On the Death of Joe Negri

I saw on the news that Joe Negri had died.

I wasn’t exactly surprised. He was nearly a hundred years old, after all. It’s surprising that he’d lived that long. Still, I was terribly sad.

I’ve written so many times about how much Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood affected me, as a child. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on the rug, uncomfortably close to my father’s fuzzy old television with the two dials instead of a remote, watching Fred take off his dress shoes and put on his puppeteer sneakers. I never missed an episode. I suppose I learned more about what it means to be a Christian from Mr. Rogers than I did from anybody else. Mr. Rogers’s joyful appreciation for the cast of characters that came and went from the television house haunts me to this day– it’s how I imagine God the Father looks at all of us. His fascination with how things are made in all those factory tours was contagious; I’m still fascinated with learning how everyday objects are made. All those ridiculous, whimsical stories in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe taught me my ethical view on the world: when someone is hungry, grow a garden to feed them. The most important things in the neighborhood are the people who live there. When an authority figure is wrong, dare to call them out. I still live by the code I internalized watching that show.

Negri was a brilliant musician who displayed his talent with the guitar on Mr. Rogers, but guitar wasn’t his only role.

I did not realize how good the music in Mr. Rogers was until I was much older. I knew that the improvised jazz that always played in the background was fun to dance to, but I didn’t fully appreciate it until I was an adult, showing the series to my own child. John Costa was a fantastic music director. Mr. Rogers himself was an expert pianist. And Joe Negri was amazing on the guitar. Every television visit to “Negri’s Music Shop” ended in a little concert with Joe on the guitar, and it was always excellent.

Negri played himself in the music shop segments, but he also played the character “Handyman Negri” in the television visits to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. Handyman Negri was the mild-mannered custodian who fixed broken things and soothed rattled tempers all over the puppet neighborhood. He was gentle and encouraging to anxious Daniel Striped Tiger and shy Henrietta Pussycat. He was patient and understanding with bossy Lady Elaine. I will always remember his cheerful grin as he and Lady Elaine sang “A Handy Lady and a Handyman” at the Museum-go-Round.

The fact that Negri was always soft-spoken peacemaker in the Neighborhood, made it even funnier when he played the role of W. I. Norton Donovan in an opera. If you watch Mr. Rogers, you’ll learn that the characters in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe sometimes put on dress-up costumes and performed a whimsical show-length “opera,” really more of a sung-through musical, for the television audience. One or two of the performers in the operas were actual trained opera singers, but the rest were the usual cast of Mr. Rogers doing their best.  In 1980, that opera was “Windstorm in Bubbleland,” the tale of a news reporter, a porpoise, a professional sweater knitter, and a hummingbird who join forces to save their town from a hurricane caused by a greedy corporation selling aerosol spray cans. Yes, that’s actually the plot.

In the opera, Negri played the role of the bad guy. He sniveled and pontificated as the dishonest businessman “W. I. Norton Donovan” in a tweed suit, and then put on a costume made mostly of tinfoil streamers to reveal that W. I. Norton Donovan was actually W. I. N. D, a personification of the windstorm itself. When I was a preschooler, I had to hide my eyes behind my hands in fear when W. I. N. D. appeared, cackling wickedly, with tinsel and glitter hanging from his eyebrows. I peeked cautiously over the top of my hands as he flew around menacing the townspeople. I cheered in relief when the hummingbird and her friends manage to push the wind back out to sea. I didn’t realize that W. I. N. D. was more hilarious than frightening until I was an adult, showing the opera to little Adrienne.

It always feels like such a betrayal when talented people who spend their lives being good to children leave us.

When I heard that Joe Negri died, I felt the same way I did when Shari Lewis passed away, and when Emilio Delgado and Caroll Spinney from Sesame Street died, and when Mr. Rogers himself died. An artist who uses their gifts to make children happy, is a truly generous human being. I can’t imagine there’s anything but happiness in the next life for somebody whose whole job was to help children learn and feel well. But it’s devastating for those of us left here without them. It feels as if they ought to always be here, at the same age we remember them, happily making their art.

Goodbye to Joe Negri, Handyman Negri, W. I. Norton Donovan.

Let’s all try to make it a better world for children, as he did.