In 1966, Mr. Rogers left WTAE to develop “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” for the public television station WQED. He hired Mr. Negri to be on the show and later asked him to play a handyman.
“I almost started laughing,” Mr. Negri later recalled. “I said: ‘Fred, you got the wrong guy. I’m not very handy. You know, I can’t do anything. I can’t even put a hammer on a nail.’”
Mr. Rogers was undeterred.
“Don’t worry,” he told his new handyman. “It’s going to be all pretend.”
From the outset, music was central to the show. Mr. Negri sang for the first time in Episode 13, performing “Sometimes People Are Good,” a song written by Mr. Rogers, after the puppet Lady Elaine Fairchilde borrowed a painting without asking.
The lesson is in the lyrics:
Sometimes people are good
And they do just what they should.
But the very same people who are good sometimes
Are the very same people who are bad sometimes.
It’s funny, but it’s true.
It’s the same, isn’t it for me …
Isn’t it the same for you?
At the end of the episode, Mr. Rogers reflected on what Lady Elaine had done. “If you want something, you ask for it,” he said. “And if you can’t have it, then you find something else.”
Bending down to pick up domino blocks from the floor, he added, “I wonder if Lady Elaine knew that.”
Then he, too, sang the song, lingering on the words “for you?”
