By Mary Ann Grossman
Book Critic

Tim Madigan misses his friend, Fred Rogers, every single day. But he has no doubt where to find the kindly host of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," who died in 2003.

"It's a good bet Fred is in heaven with my brother and all the saints," Madigan says.

"I believe Fred was on a par with the great human beings in history, the Lincolns, the Gandhis, the Mother Teresas. Fred's television show demonstrated him to be this wonderful, gentle, wise person with children, but there was an adult part of him that was even more wonderful because when faced with real-life, nitty-gritty realities, he never wavered from his essential goodness, compassion and love."

Madigan, who grew up in Crookston, Minn., is an award-winning writer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in Texas. He met Rogers in 1995, and their years of friendship are tenderly recalled in Madigan's new memoir, "I'm Proud of You."

The mid-'90s should have been a happy time for Madigan. He and his wife, Catherine, had a son and daughter. His career as a newspaper feature writer was going well, and he had published a book, "See No Evil: Blind Devotion and Bloodshed in David Koresh's Holy War." (His second book, "The Burning: Massacre, Destruction and the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921," was published to good reviews in 2001.)

But Madigan was miserable during the period he describes as the "darkest, most difficult of my life." He was suffering from depression, which he believes has afflicted men in his family for generations, and he was contemplating divorce.

That's when Fred Rogers came into Madigan's life, and there's no doubt Madigan considered this meeting a gift from God.

"Looking back, it seems no coincidence that our unlikely acquaintance would come when it did," Madigan writes, " ... when I wrestled with profound depression and self-loathing, complex and painful feelings about my father (Fred called these various struggles my 'Furies') and, finally, the catastrophic illness and heroic spiritual journey of my younger brother, Steve."

Madigan met Rogers when he was working on a newspaper story about children's television icons. During a weekend visit to Pittsburgh, where Fred and his wife, Joanne, made their home, Madigan watched a taping of "Mister Rogers' Neighborhood," saw Rogers interact with other people and attended church with the couple.

"It didn't take long to realize that this guy cared about everybody, even a smarmy journalist," Madigan recalls with a laugh.

But newspaper folks are a cynical lot, and Madigan admits he was skeptical at first about Rogers' goodness.

"One of the first times I talked to him on the phone, he said, 'Tim, the most important thing in the world right now is that I am talking to Tim Madigan on the telephone.' I remember thinking, 'Yeah, right. Do you think I was born yesterday?'

"It took me awhile to get used to the notion that Fred, given who he was in the world, all the people he knew and the demands on his time, would choose so late in his life to make an investment in friendship with someone who, like me, lived so far away. The fact that he was a TV celebrity soon became irrelevant. He was just my friend. I started sharing with him the truth of my insides, which weren't very pretty at the time."

Madigan wrote to Rogers, who was an ordained Presbyterian minister, about his anguish at the thought of how divorce would fracture his family.

"I was looking for that moment when I would do or say something rendering Fred incapable of loving me," Madigan admits.

"I thought that after telling him about the problems in my marriage he might say, 'I can't love or support you on this one.' But that was when his love was most forthright and pure. He said, 'I will never forsake you. You are my beloved brother, God's beloved son.' "

Although Rogers had an innocence that made him so loved by children, Madigan says everybody's favorite neighbor was fully engaged in the adult world. Rogers could be quaint, calling Madigan "my dear." He was a vegetarian who wore "a goofy-looking swim cap and goggles for his daily swim." He loved to take pictures of people he met for the first time, and he was the most intelligent man Madigan had ever met. He was hard-working, with a unique capacity for relationships.

"What was amazing was Fred's insistence on real human communication," Madigan says. "He had the ability to get past the 'stuff' into just two people talking. That was true whether he was talking to me or Katie Couric, the Dalai Lama or a New York cab driver."

New York is a long way from Crookston, where Madigan, 48, grew up with six siblings. His mother, Lois, was a nurse, and his dad, LaMoure J. "Myke" Madigan, owned a lumberyard.

"Crookston was a wonderful place to grow up, as close to Norman Rockwell as you can get," Madigan recalls. "With 8,000 people, everybody knew one another. I wish my son could grow up in a place like that."

Madigan was a writer by the time he was 11, spinning stories about University of Minnesota football games. One journalist who inspired him was Joe Soucheray, who worked for the Minneapolis newspaper in those days and is now a Pioneer Press columnist.

"I thought Joe's writing was, and is, poignant, lyrical and insightful," Madigan says.

After graduating from the University of North Dakota, Madigan was a sportswriter at a small North Dakota newspaper and then worked the police beat in Odessa, Texas. Moving to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, he covered everything from sick children to serial killers.

Despite Madigan's successes, he felt he had never lived up to his uncommunicative father's expectations. In the depths of his depression, Madigan wrote to Fred Rogers asking, "Will you be proud of me?"

And Rogers replied: "YES ... I will be proud of you. I am proud of you."

After that, Rogers always ended his e-mails and letters to Madigan with IPOY (I'm proud of you).

"I'm not sure why my dad couldn't say he was proud of me," Madigan says. "It had a lot to do with his generation. I think he suffered from the same depression I did, back in the days when diagnosis wasn't readily accepted and medications not fashionable, especially not for men. He struggled through it; he had a tremendous amount on his plate when I was growing up. He was an athlete. A tough guy. To have this bookish son must have been troubling or confusing to him."

The "healing part" of this story, Madigan says, came when he and his father visited Underwood, N.D., where the senior Madigan had grown up.

"When I learned my father's story and what his childhood was like, I realized he was a struggling guy just like me," Madigan says. "Then, the pieces all fit together. I found that he was proud of me and he loved me very, very much. One of the things I hope people would take from my book is that so many men are imprisoned inside themselves. For whatever reason, they are unable to express a lot of things going on inside of them, particularly love and tenderness."

Love and tenderness are abundant in the last half of "I'm Proud of You," which tells how Rogers reached out to the Madigan family when Tim's younger brother, Steve, was dying of cancer in Iowa.

"Part of the reason my book exists is to share what it was like to go through the experience of coming to terms with grief and death with someone like Fred, who embodied the eternal," Madigan says.

"The other part is that when my brother got sick, he got to be like Fred in his perspective on life. Steve, who was paralyzed from the chest down in the last weeks of his life, told Fred during a phone call that cancer was one of the greatest blessings he'd been given because it taught him life was about love, family, the cardinal singing outside the window. He felt so blessed that what happened to him brought the family closer together. I was imagining what Fred was feeling as he listened to this, having a complete appreciation for this young man, his pain and the wisdom he'd acquired through this."

Besides offering comfort to the Madigans while Steve was dying, Rogers contributed $1,000 and an autographed book to a fundraiser held by Tim and Steve's sister and brother-in-law, Terri and Jay O'Neill of St. Paul.

After Steve Madigan and Fred Rogers died, Madigan wrote about them in the newspaper. Reader reaction was so strong Madigan decided to write "I'm Proud of You" to "show Fred Rogers in action in life."

Madigan will read from his book Wednesday in Wayzata, and he'll return later in the fall to attend a celebration of his parents' 50th wedding anniversary. They live in Edina with his sister, Chris; the rest of his siblings also live in the metro area.

Thanks partly to Rogers' emotional support, Madigan's "Furies" are under control, and his marriage is strong. His only regret is that he won't be able to tell Fred about what's going on in his life now or share with him the comments from people who have been touched by the book.

Fred Rogers, he says, "was my biggest supporter and cheerleader."

St. Paul Pioneer Press, August 20, 2006