Anniversary of Death : Will Rogers--a Mirror of America

This thing of being a hero, about the main thing to do is to know when to die. Prolonged life has ruined more men than it ever made.

-- Will Rogers

“It was so bad,” the solemn-voiced Eskimo woman said. “I was 11 years old. . . . We had saw some airplanes before, but we never seen one crash before.”

Rose Okpeaha Leavitt of Barrow, Alaska, now 61, is believed to be the only living witness to a tragedy that threw millions of Americans into disbelieving despair 50 years ago today.

“I still can see it in my mind still today,” she said. “It was very foggy. It was red and silver, the airplane. It just went upside down . . . in the water. It was not very deep. We was camped there at Walakpa--my father was hunting walrus and seal.”

Her father, Claire Okpeaha, went to the water’s edge. “He was hollering, ‘Hello!’ maybe about four times,” she recalled in an interview. But there was only silence.

“Then,” she said, “he ran 15 miles to Barrow to tell about it. I didn’t know the men in the airplane. Only later did I know who they was.”

American Folk Heroes

They were two American folk heroes--Will Rogers, the humorist and common-sense philosopher, and Wiley Post, the one-eyed aviator famed for his record-breaking around-the-world and high-altitude flights.

Post and Rogers were en route from Seattle via Alaska to the Soviet Union to chart a possible trans-Siberian airline route.

They had taken off from Fairbanks that morning for Point Barrow, the most northerly point in the Territory of Alaska. Hampered by poor visibility and navigating by dead reckoning, Post had gotten slightly off course and, late in the afternoon, had put down on a shallow inlet to ask directions from Eskimos camped there.

Claire Okpeaha and his English-speaking wife told the aviator that Barrow was only 15 miles north.

Engine Coughed, Quit

It was 3:18 p.m. when Post took off. The hybrid Lockheed Orion-Explorer got up to about 100 feet when the engine coughed and quit, apparently out of fuel. The ship fell into a dive and crashed into about three feet of water. Rogers, 55, and Post, 37, died instantly.

Their deaths sent a shock wave of anguish rolling across a nation already demoralized by the Great Depression.

Post, with his jaunty eye-patch, was greatly admired for having overcome his visual handicap to become a top pilot.

But the grief for Rogers was of a different order of magnitude; it was almost as if everyone had lost a member of his family.

Americans, quite simply, loved Will Rogers. Loved him for his easygoing humanity and generosity, for his instinctive sense of what the ordinary man was thinking and feeling.

And, most of all, they loved him for his irreverent sense of humor--what Lowell Thomas called “his fine scorn for all shams and pretensions.”

His slangy, sometimes ungrammatical newspaper columns, usually examining the latest political or social folly, were read by 40 million Americans, according to author Bryan Sterling, at a time when the population was only 120 million.

The name Will Rogers on a movie marquee virtually assured a hit--in 1934 he was the top box office draw, beating out Clark Gable. In 1935, he was No. 2, behind Shirley Temple.

In less than 14 years, he made 70 films. Sterling said Rogers’ last contract with Fox Film Corp. called for three pictures a year at $250,000 each--the equivalent of nearly $2 million each in 1985 dollars.

He was paid $350 a minute for his drawling Sunday radio performances--and quietly donated the money to help feed the hungry.

But Will Rogers was much more than rich and famous.

Cowboy and Indian

He was the Oklahoma country boy--literally both cowboy and Indian--who had made it big in the big city but never got the big head. He was an extraordinary man who seemed to epitomize the ordinary man. He could socialize with and satirize the high and the mighty and get away with it.

Once, for example, he opened a speech before a bankers convention like this: “Loan sharks and Interest hounds! I have addressed every form of organized graft in the U.S. excepting Congress. So it’s naturally a pleasure for me to appear before the biggest.”

Americans cherished Rogers for such lines--and even the bankers laughed.

The story of the Arctic crash made banner headlines around the world. And in Los Angeles, because Rogers and his family lived on their ranch in Pacific Palisades and he worked in Hollywood, the story dominated the news as few events have before or since.

On Aug. 16, The Times put out an “extra” with a brief account of the accident. The next day it carried seven front-page stories. Inside, there were five pages of stories and pictures on Rogers’ death.

Countless Americans, according to news accounts at the time, simply stopped wherever they were and broke into tears.

Even now, two generations later, almost everyone who was old enough at the time to remember anything about the event can recall precisely what he was doing when he heard the news--much as younger people recall the deaths of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Lindbergh Flew Them Home

The bodies were flown home by relays of pilot friends--the last leg to Los Angeles by Col. Charles A. Lindbergh.

