As Mister Rogers Documentary Hits Theaters, A Storrs Woman Shares Her Story Of Friendship With The TV Icon

Mister Rogers had very nice handwriting.

Beth Usher would know. Usher, a Storrs resident, received letters from Fred Rogers for much of her life. She also talked to him on the phone and met him in person. He asked for her advice on what to say during the University of Connecticut’s 1991 commencement speech, an event he agreed to speak at after she asked him about it.

Their friendship began unconventionally, with Usher eagerly watching his television program and telling secrets to the screen she wouldn’t even share with her own family. In its later stages, their friendship is what connected her with the team behind “Won’t You Be My Neighbor,” a new documentary about Rogers just released to theaters and playing at Madison Art Cinemas in Madison.

Usher, now 38 years old, was in her third week of kindergarten when she fell off a seesaw. No one is certain if she fell as the result of a seizure or if the seizure was instead caused by the fall. A doctor gave her phenobarbital to try to control the seizures, but within the following few weeks, she had another.

Gradually, she had more and more seizures. At the peak, she would have as many as a hundred in a day. They affected the right side of her body, and as a result, she slowly became left-handed.

“They felt like I was on a rollercoaster,” Usher said of the seizures. “Even now, I can tell you. It feels like you’re on a rollercoaster and it keeps going and going and you can’t get off.”

She lived in fear of them. She never knew when they were coming, but she knew when they were over from the sudden feeling of calm in her body. Her parents found she couldn’t be left alone.

One day, her family noticed something unexpected when Usher was watching TV with her brother. For the duration of an episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” Beth didn’t have seizures.

“I’ll never forget my son saying, ‘Mom, look at Bethie,’” Kathy Usher, Beth’s mother, said. “I go down, and she’s just staring at the television. I’m watching this kid for a half hour not have one seizure. Before that, she’d have them every minute or so, she’d have a jerk or she’d be on the floor. Just something in his voice was amazing.”

The show, which debuted nationally in 1968 and ran for more than three decades on national public television, taught everything from handling anger to dealing with divorce. For the Usher family, it suddenly had a much greater purpose. Something about the show, perhaps Rogers’ voice, granted peace in half-hour increments.

Rogers would ask questions to the audience, to which Beth would joyfully respond. She would love to be his neighbor, she told him, watching the show as if in a trance. Beth had a hard time making friends at that point in her life, as her seizures frightened adults, much less children her age. “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,” however, brought her one of her closest friends — Rogers himself (or, as he later insisted the Ushers call him, Fred).

All the while, after research and visits to many doctors, Usher received a diagnosis: Rasmussen’s encephalitis. It attacks one hemisphere of the brain, and no one is certain what causes it. It explained why she started favoring one side of her body and why she had seizures constantly, but there weren’t many options for treatment.

Doctors at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore confirmed the diagnosis and proposed a radical solution. Neurosurgeon Ben Carson (now the secretary of Housing and Urban Development) would remove the half of her brain the disease was attacking in a procedure called a hemispherectomy.

Without it, doctors said, she would likely keep having seizures until the left side of her brain deteriorated to the point she would have to be put in a nursing home. The family was hesitant to have such a procedure, worried about the potential outcomes such as brain damage or death. Ultimately, however, they agreed to the surgery to try to rid her of the seizures and save her life.

The whole family was nervous for the procedure. Her parents scheduled the surgery and then canceled a few different times before finally going through with it. To try to ease some of the tension, Kathy Usher called Rogers’ show and told them what was going on.

She hoped for a signed picture. What she got was a call a few days later from Rogers himself, telling her he’d call back that night to talk to Beth.

They spoke for over an hour, an experience Beth said was like “having the world served on a silver platter.” She shared her deepest fears about her upcoming operation. In response, he worked to calm her anxiety both as himself and in the voice of the puppets from his show.

