I HAVE BEEN watching television for a long time. In my youth, I watched TV before Fred Rogers was on TV. This was deep into the past century, mind you. I watched Howdy Doody and Amos ’n’ Andy and Pantomime Quiz and Ding Dong School and other " classics " that people born during the Truman administration remember. And then, because I was doing all this watching in Pittsburgh, I got to see Fred Rogers’s first TV show — The Children’s Corner, produced via shoestrings at WQED, America’s pioneer community-owned " educational television " outlet. ’QED (Channel 13) had studios in a smoke-stained-black sandstone mansion in Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood, near Forbes Field and the University of Pittsburgh. In April 1955, at age seven, I actually attended an on-air one-year birthday party — ostensibly for Children’s Corner star Daniel S. Tiger, but actually for WQED — there. Mothers sat outside on the mansion’s lawn while far more kids than anyone had expected packed the jury-rigged studio. Fred Rogers, my mother recalls, showed up carrying a small cake with a single candle. Overwhelmed by the turnout, ’QED volunteers scrambled to scare up some sheet cakes.

Rogers himself wasn’t often seen on The Children’s Corner. His mouthpiece was Josie Carey, a young comic actress who seemingly lived on the panoramic poster-board set out of which popped King Friday XIII and Daniel and X the Owl and Henrietta Pussycat. (The trolley, a familiar Pittsburgh icon, ran along a short track between puppet stages.) In those postwar days, men generally didn’t host kids’ shows, except to introduce cartoons or do slapstick, so Carey was on camera while Rogers spoke for the hand puppets from behind the scenery. Most of the banter was improvised. Some of it was silly; some of it ended up being uncalculatedly sophisticated beyond the ken of the show’s audience, which, unlike the toddler set later targeted by Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, was young grade-schoolers. (A not-typical, but funny, clip from the show is available at www.pbskids.org/rogers/all_ages/josie.htm.)

But in The Children’s Corner’s quasi-scripted segments, one found the seeds of Rogers’s trademark kiddie-therapy. Daniel, I remember after almost half a century, was, at one point, terrified of the kinescope (a piece of primitive TV-recording equipment) until Josie helped him confront his fear of the unfamiliar. The citizens of Rogers’s puppet kingdom engaged in a sort of running soap opera of squabbles and misunderstandings that mirrored the insecurities and concerns of the under-10 set. And in an age when television itself was unfamiliar and a little scary, The Children’s Corner didn’t dwell on theatrical illusion. The show was live, daily, and an hour long. Flubbed lines were simply repeated. If a piece of the set fell over, Carey explained that a piece of the set had broken, laughed, and moved on — allowing the audience to watch the show being made as it watched the show.

Guests would drop in for musical demonstrations; Josie would occasionally join Rogers at the piano. There were also cognitive-learning aspects to The Children’s Corner that Rogers later abandoned on his Neighborhood show. Josie, for example, taught me rudimentary French. There were music lessons. And King Friday translated nursery rhymes into pretentious vocabulary (e.g., " Three Rodents with Defective Eyesight " ). Compared to commercial children’s fare, The Children’s Corner was a true class act. And long before anyone had coined such a term, it empowered children. In 1955, The Children’s Corner won the Sylvania Award for best locally produced kids’ show. A Saturday-morning version of the program was picked up by NBC for a brief run later that year. It wasn’t until 1966 that Rogers hosted his own show — a prototype of the Neighborhood show, in Canada. Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, as most people know it, debuted on PBS in 1968.

Since Fred Rogers died, on February 27, the outpouring of praise and gratitude has been unstoppable. Rogers, who was hired as WQED’s first program director back in 1953, produced the predecessor to Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood only because nobody else was available to do a kids’ show. His lifetime impact on public programming is unassailable; his role in the lives of the children born during the administrations of Eisenhower through Bush is unquestioned. And the shame of it is, there will never be another Fred Rogers on TV — if anywhere. Though adults (and certainly teens) might have found his soft-spoken delivery a tad cloying, preschoolers never found it condescending, and Rogers used his ability to communicate with the very young to demystify war, loss, assassination, death, divorce, and other threats over which they have no control.

Yet, despite his Pied Piper knack for gaining children’s trust, he steadfastly resisted commercializing his creations. He once even harangued Burger King into removing a Mr. Rogers look-alike from its ads. And despite his religious affiliation — Rogers was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1963 — he never shilled for any church or faith, and instead advocated such nondenominational values as tolerance, acceptance, peace, patience, self-respect, and responsibility. In an era when religious broadcasters went on the air to bilk widows and ally God with right-wing hate politics, Rogers was the secular-humanist spiritual leader America needed. And still does; here’s hoping there’s room for everyone in the children’s corner.

Clif Garboden can be reached at cgarboden[a]phx.com