me what he wanted to do, he told me his mission with television. And he said, I want…I was in interview for production assistant, his assistant, help with puppets, get all the props ready, that was my main job.
EC: You were a prop guy?
DN: Prop guy, and a costume guy, and a coordinator basically. And he said, I also want you to do this small part. Occasionally you’ll come in and bring a prop in and show it to me—you’ll be the delivery man. Fine. And your name will be Mr. McCurdy. That was the name. Well Susan Roebucks gave us foundation money to do the series, extend it to the national audience, and twenty minutes before we started taping the first program the phone rang.
DN: And it was Susan Roebucks and she said, "We love everything you’re doing but don’t call the delivery man Mr. McCurdy because it’s the name of our director, and it looks like it’s too self-serving." Fred was saying thank you. So he said, "We’ve got to get you a name, we’re taping. McFeely!" That’s Fred’s middle name, Fred McFeely Rogers. And that’s how I got the name.
EC: And McFeely...that was from his grandfather?
DN: Grandfather, his his his…yes. The real Mr. McFeely was Fred’s grandfather, yeah.
EC: So, you were hired to be the prop guy and kind of everything else, which I think in most public television stations everyone kind of does a little bit of everything. But you’re background had actually been in acting.
DN: Yes. My background was in theatre, and I started a children’s theatre playing a clown. There was a Pittsburgh Playhouse, similar to your ACT here, or the Seattle Rep…is well know within the regional theatres, circuit, and they have a children’s theatre.
DN: And I started being the host of the children’s theatre every Saturday and Sunday matinees…Rumpelstiltskin and that kind of thing. And my name was "Bimbo the Clown." You can’t do that now, but my name was Bimbo the Clown. And I really…loved working with children. And I’d work backstage, and I’d be a stage manager...but my background was in front in back of the stage and I loved every moment of it.
EC: You’d gone to school at the University of Pittsburgh? And did you major in theatre and drama there?
DN: Theatre and English was my major really, English Lit, with drama thrown in. Mainly theatre literature. But I went to the Playhouse first and had an intensive two years in the theatre, acting and directing and stagecraft, everything. And then finished up at Pitt, University of Pittsburgh.
EC: When you got the job with Fred Rogers, were you thinking, This is a one or two year gig and then I’m out of here, back to L.A.?
DN: Exactly, exactly. I was living in Los Angeles at the time, I came back home to Pittsburgh. The summer, I was in England, but I was going to go back to LA, and I got the job. Well I said I’ll have this for a year; Fred said we were going to do 130 programs in black and white. That was...
EC: Cuz it was like, what, 1967, ’68?
DN: ’67, ’68. We started taping in ’67, went on the air in ’68, January—February 19th. And here I am!
DN: I thought I had a job for one year. And then we were renewed the next year in color, 65 half-hours every season, and, you know, I stayed because it was, I felt I was a part of something that was really helping children. And that was Fred’s mission. He never wanted to be a television actor or star, he never, he really stayed away from the limelight, that was not who he wanted to be.
EC: It was all mission driven…and that was the heart of it? Was kids, and teaching kids?
DN: Yes. Always about the child, that’s what he thought about. Every time we would go on, he would say, What would children…and he studied child development, so he was qualified. His three disciplines were child development, theology, and music. And they all worked together. And he wrote all the scripts, wrote all the music that was on the program basically, and did the puppets, and the voices of the puppets.
DN: And I would help him with the behind-the-scenes. And I got the props. And it was you know the first year, early television, we did everything. As the years went on we could afford to get an editor, and afford to get someone else to help me, but those early years were…really…wonderful. We worked around the clock, we’d start taping at 4 in the afternoon and finish at 12. Fred said we can’t do this schedule anymore, we have to start at 10 in the morning until 5 because I want to see my children.
DN: He was always thinking of children, he always thought of that, that was his...
EC: And family was at the heart of the whole operation, right?
DN: Yes, it was. Our company is called Family Communications.
EC: But you met your wife there?
DN: Yes I did. I was there about 10 years, my wife came as…we had an associate producer slot open, and she came from Boston, she was living in Boston. It was a mutual friend of friend who said, "We have this wonderful person you should hire."
