I wrote back, and so our correspondence commenced. She’d tracked down my email address and sent a note to tell me that she’d enjoyed the story I had written. Less than a week later, a message popped up in my inbox. I’d done a brief phone interview with her, no more than 20 minutes. Our virtual pen pal communication began last summer, just after the release of Neville’s documentary. It was over email that I developed my own relationship with Joanne.
In the years following the publication of the cover story, Fred and Junod kept in touch - migrating from written correspondence to email as he typed away on a lightweight laptop that Joanne had given him one Christmas. But as Junod spent more time with him, Fred started to turn the questions on the writer himself, more interested in learning what made the journalist tick than revealing his own inner workings. As a cynical investigative writer, Junod was initially hoping to uncover the dark side of the cheery public figure.
The movie tells the story of Fred’s relationship with Tom Junod, a journalist who was assigned to profile the television host for Esquire magazine in 1998. “He would just raise one cheek and he would look at me and smile,” she said, cracking herself up. If the couple was out at an event that turned out to be bland, he had a go-to way of making her laugh: passing gas. She was keener on imparting to the writers just how funny Fred was. Yet when the filmmakers behind “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood” approached Joanne to get her blessing on the project, Micah Fitzerman-Blue, who wrote the film with Noah Harpster, said, “She really only had one request: that we not treat her husband as a saint.” In the 16 years since Fred’s 2003 death, they’re the only token of his that she’s kept for herself. They’re tucked in a tote bag that hangs by her favorite chair, so she can grab one when she wants to feel close to him. She still has most of the letters from their early courtship. Even though she didn’t know him all that well by the time he proposed, that’s what she clung to - the idea that this was a man with a strong moral center. Fred told Joanne about his hopes for the future - about the kind of people he wanted the two of them to become. They kept in touch through the mail, though they weren’t very good writers, Joanne says. When Fred headed to New York after graduation for an apprenticeship at NBC - the first stop on his way to “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” - she stayed in Florida to get her master’s degree in music. Joanne - she dropped “Sara” early on, deeming it too stuffy - was raised in a Puritan home, and she was repulsed by her schoolmates who talked about “sucking face.” Any kissing she said she and Fred did was “pretty unpracticed.” She recalls being attracted to Fred, but they weren’t particularly physical with each other outside of the sorority and fraternity dances they attended together. It was 1952 and they were in the midst of a long-distance courtship that began at Rollins College in Florida. A letter she lost almost immediately in a flurry of excitement as she rushed to a pay phone to give him her answer: “Yes, yes, yes!”īoth 24, she just 11 days his senior, they were friends but not yet lovers. Fred Rogers proposed to Sara Joanne Byrd in a letter.
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