“Talking to him was like talking to my best friend,” Beth said. “It felt like I was the only one who mattered. He was patient and kind… and it was nice to have someone to just talk to.”

In February 1987, surgeons successfully removed the left hemisphere of her brain. Carson wrote in his 1990 memoir “Gifted Hands” that there were no complications during surgery. Afterward, however, Beth’s brain stem swelled more than anticipated, and she fell into a coma for six weeks.

Rogers called each day to check on her recovery, but the Ushers didn’t leave the hospital while Beth was comatose. He ended up calling the hospital directly and reaching them there.

While musical tapes Rogers sent the family sang from a Fisher-Price cassette player in Beth’s room, a live Rogers spoke with Kathy Usher. He wanted to fly out the next day to see Beth, he said. Beth’s mother was hesitant, as Rogers was a busy man and Beth was still in a coma. None of that mattered to him, though. He just wanted to visit Beth.

A minister friend picked Rogers up from the airport and took him to the hospital. He carried only a clarinet case, and he asked her family not to tell others he was coming. He wasn’t doing it for publicity — he was flying out to see a friend.

“It was really amazing because he didn’t know us before that,” Brian Usher, Beth’s father, said. “My wife called a few days before (the surgery to ask for a photo), and then he was there with us.”

When he got there, he sat down with Beth and talked to her gently. Nurses strained to see over her parents’ shoulders as they stood in the doorway. He pulled puppets out of his clarinet case, replicas of beloved characters from his show including King Friday and Daniel Striped Tiger. He sat with her for an hour.

As much as everyone in the room wished Beth would wake up to experience the moment, she remained comatose. At Rogers’ suggestion, Kathy Usher took a picture of the two together for when Beth woke up to prove he visited. He left the puppets with her.

As Beth exited her coma six weeks after surgery and began to heal, Rogers was a source of kindness that helped the whole Usher family pull through. He was the one of the first people to receive a call when Beth woke up, second only to family. He was thrilled with each milestone showing success after her surgery, such as when she started walking and talking again.

After she left the hospital, he continued to be a friend. He called for birthdays and events such as good report cards and graduation. He wrote letters to her brother, Brian Jr., while Brian Jr. served in Americorp in Denver. The letters came with trolleys in the corner.

David Newell, who played Mr. McFeely and knew Rogers well, said Rogers had a friendship with a lot of children, but it was rare for him to have such a strong connection with a child.

“Beth was an exceptional child, so it made perfect sense,” he said. “Fred didn’t always have time, but when there was a child, he made time. He was a respectful man, especially when there was children involved.”

Even now, 15 years after his death, Rogers is a huge presence in the Ushers’ lives. On their living room table sits a coaster with a picture of Rogers and the phrase “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” His books live on the shelves right along with family pictures. Written in a thick black marker, a handwritten note from Rogers in the Ushers’ copy of “Going To The Potty” talks about how the book has photos of his family in it. Often, when faced with a tough situation, the family asks themselves, “What would Fred do?”

It makes sense, then, that the documentary makers would talk to the Usher family about Rogers.

In April 2017, the documentary team filmed a workshop Beth gave during the annual conference for the Association for Applied and Therapeutic Humor. It was focused on Rogers’ idea that children’s feelings come out during play and how a family that plays together, stays together. The team also spoke with the family “for hours” about their relationship with Rogers.

The scenes ultimately didn’t make the final cut of the film, although an associate producer confirmed the family was still given special thanks. Beth’s friendship with Rogers has been a point of pride in her life, and having the opportunity to share the impact he had on the whole family, even if it didn’t appear in the film, still meant the world to the Ushers.

After spending years talking about the show and the lessons from it to anyone who would listen, the family is excited that Rogers’ message lives on. On television, in the documentary and in person, Rogers was always the same kind, genuine person.

“Rogers once said that he’d visualize just one person sitting behind the camera in order to make a personal connection,” Kathy Usher said while gesturing to her daughter and laughing. “It really worked with this one.”