This happened 50 years ago almost to the day, but I remember it down to the overcast skies outside and fading autumn light of that late afternoon in northern Minnesota. There were about 30 of us aspiring young hockey players gathered in the classroom that day, and it’s safe to say that none of us were particularly concerned about the …
“I realized that this show is not about Fred Rogers. It’s about the feeling that Fred Rogers conveys and gives to the world. The nuances, the beliefs, the spirituality of him, the feeling … because I think that is what it is. It’s the love, the compassion. It’s the looking for the good, not for the bad. It’s the positive, …
One of Fred Rogers’ favorite things was making connections between people, so he would be delighted by recent events at Circle Theatre in downtown Fort Worth, Texas. It is there that I have been privileged to observe the cast, crew and theater staff as they prepare for the premiere of “I’m Proud of You,” the stage play based on my …
In the early morning of Sept. 3, 1855, 600 U.S. soldiers commanded by Gen. William S. Harney surrounded a peaceful Lakota Sioux village — about 250 people whose tipis were pitched along a clear stream in the Sandhills of northwestern Nebraska. On Harney’s order, the village of a revered Lakota leader named Little Thunder was destroyed. Lodges were set ablaze …
“When people come to see the play, I hope they learn what Tim learns.” — co-writer and director Harry Parker On Saturday evening, Oct. 28, Circle Theatre in downtown Fort Worth, Texas, will host the world premiere of “I’m Proud of You,” the stage play adapted from my memoir of the same name. My life and career is indeed about …
Today was the official publication date of “Man Overboard: A Medical Lifeline for the Aging Male.” Published by Mayo Clinic Press, it is the literary debut of my good friend, Dr. Craig Bowron, who lives around the corner from my sister, Terri, in St. Paul. I know from some experience that when you are working on a book, the “pub …
ON Wednesday night at Texas Christian University, I will be inducted into the Texas Literary Hall of Fame. I know. Go figure. I was happy to learn that the master or ceremonies of the Hall of Fame banquet will be June Naylor Harris, a close friend since the 1980s, when we were both cubs at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To …
The memoir of my friendship with Fred Rogers, “I’m Proud of You,” was first published in 2006, followed by a second edition paperback in 2012. It recently dawned on me that was a full decade ago. Yet I continue to hear regularly from people who have found the book and found deep meaning in it. That is because Fred Rogers …
Vin Scully and I had a nice conversation one morning in the spring of 2019. “I’m carrying a little cup of coffee and walking down to my office and we’ll be able to chat for a little while,” he said. That voice. It was a little surreal to hear it coming through my cell phone. Growing up in Minnesota, I …
Humankind is sleepwalking toward an apocalypse and until a few years ago, I was one of the zombies. I had been aware of climate change for decades, first learning of it in the late 1980s through the work of NASA climatologist James Hansen. In 2006, I watched with considerable alarm “An Inconvenient Truth,” the documentary in which Al Gore called global …
Fifty years ago almost to the day, I rode my bike from our neighborhood, down the hill, past the courthouse to the only record store in Crookston, Minnesota, population 8,000. I had just been paid for my summer job, hoeing sugar beets, and would use my very modest salary, (a dollar for a mile-long row, as I recall) to buy …
During the COVID years, my preoccupations have included, a) trying to learn to play the guitar and sing, b) confronting the lingering vestiges of old demons and c) becoming more familiar with the divine spark that I believe lives inside of me and every human being. The jury is still very much out when it comes to the guitar playing …
In the past few years, I’ve taken a deep dive into the issue of climate change, reading scores of news accounts, scholarly articles and books on the topic. What I learned frankly terrified me. What was true and what was hyperbole? I recently asked one of the world’s leading climate scientists, Camille Parmesan, to help me separate one from the …
On an autumn day in 1998, my mom called to say that my brother, Steve, just a year younger than me, had been diagnosed with lung cancer that would take his life two years later. The news was doubly devastating because Steve and I, inseparable as children, were estranged at the time. After hanging up with Mom, I called my …
I just learned of the death of Tommy Lasorda, the Hall of Fame manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Tommy was 93 and had been in poor health for several years. The news has much deeper meaning for me today than it would have a few years ago, before I met my friend, Fred Claire, the former Dodgers general manager …