DN: And it just so happened that the job was open and that’s how we met.
EC: So she became...Purple Panda?
DN: She...yes. Our courtship was Nan being Purple Panda (her name is Nan) and I would do these appearances—in fact I brought the Panda here a lot to Seattle. And there’s a character on the program that maybe your audience hasn’t seen Purple Panda, but it’s a costume character. And I’d take Panda with me when I’d visit child care centers or do events in theatres or whatever.
DN: And one day I needed somebody to do it, because the person who played it had moved. So Nan played it for awhile, until she got pregnant.
EC: But that was part of your courtship?
DN: That was, that was. And then she did it for three months or four months during the pregnancy of our first child, then said, That’s it, no more.
EC: Now you have two boys and a daughter.
DN: Two boys and a girl. And a granddaughter. And a grandson on the way, we know it’s a boy, whose going to be born, they say, on March 20, which is Fred’s birthday. So that would be wonderful. I just hope it’s March 20, that would be such a, whatever that word is, omen, I don’t know.
EC: It would be a wonderful coincidence.
DN: It would, it would.
EC: So I understand one of your boys also played Purple Panda at one time?
DN: Yes, yes. Oh they’ve done everything. My daughter has too. My son who is now 27 just did it at the holiday parade in Pittsburgh, there was a holiday parade, a Macy’s parade, in Pittsburgh, and I needed a panda. And he did it. He would begrudgingly do it but he really enjoyed it. And he, uh, lives in New York City and works at an ad agency in New York City, and about a week later he told everybody that he did Panda. You know—I thought he wouldn’t say a word. But he did.
DN: And then a letter came, or an e-mail came, could you do these autographs for me. It was about twenty autographs he wanted…for people his age who grew up with the program.
EC: I understand that one of your boys, who is quite tall…got out of it?
DN: He got out of it. He’s 6’4', can’t fit into it. But he did when he was four years old, five years old, rode on a trolley in a parade, got a kick out of it…but he’s the one who loves sports, was working in Denver for a sports team in Denver.
DN: ...but is taking acting lessons. I don’t know what that means, he never showed any interest in it, and you know maybe it’s, he grew up around television and theatre, maybe the bug bit him, I don’t know.
EC: Let’s talk about Fred Rogers. What was he like?
DN: Oh, Fred. His wife always says, What you see is what you get, and that was Fred. He was not a performer, he was a communicator. That’s what he saw himself as—as a teacher.
DN: He was genuinely the real thing, there was no act. Fred was like on television, he was like off camera. On camera he was slightly…more subdued, or he would adjust his pace of speech to the child.
EC: He’d be focused.
DN: Focused. He always said that the space between the camera and the television set at home, that space is holy ground. He always thought that that was such precious time for, for families. It’s a precious time to waste. Here we are with this wonderful medium, let’s not junk it up. And over the years, you’ve…you know, public television is about the only oasis in all of this. What you see on public television you can trust, for children and for adults.
EC: And really it started with Fred to establish that.
DN: In a way it did. He established the mission basically of public television. His was the first program on the air. Actually WQED, which is where we tape our show in Pittsburgh, was the first community-supported station in the country. And he came on April 1st, 1954 with a program called the Children’s Quarter, and it ran for seven years live every day.
DN: So before the Neighborhood, he had 3,000 hours of television before he even started Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood! But he wanted to use it as a vehicle for goodness. He always said, how do you make goodness attractive? You know you can make badness so to speak attractive—it sells. But how do you make goodness attractive? That was his, in a nutshell, that was what he was trying to do.
EC: He always had this kind of very mild personality which he came across with on television, which I take it he was like in person…did he ever get mad?
DN: He did. But he never…would throw a sneaker across the room. You could tell when he was upset or concerned or angry — he’d go to the piano, we had a piano in the studio, he’s a musician, he would sit down and play the piano. And you’d know that he was thinking things through. He always had his frustrations where his anger would come out through his fingers. You know and he taught children that too…you don’t hit someone when you’re angry, there’s ways, it’s OK to be angry, it’s certainly a natural human emotion.
