Sweater Weather and Mr. Rogers

“Sweater weather” my grandmother used to call it – those weeks after the chill of winter waned but had yet yielded to the heat of summer. Cold enough to wear something to keep warm but not cold enough for a winter jacket.

It’s the perfect description for this time of year – at least in southern Arkansas. It had yet to become sweater weather outside in southern Wisconsin where we visited last week. Oh, we wore sweaters, all right. Sweaters served as one of many layers donned to keep warm inside the apartment – while sitting in front of the gas fire place during a weekend visit with two of my husband’s brothers and their wives. We had enjoyed the visit and the men reviewed their shared childhood.

One of my favorite sweaters from my childhood in New York still warms me with memories of all the times I wore it. A pale, green, soft sweater, I spotted it with paint from the paint-by-number sets my mother gave me for birthday and Christmas gifts. Okay, it never made the top 10 in fashion statements, but I reached for that well-worn sweater before going out to play in sweater weather.

For school, we had other sweaters to wear. Besides the cardigans purchased as part of our fall school wardrobe, my other grandmother plied a fast set of knitting needles one year and created a school sweater for each of her nine school-aged grandchildren. Six maroon sweaters with gold bands around the neck and sleeves for the Jasper Bulldogs. Three black sweaters with orange bands at the cuffs and collar for the Woodhull Wildcats.

Afterwards, our moms mandated that we wear those sweaters to school for picture day. Those sweaters remained in view long after we outgrew them – every year, Grandma arranged our pictures in three rows of three inside a black picture frame to add to her collection on her living room wall.

I mention all this because Thursday is Sweater Day in honor of – no, not my grandmother – but of the late Fred Rogers on what would have been his 80th birthday anniversary. He starred in the longest running show on PBS – Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood. Every show began with Mr. Rogers entering the set wearing a suit coat which he slid off, hung up and replaced with a zippered sweater. He looked, talked and spoke as if he had just dropped in to visit with his viewers as a caring neighbor.

In honor of what would have been Mister Rogers’ 80th birthday on March 20, postman Mr. McFeely of the show – aka David Newell, the public relations director for Family Communications, Inc. (the nonprofit company founded in 1971 by Fred Rogers) – has a special request. “We’re asking everyone everywhere (from Pittsburgh to Paris) to wear their favorite sweater on that day,” Newell said. “It doesn’t have to have a zipper down the front like the one Mister Rogers wore on the program, it just has to be special to you.”

If for that reason only, I wish we had saved just one of the sweaters Grandma knit. They represented her love for us expressed with hours of work with needles and yarn. I would settle for even one of the many four-needle mittens she made for us through the years. Having once attempted to knit a pair of them, I remain impressed at her ease in producing them. Grandma always had some kind of handwork in her bag, but those sweaters remain her most impressive project. I wish I had one to pull out for Sweater Day.

Sweater Day is also part of Pittsburgh’s 250th anniversary celebration and this week is the first-ever “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” Days – a time set aside to recognize Rogers’ deep appreciation of what it means to be a caring neighbor. Rogers died Feb. 27, 2003 in Pittsburgh, Penn. – 40 miles from where he was born. A cardigan sweater he once wore now hangs in the Smithsonian.

It’s sweater weather, folks. Wear one Thursday in honor of Mr. Rogers. Then keep it handy Friday to welcome the first day of spring with its erratic highs and lows.
Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. E-mail her at joanh@everybody.org


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