A few weeks ago, when Damon Lindelof accepted an Emmy Award for the HBO series “Watchmen,” he wore a dark blazer over a black T-shirt that bore the words, “Remember Tulsa ’21.” “We dedicate this award to the victims and survivors of the Tulsa Massacre of 1921,” Lindelof, the show’s creator, said as the cast and crew stood behind him. …
From Chapter 16 of the Tim’s book, “I’m Proud of You: My Friendship with Fred Rogers“: When Fred was a boy in Latrobe, Pa., his mother taught him how to look for hope during the darkest times. “In times of tragedy, look for the helpers,” Nancy McFeely Rogers would often tell her son. “They’re always there. Perhaps on the sidelines, …
It’s oddly wonderful to celebrate the words of college football commentator Kirk Herbstreit and Catholic writer and theologian Richard Rohr in the same blog post. But these are not normal times. On Sunday night, I came across Herbstreit’s stirring soliloquy about race on “College GameDay.” “If you’re a white player in these locker rooms, I think it’s really incumbent upon …
On June 1, 1921, a white mob numbering in the thousands destroyed Tulsa’s uniquely prosperous African American community, known as Greenwood. About 300 people were killed and 10,000 left homeless. Photographs of the aftermath of that day in Oklahoma recalled Hiroshima after the atom bomb. Also part of Tulsa’s grim tableau in those terrible hours was the sight of flatbed …
My first conversation with Fred Claire took place in April 2019. Not long afterward, hours probably, I was struck by the irony … another great guy named Fred. I had met the other Fred, Fred Rogers, in the fall of 1995 when I interviewed the children’s television icon for a newspaper story. I was the beneficiary of his human greatness …
In 1988, as general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Fred Claire was the architect of the team’s last World Series championship. Nearly three decades later, in the winter of 2017, cancer that had begun as speck on Fred’s lip had returned with a vengeance. The prognosis had been poor from the time his melanoma had spread to his jaw …
July 7 is the official publication date of my new book, “Extra Innings.” I love the story of Fred’s Claire’s inspiring fight against cancer at City of Hope National Medical Center in California, one of the world’s finest medical institutions. But as general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Fred was also the architect of the team’s last World Series championship …
Margaret Dickinson’s mother was often too ill to care for her youngest child, so from the time Margaret was old enough to walk, the little girl accompanied her father to job sites, or to meetings with Tulsa power brokers, or to any of the other myriad engagements befitting the owner of the young city’s most prominent construction firm. Wilfred Dickinson’s …
I published a version of this essay a few months ago. Given current events, it bears repeating. In the year 2000, as part of the research for my book, “The Burning: Massacre, Destruction and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921,” I interviewed an elderly man named Richard Gary, who told me this story. On a day in early June 1921, …
This is the forward to my book, “Extra Innings, written by Bill Plaschke, former Los Angeles Dodgers beat writer for the Los Angeles Times. Fred Claire is a fighter. You might not know that to look at him — he’s so distinguished and dignified and darned polite — but believe me, when he spots an unfairness or injustice, the man will …
Tuesday morning I listened to a lecture by an American Buddhist teacher named Tara Brach, who spoke of how the minds of most people careen relentlessly from one fearful, self-protective thought to another. She said this happens on average about 86,000 times a day. (This works out to a thought per second.) I don’t know where she came by this …
As doctors, nurses and first responders have tended to the physical devastation wrought by the pandemic, my friend, the Fort Worth, Texas, grief therapist Dr. Patrick O’Malley, and his colleagues have been working to help us cope with the profound emotional, psychological and spiritual challenges of this moment. I was Patrick’s co-author of the 2017 book “Getting Grief Right: Finding …
Fred Rogers once said something to the effect that one of life’s great challenges is making goodness attractive. As a writer and journalist over these last decades, I’ve come to realize it might not be that challenging after all. This is a theme I’ve returned to again and again in my career: A good person finds him or herself in …
On Super Bowl Sunday in 1981, football was the last thing on the minds of the two young friends, Trey Shelton and Kevin Curnutt. The winter afternoon was warm and sunny, perfect for riding dirt bikes on the rural outskirts of Arlington, Texas. That day, Kevin saw Trey and his bike cross a shallow stream and disappear over a hill. …