DN: But what you do with it is what’s important. And he would try to tell children that. He wrote a song, 'What do you do with the mad that you feel when you feel so bad you can bite?' It came right from a child in a daycare center that he was observing.
EC: And, you know, the thing that always really grabbed me about him…I remember him giving this speech when he accepted a Lifetime Emmy Award.
EC: It was the most thought-provoking and just to the point speech about the importance of television but also about the importance of children and family. Yes. And the importance of what producers—the people who produce television—the important job they have and what they put on the screen for not only children but for anybody. It was the time he received, and I think you may be able to see this on YouTube, if your viewers want to see it, it’s on YouTube, but...watch public television.
EC: So you worked with him for close to 35 years?
DN: Yeah. ’67 to 2003. The last performance I guess you could say, or appearance, he was…he and Bill Cosby were the hosts — or the, not the hosts, the grand marshals of the Rose Bowl Parade. And I was with Fred because at that time I sort of morphed into the PR person then. And I was there; I would set up the interviews and plan for Fred to get to an event, so I was there.
DN: He was feeling terrible…he had stomach cancer, but he didn’t know it at the time. He came back after the parade. His last appearance was at that parade. He came back and had the operation and they thought they got it and it came back in a week or two and two weeks, three weeks later he had passed away.
EC: 2003. Actually it was August 31, I believe, 2001 that you did the final taping of the program.
DN: Yes.
EC: And I understand too that Fred didn’t want that to be an acknowledgment of the final taping, he just wanted it to be another show.
DN: Exactly. In fact, it was a Friday and we were doing on Friday a Thursday show, and on Monday we would have been doing the Friday show. Well the Thursday show, on Friday, we got finished quick, we had another two hours of studio time. Fred said, "let’s do it. Do we have all the props, I’ve got my script, I know what I’m doing; let’s just do the final show now."
DN: He didn’t want to linger over the...
EC: The fact that it was the last show.
DN: He wanted to just put it in the can, and that’s it. I think he did that because he was having a very hard time making it a last show. What, almost fifty years of doing it? He knew…he wanted...at that time, he wasn’t sick. At least, we didn’t think he was. And he wanted to transist, is that the word...
DN: ...make a transition into the internet. He wanted to do bedtime stories somehow over the internet. Because he started, the early days of television, he said, Where we are with the internet is where we were sort of when we started in television—very primitive. What we have now, it doesn’t seem primitive to us, but in a way, it really is. You know, another twenty years from now, it’s gonna…who knows?
EC: So he was looking to the next chapter?
DN: He was looking to the next chapter.
EC: But you did something in that last taping. You wanted to have your little good-bye even though no one would probably notice it.
DN: We...Fred always planned to have a library on Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood that could repeat for generations and this station, Channel 9, is doing that, and thank you very much Channel 9 because it needs to be here. Obviously you don’t take Tom Sawyer off the shelf because Mark Twain died. It’s perennial.
DN: At any rate, our last show…we didn’t want it to look like a last show, we just wanted it to be another show. So I sang my "Speedy Delivery To You" song and as I left I shook Fred’s hand, which I never had done before, I just said, "See you around the neighborhood," and went out the door. And that day I wanted to make some sort of indication, for me, that it was our last show, and I was really saying, Thank you for all these years, and, just, Thank you. So I shook his hand.
EC: He meant the world to you.
DN: He did. He did. He was…and he had such a great sense of humor. And that wasn’t what people saw, he was a very very bright man. He had perfect pitch, he could play music by ear, he had a great sense of humor, very quick. He could take off-script, get people back on-script by filling up two minutes if he had to. But he always knew where he was going with what he was doing. He knew children.
DN: Somebody once came to him and said, I want to get into children’s television. And he said, you know, if you want to do that, is take this course in child development, and know children. Know what makes them tick, if you’re going to go into children’s television.
EC: You’re committed to keeping his legacy alive. This has become the mission, the lifetime mission for you?
DN: I guess it has. You know, I’ve worked 40 years and I want what we’ve done, all of us have done, to go on, in some form.
