Once Upon a Time

Author Tom Junod structures his profile on Mister Rogers in a manner not so typical of profiles, yet it is all encompassing of Mister Rogers’ essence. Jonod alternates between a limited omniscient third person and a first person point of view when interacting directly with Mister Rogers and detailing his personal observations. Structurally, it is like a story; Junod begins almost all of his paragraphs with the phrase “Once upon a time” which directly adds a fairy tail quality. Furthermore, he incorporates personal stories and anecdotes of his own childhood and creates a personal connection with Mister Rogers as a foundation for giving insight into various details of who Mister Roger’s is at his core. The inclusion of his own stories as well as stories of events separate to those that he directly experienced with Mister Rogers also serve to introduce recurring themes that he revisits after developing the profile and giving you context; for instance, the second paragraph details how Mister Rogers was asked to write a chapter on how to deal with children effectively in a book for ophthalmologists.  He highlights how Mister Rogers started the chapter with “You were a child once, too.”, a sentence, that reappears later on when visiting Mister Rogers’ childhood home. The author’s diction is a combination of word choices that compliment the story-like composition as well as Mister Rogers’ wholesome virtuousness, and strong crude words and sentences that interject the flow of innocence, like when he casually mentions a student who shot and killed five kids in his school. These opposing points of view are almost representative of a parallel between the good in Mister Roger’s life and the fact that he is dying of cancer. Although his writing brought harsh realities to the surface, he ensured he fully conveyed the beauty of Mister Rogers’ personality, quintessentially capturing his soul and leaving the reader just as familiarized with Mister Rogers as the author, perhaps more.