This morning, I used a long walk to catch up with Gary Kelly, my good friend and co-founder of our classic rock cover band called the Love Starved Dogs. Gary and I hadn’t talked since social isolation began about a month ago, and after sharing news of our families, (everyone healthy, thankfully) we discussed the future of the band. I …
I met Fred Claire about this time last year on my first visit to City of Hope National Medical Center near Los Angeles. Fred, his wife, Sheryl, and I talked for two hours that first day, sitting in the shade outside a research building on the sprawling campus. Fred never let on then that he was in terrible pain from …
A few days ago, I opened a purple, college-ruled composition notebook, noted the date on the first page, March 23, 2020, and launched into what I am calling The Coronavirus Journal. “What else to call it?” I began. “We are living through one of the most cataclysmic moments in the history of man, or so it seems. Could the wackiest …
One of Fred Rogers’ greatest pleasures was making connections between people he loved. I’ve enjoyed that experience myself in recent weeks, introducing my good friends Michael Gingerich and Tom Kaden to Dr. Patrick O’Malley. Tom and Michael are the founders of Someone To Tell it To, a Pennsylvania nonprofit devoted to intentional and compassionate listening. Patrick, as some of you …
A few weeks ago, on a Minnesota trip to visit my family, I also got together with my friends, Craig and Stephanie Bowron. For a couple of hours in their St. Paul home, Stephanie played piano, Craig and I played guitars, and we sang ourselves hoarse, everything from the Beatles to Johnny Cash. That seems like a lifetime ago now. …
You might remember Thursday, when the stock market decline was the worst in decades and news of the coronavirus pandemic seemed to grow more grim by the hour. A bad day, for sure. And yet … There was Dave Brown. My wife and I had tickets to see the Eagles at the American Airlines Center in Dallas next week. We …
My friend, Karl Travis, is actively dying. By that I mean he is leaning into the experience, including the injustice of a baffling illness that will take him from the world, in the physical sense at least, far too soon. The much admired and beloved Presbyterian pastor is leaning into the mystery. He is leaning into the inevitable sadness of …
In the year 2000, as part of my research for a book on the Tulsa, Okla., race massacre of 1921, I interviewed an elderly man named Richard Gary, who told me this story. On a day in early June 1921, his father, a white Tulsa resident named Hugh Gary, loaded his young sons, Richard and Hubert, into the family Dodge …
Here is an excerpt from my latest book, “Of the First Class: A History of the Kimbell Art Museum.” Chapter 1 Sacred Ground On a muggy summer Saturday in 2014, 8,000 people converged on the heart of Fort Worth’s cultural district: the “Great Lawn” of the Kimbell Art Museum. The crowd was double what organizers of that day’s festival had …
In the past several weeks, in the trailers and articles I’ve seen and read about the upcoming Mister Rogers movie, much has been familiar. As many of you know, I, too, was a deeply troubled journalist who met Fred Rogers on assignment and became the beneficiary of his otherworldly presence, compassion and love. “The entirety of “A Beautiful Day in …
I was getting toward the end of my long walk on a typically scorching Texas morning when I approached a road construction site. I passed a Hispanic man standing in the bed of a pickup. “Amigo!” he said. I assumed he was speaking to a co-worker and I kept walking. Then he called out again. “Amigo!” When I turned, he …
I’m deeply grateful to my friend, Sid Ansbacher, for restoring this memory of my brother, Steve, and my friend, Fred Rogers. I hadn’t read this or thought of it for years until Sid recently shared it with a friend on Facebook. It is from the fall of 1998, when Steve was diagnosed with lung cancer that would take his life …
In the last decade or so, I’ve become an admirer of Jeff Daniels, the actor who came to prominence as the goofball character (with Jim Carrey) in the 1994 movie “Dumb and Dumber.” But it’s been his later work, hardly of the goofball variety, that I’ve found so compelling. Daniels was the brooding anchorman in HBO’s “The Newsroom”; the womanizing FBI …
My book,“I’m Proud of You: My Friendship with Fred Rogers”was first published in 2006. On scores of occasions in the years since, I’ve told the story of our relationship to audiences large and small across the nation. It’s been a deeply meaningful experience every time. It seems you can’t bring up the name of Fred Rogers without changing the molecules …
A year or so ago, someone approached me at a party and said, “So how about this fake news?” By her tone and facial expression, I knew she was really saying something to the effect of, “If the president is saying it, it must be true.” This person, of course, knew that I had spent most of my career as …