DN: You know obviously there’s an end to everything, but as I said earlier, Mark Twain’s books are still around. In some way, there’s going to be electronic something in the future, that some of these materials can be given to families. And maybe that’s the internet, I don’t know.
EC: Where did speedy delivery come from? And the little gesture?
DN: Speedy delivery, I don’t know, that just came out of somewhere. But speedy delivery, I think the first show we did, I delivered an armadillo to Fred.
DN: The theme was something like armor, protection, and so forth, whatever this symbol was. And I remember leaving and saying, well, no more deliveries, Mr. Rogers, "Well, speedy delivery!" and I did that and off I went.
EC: Now there’s a documentary about you called Speedy Delivery, produced by LA director Paul Germane, shown here in Seattle at the Children’s Film Festival, sponsored by the Northwest Film Forum. How do you feel about being the center of that documentary?
DN: You know, it was a wonderful experience because they showed it three times, and I was there for two of the Q&As after, and you know, basically, the audience was 90% graduates of the neighborhood. We had college kids, we had people whose children grew up with it, and we had some fourth and fifth graders, but it wasn’t for pre-schoolers. It isn’t for pre-schoolers.
DN: It’s really a documentary on my life in the neighborhood, I guess.
EC: And all the years that you spent there. A lot of it we’ve talked about here.
DN: And Paul Germane is the producer/director. I met him one day by happenstance. I was at a ball outside of Pittsburgh, and it had a PBS courtyard or something to that effect and that’s why I was there. And he came up me, at that time he was going to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
DN: Studying film, and was doing his master’s work, and he said, I’d like to do a documentary, a ten minute documentary, on you. And I said, well, that’s fine, you’re right behind our studio, stop over someday. And I forgot about it for a couple of months. And then all of a sudden he shows up, and he said, I’d like to do it, and I said, Well fine. Here’s where I’m going to be the next couple of months, and he spent three or four months with me following me around different places.
DN: And it’s taken him awhile to get it done — he had no budget, he got a grant from the college to do it with. So Paul, Paul saw something. And he grew up with it too, he’s only, he’s twenty seven. And he saw something in what I was doing, and liked the concept of, Here’s somebody who’s very passionate about what he’s doing. And I am! And he saw that, and that’s the sort of the key to "Speedy Delivery."
EC: How many appearances do you make per year now?
DN: Oh, I do a lot.
DN: You know I really, really enjoy — just before I came here to talk to you I was at a library and there were about 100 children and their mothers and caretakers coming. And again, it was the parents who grew up with it, and the children were growing up with it, they were all introduced to it. And there were three families from Japan who just moved here about three months ago who had already discovered Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.
DN: And they said, and we found this out in other situations, that it’s helping us learn to speak English. And if you think of it, he looks to the camera, speaks slowly, uses clear, simple English, and very methodically. And sometimes he’ll show—this is a pair of glasses—he illustrates. And it’s a by-product, it’s not designed to teach English.
DN: But it’s a by-product, it’s remarkable how people use what you offer.
EC: How long does it take you to become Mr. McFeely?
DN: I think I always am. When I spoke to Fred, he said, Oh! I like…you speak ,you can tell I speak fast as Mr. McFeely speaks, he’s always in a hurry…that’s why "Speedy Delivery!". And he said, you know, and I’ll use that, he said, I’ll use it as an example of—sometimes Mr. McFeely’s always in a hurry, for viewers that have never seen Mr. McFeely.
DN: I’m always in a hurry, and I deliver, and I’m off to the next delivery. And sometimes Fred wanted to do a little lesson, he said, "Mr. McFeely, why don’t you just come in and have a seat and take your time." And he wrote a song about if I like to take my time, because you’ll do things right, you need to be methodical. He wanted to show children, this was a lesson, using McFeely as...
EC: Slow down! Let’s think about this.
DN: Slow down, yes, let’s think about this. Exactly, exactly.
EC: David Newell, Mr. McFeely, Speedy Delivery — thank you for all that you’ve given. Thank for your time and thank you for all the lessons. And also, thanks to Fred Rogers, way up there, eh?
DN: Yes. And I just hope he’ll be in some form of the media down here and I’ll be there trying to make the sale. Speedy delivery!
