PITTSBURGH — For 30 years, every afternoon at 3 p.m., accountant Fred Rogers would wave goodbye to his co-workers at Susquehanna Steel Corp. and head for home. In all those years, his acquaintances all knew him as a soft-spoken, grandfatherly man who came to work early every day so that he could leave in the early afternoon to spend time with friends.
In reality, Mr. Rogers was spending time only with himself. After he left his office in suburban Pittsburgh, he would ride his bicycle to the nearby neighborhood in which he lived, enter his two-bedroom bungalow, swap his sportcoat and loafers for a sweater and sneakers, and enter what a team of psychiatrists at Carnegie Mellon's Institution for the Mentally Ill describe as "the land of make-believe."
Beyond his excellent decades of work as a key worker in the financial offices of the major steel manufacturer, Mr. Rogers led a life that one would except from a pillar of the community. He was a major contributor to the Pittsburgh Zoo, with his name appearing on plaques honoring donors in the Zoo's striped-tiger enclosure as well as its groundbreaking mixed-wildlife habitat, a wooded area populated by owl and pussycat alike.
He also led a drive to erect a small replica of Paris's Eiffel Tower in downtown Pittsburgh, although the land and money for the project was ultimately used on a new stadium for the Pittsburgh Pirates baseball team instead.
It's likely that nobody would have ever learned the truth about Mr. Rogers's affliction were it not for one bizarre incident. Shortly after losing the battle over the Eiffel Tower replica, Mr. Rogers was taken into custody by police outside a local TGI Friday's restaurant, after restaurant employees complained that Mr. Rogers had been belligerent to them and demanded "to see the King."
A search of Rogers' house the next day revealed a home in disarray; hundreds of cans of fish-food flakes were stacked in a closet, with his aquarium full of dead, overfed fish. Instead of focusing on television like most people his age, Mr. Rogers apparently instead delighted on running a single electric train car back and forth along a track. Individuals capable of being entertained by such simple acts for long periods of time show a greater tendency toward serious mental illness, say Mr. Rogers's doctors at Carnegie Mellon.
According to Carnegie Mellon records, while staring at the electric trolley, Rogers would imagine himself entering a fantastic "land of make-believe," populated by puppet-like characters akin to those in children's television series such as Sesame Street or Teletubbies.
Mr. Rogers's co-workers expressed shock at the revelations about his private life, but admit that some of his personality quirks look in retrospect to be desperate cries for help.
"Fred was always very attentive to me," said accounting manager Elaine Fairchild, who worked with Mr. Rogers for nearly 20 years. "He treated me like a lady. But he was always calling everyone 'neighbor,' and telling them what a beautiful day it was, and some people were bothered by that. It's sad that being a good neighbor and treating people with respect would turn people off to a person, but I guess it turns out that Fred wasn't so neighborly after all."
"He always tried to get me to come inside his house," said postal worker George McFeeley, who delivers the mail in Mr. Rogers's neighborhood. "He would try to engage me in the strangest conversations, and I would always have to excuse myself. If I had stayed talking to him, nobody else in the neighborhood would get a speedy delivery of their mail."
But the outlook for this deeply delusional accountant may be bright. According to his doctors, Rogers is responding well to drug therapies and may be released to a group home in the next three months.
"Now that he's full of prozac and zoloft," said Carnegie Mellon's Dr. Prinz Tuesday, "not every day is a beautiful day, and not everybody is his neighbor. He's much better off this way."
