Illustration by Alex Cochran

Jeanne Marie Laskas couldn’t stop returning to Fred Rogers.

“That’s what I … went to him for, was another shot of wisdom. Another, another, another — you drink from Fred,” she recalled during a recent interview with the Deseret News, while noting her metaphor’s irony (Rogers didn’t drink alcohol).

In the 1980s Laskas worked at WQED, the Pittsburgh TV station where Rogers filmed “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.” The beloved TV host became Laskas’ acquaintance and eventually her close friend.

She’s been writing about Rogers in various publications for 35 years now. And she’s watched how the world, like herself once upon a time, keeps going to Rogers for another shot of wisdom. Another, another, another.

“Look for the helpers.” “I like you just the way you are.” “I’m not very good at it, but it doesn’t matter.” Little Rogers-isms continue to circulate in an endless influx of think pieces, memes and viral social media posts — bits of gentle wisdom in a world that seems to have gotten decidedly less gentle in the 17 years since Rogers’ death.

Our modern harshness has also, inevitably, turned Rogers into a pejorative: Just last week, one of President Donald Trump’s senior campaign advisers dismissed Joe Biden’s most recent town hall as “an episode of Mister Rodgers Neighborhood.” (Two days later, “Saturday Night Live” seized the taunt, draping Jim Carrey’s Biden caricature in a red cardigan while he sang “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?”)

For better or worse, there is no escaping Rogers at this point.

Laskas singled out a Rogers-related phrase — not one Rogers himself ever spoke, but one born from his mortal absence, repeated to the point it has become cliche: “We need Mister Rogers now more than ever.”

“And we’re just going to keep saying this,” Laskas predicted. “The next big crisis, or the next big, horrible thing — ‘We need Fred Rogers more than ever now.’”

Searching Rogers for advice these days isn’t unwarranted or misguided, necessarily. But when it comes to what he left us, it’s possible we’ve been looking in the wrong place. The most abundant source of Rogers’ output, after all, isn’t his TV episodes (more than 900) or his speeches (hundreds) or his songs (hundreds) or his books (dozens).

Rather, it’s the letters he wrote to other people.

“Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” reportedly received 15 to 30 pieces of viewer mail every single day. Those who worked closely with Rogers say he personally responded to each of those letters or oversaw an assistant’s response on his behalf. Oftentimes, Rogers wrote separate replies to both the child and their parent. He had to visit the office on weekends to keep up with it all.

If Rogers’ old colleagues are misremembering or exaggerating the numbers here — say they received five pieces of viewer mail each day, instead of 15 to 30 — then Rogers still wrote replies to some 40,000 people over the program’s 31 seasons. If his colleagues aren’t exaggerating, then this number could exceed 200,000. (For scale, the world’s largest stadium, Rungrado 1st of May Stadium in North Korea, seats 114,000.)

Keep in mind, Rogers wrote to more people than just his TV viewers. He also maintained written correspondence with a vast network of friends, family and acquaintances via letters, emails and handwritten notes.

Fred Rogers Productions Fred Rogers interacts with children in this undated photo.

That Rogers’ individual replies constitute an entire stadium’s worth of people seems, well, kind of preposterous — not just because of the sheer volume, but because of how something so voluminous, from someone so beloved, has somehow evaded pop culture’s gaze for so long. Most people know about Rogers. Very few people have known about the extent of his letters.

Yet the letters do exist — many of them archived, many not. While “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” is remembered as Rogers’ legacy, that was only ever half of it. His message to the world was fully realized in these thousands upon thousands of intimate one-on-one written correspondences.