Acknowledgments

Thank you, Fred McFeely Rogers, for helping me grow up with such gentle care, the way you helped so many people. And thank you for the way you lived your life, which has given me inspiration again now that I’m an adult.

Thank you to Carrie Thornton, who edited this book with her usual panache. Thank you to all her kick-ass colleagues at Dey Street Books, including Tatiana Dubin, Paula Szafranski, Greg Villepique, Andrea Molitor, Stephanie Vallejo, Danielle Bartlett, Kell Wilson, and Andrea Peabbles.

Many thanks to my agent Daniel Greenberg and all his comrades at the Levine-Greenberg-Rostan agency who staunchly look after my interests, especially Tim Wojcik and Miek Coccia.

Thank you to the brilliant illustrator R. Sikoryak; this is our third collaboration (the other two being The Tao of Bill Murray and The World According to Tom Hanks) and he constantly astonishes me with his artistic gifts and his easygoing genius. Go check out all his other books and comics. (And he would like to thank his wife, Kriota Willberg.)

Thanks to Emily Uhrin at the Fred Rogers Center in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, for her assistance with their archives. For advice and aid, many thanks to Temilade Adejumo, Alan Bunce, Stephanie Cozart Burton, Liz Carlson, Carole D’Agostino, Stephanie Dempsey, Tim Ferrin, Danielle Fuerth, Paul Goldberg, LJ Gysel, Thane Gysel, Dean Jordan, Judy Katz, Nina Kiersted, Kevin Leonard, Jeff Malmberg, Jen McGivney, Monica Morita, Bernadelle Richter, and Basil Twist.

Thanks to all my neighbors in all my neighborhoods, especially the awe-inspiring Rob Sheffield for his essential feedback on an early version of this manuscript, which made the book better in a thousand ways. Thanks to my dear friend Jeff Jackson, whose deep knowledge of both Andy Warhol and George Romero was incredibly helpful. Thanks to Bill Tipper and Steve Crystal for long-distance advice and encouragement, and to James Hannaham (my one-time Fred Rogers memorial-service coconspirator) for being his excellent self. And this book wouldn’t exist without the well-timed hospitality and generosity of Chuck Barger—my profound thanks to him.

Jen Sudul Edwards, the woman I love, is a brilliant, generous dynamo of a human being who’s an inspiration to just about everybody she crosses paths with—and that’s a lot of people—but I’m the one who’s lucky enough to be married to her.

This book is dedicated to my two wonderful sons, Dashiell and Strummer, who fill my life with adventure and dancing and birds. Dashiell asked for me to dedicate a book to him, which I was extremely happy to do—although I know he would really have preferred that it was about Samuel L. Jackson.

And my thanks to you, for reading this book. Like Mister Rogers, I like you just the way you are.