Is it true Mr Rogers of PBS was one of the top snipers in the USMC?

Question:

Is it true Mr Rogers of PBS was one of the top snipers in the USMC?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: This is in the spirit of "Give a man a fish, he'll be hungry the next day; teach a man to fish, he'll feed himself for life."

If you suspect something you read on the Web or in an e-mail message, you can often Google a phrase or two and get at the truth.

In this case, I used

"Mr Rogers" PBS Marine

- note the quotation marks. You can add the word "Hoax" if the story has common names:

"John Smith" love child Alien Elvis Presly hoax
AOL Mictosoft cash reward e-mail promotion hoax
Nigerian Oil Ministty Hoax
"Ted Pack" "wonderful singer" hoax

Google returned many hits for my first search. (I made up the last ones for examples.) There are lots of hoaxes on the WWW. This site is authoritative for Mr. Rogers:

http://urbanlegends.about.com/library/bl...

says this and has links for further reading:

Rumors to the contrary have circulated since the early 1990s. It's unknown where, precisely, these stories originated, but around 1994 Fred Rogers' supposed military exploits became a hot topic on the Internet, and grew hotter as the decade wore on. Here are some examples:

1994: "A note on Mr. Rogers. He would be a tough competitor. He has 42 confirmed sniper kills (in Korea?)."

1998: "So this fellow at work (retired Army vet) says that Mr. Rogers of childrens' TV fame served three tours of duty in 'Nam as a sniper and has been credited with kills in excess of 1500 meters."

1999: "Interesting side note about Fred Rogers. He was the number three Marine sniper in the Vietnam war. And one of the reasons he always wears long sleeve clothing is because his arms are covered in tattoos."

Predictably, Rogers' death in February 2003 sparked a resurgence of the old rumors, but with a fresh twist: now he was an ex-Navy Seal, supposedly, instead of an ex-Marine sniper. This variant circulated far and wide after someone attached it to a newer email hoax that made similar claims about Bob "Captain Kangaroo" Keeshan. The relevant portion of that text went as follows:

2003: "On another note, there was this wimpy little man (who just passed away) on PBS, gentle and quiet. Mr. Rogers is another of those you would least suspect of being anything but what he now portrays to our youth. But Mr. Rogers was a U.S. Navy Seal, combat-proven in Vietnam with over twenty-five confirmed kills to his name. He wore a long-sleeve sweater to cover the many tattoos on his forearm and biceps. A master in small arms and hand-to-hand combat, able to disarm or kill in a heartbeat. He hid that away and won our hearts with his quiet wit and charm."

Fred Rogers won our hearts, true enough; but the rest of the story is hogwash. After graduating from Rollins College in Florida with a degree in music in 1951, he immediately embarked on a broadcasting career -- a career that continued uninterrupted for nearly 50 years, even while he studied for a Bachelor of Divinity degree, eventually becoming an ordained minister in 1962. Far from hiding a secret past as a trained killer, Fred Rogers was an exemplary individual who devoted his entire adult life to educating and bettering the lives of children, and as such he deserves to be remembered.