I’ve been lucky in my radio career to have interviewed some great names, from all walks of life. But just like your first car, your first kiss, your first marriage (whoa – where did that come from?), I can honestly tell you that when people come up to me and ask “Who was your first interview on the radio?” I can say with no hesitation, Fred Rogers from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood.

I was actually doing a morning show on a rock-and-roll station on the FM dial and talked with my PD (program director) about doing something a little different to see if I couldn’t get a famous name on the air and wish them “Happy Birthday.” I was given the o.k. as long as it wasn’t more than five or six minutes in length.

So I checked the birthdays for the next couple of weeks and saw Mr. Rogers’s name. I knew Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood was produced at WQED in Pittsburgh, so I gave them a call and got hold of his producer, a very nice man by the name of David Newell, and he thought the interview would be no problem. Are you ready for this? David Newell plays Mr. McFeely, the deliveryman on the show!

I was given a number and a time to call to pre-record the interview, and was I glad we did! I mentioned to David just a few minutes, and Mr. Rogers gave me 45! Mr. Rogers was in the hospital, but not as a patient, he was visiting his mother. The number I had called was the phone booth across the hall from her room.

What could Fred Rogers and I talk about for 45 minutes? His mother made all his sweaters and he had just presented one to Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show a few days before. What’s Johnny like? He said he was a warm, kind man and when it came to relationships with his children, he said these three words. “Johnny gets it.”

Fred Rogers was an ordained minister and never served in the military. He was married and had two children of his own. He thought Eddie Murphy’s impression of him on Saturday Night Live was funny, but was glad that the kids that watch the “Neighborhood” were asleep that late at night.

I said 45 minutes was the length of the interview, so Fred turned the phone over to King Friday XIII and Queen Sara Saturday. Prince Tuesday may have chatted also. Could you imagine walking down the hall of that hospital and seeing Fred Rogers doing his puppets’ voices?

He rarely got mad, but he told me the story of some radio DJ’s doing a skit where they imitated him, telling kids how to make a blow torch out of hair spray and a lighter.

Now how do I chop down 45 minutes down to five or six? Well, I got it down to 7 1/2 and that’s what aired. I was proud that I got some nice comments on it, but there was one letter writer who didn’t think it belonged on an FM station. The owner of the station actually wrote back and said that it wouldn’t happen again and we would stick to music. There’s now “Talk fm’s, Sports FM’s, Religion FM’s”… I was way before my time!

I still have the shortened interview, but sadly the 45-minute recording disappeared many years ago.

Many years later I had a chance to ask Mr. Rogers if he remembered that interview. He said of course he did. Who could forget an interview in a hospital phone booth while visiting their mother?

In a future column: November 10th, 1975 the Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a horrible storm on Lake Superior. I’ll share a letter I received from my cousin who was on the Arthur Anderson, the ore ship that sailed with the “Fitz” that terrible night.

bob.harris@mwcradio.com