On Aug. 22, memorial services were held across the country. Flags flew at half staff, movie theaters were blacked out. Presidents and premiers, mechanics and dirt farmers sent their condolences.

In Glendale’s Forest Lawn Memorial-Park, 50,000 mourners took five hours to file past Rogers’ coffin. Another 10,000 gathered at the Hollywood Bowl to hear Rogers eulogized. In Oklahoma City, 2,000 people jammed into the State Capitol Building to say farewell to Post.

What manner of man was Will Rogers that his loss hit Americans so hard? Writer Damon Runyon may have come closest to expressing it:

“Will Rogers was undoubtedly America’s most complete human document. . . . At home he was a sort of unofficial prime minister of the people. He reflected, in many ways, the mind, the heartbeat of America.”

Poet Carl Sandburg put it a bit differently: “He was as homely as a mud fence and yet as beautiful as a sunrise over an Oklahoma field of alfalfa. Will Rogers was one of those individuals who we Americans could call without embarrassment a great man.”

Although it was widely thought that Rogers’ life was a kind of prairie Horatio Alger story, he was not a poor boy who struggled upward from poverty. His family was both prominent and well-to-do. Rogers was born Nov. 4, 1879, on a ranch 12 miles north of Claremore, in what was then the the Territory of Oklahoma. He was the last of the eight children born to Clem and Mary America Rogers. Clem Vann Rogers was a successful rancher, farmer and banker.

His Greatest Pride

“My father was one-eighth Cherokee and my mother was quarter-blood Cherokee,” Rogers wrote years later. “I never got far enough in arithmetic to figure out just how much ‘Injun’ that makes me, but there’s nothing of which I am more proud than my Cherokee blood.”

Rogers, in the true tradition of the cowboy, learned to ride about the same time he learned to walk. He learned to rope from a black cowboy who worked on his father’s ranch. All too often, Rogers wrote later, he sneaked off with his rope to spend hours “cutting curlicues” and “lassoing prairie dogs.”

His education was spotty, devoted more to mischief and rope tricks than to scholarship, and it ended in 1898 when he ran away from Kemper Military Academy in Missouri to work as a cowboy. Five years later, he wound up in South Africa as “The Cherokee Kid, the World’s Champion Lassoer” in Texas Jack’s Wild West Circus. And he was hooked on show business.

Rogers’ rise to stardom was not exactly meteoric. He worked his way up from Wild West shows through burlesque to vaudeville, at first performing rope tricks in silence, later adding humorous commentary based on events of the day.

By 1916, he was the star of the the glamorous Ziegfeld Follies; a few years later he was one of the highest paid performers in the world.

4,000 Newspaper Columns

He began writing in 1919, publishing two short books based on political jokes he used in his stage acts. In 1922, he started doing a weekly syndicated column. Four years later he began producing short daily columns that at one time appeared in nearly 400 newspapers.

Rogers’ anthologist, Bryan Sterling, figured that during his career Rogers produced more than 4,000 newspaper columns, plus magazine articles and dialogue and scenarios for several silent movies. He also delivered thousands of after-dinner speeches and scores of radio monologues.

Dr. Reba Collins, a Rogers scholar and director of the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore, Okla, said she believes that he was the greatest communicator of the 1920s and early ‘30s, with more political influence than columnists like Walter Lippmann and other serious commentators of the day.

Despite his success and celebrity, however, Rogers remained humble and natural. The shrewd but kindly characters he played on screen were essentially Rogers himself.

“I am just an old country boy in a big town trying to get along,” he once wrote. “I have been eating pretty regular and the reason I have is, I have stayed an old country boy.”

Four Children

Married in 1908, he and his Arkansas-born wife, Betty Blake Rogers, had four children, Will Jr., Mary, Jim and Fred, who died in childhood.

Betty Rogers was credited with keeping order in the busy life of the impulsively footloose, compulsively generous ex-cowboy. She kept a shrewd eye on the family finances, and was a discerning, tough critic of his work.

When Rogers did indulge himself, it was in buying roping horses and polo ponies, in entertaining his innumerable friends, buying land and in travel--especially by air. His principal vice seemed to be the excessive chewing of gum.

Daughter Mary Rogers was performing in a summer stock play in Maine when she learned of her father’s death. The climax of the play was an airplane crash in which the father of the character she played was killed. She gave up her acting career not long after his death and has lived in Greece for many years. She has seldom, if ever, talked publicly about her father.

Will Rogers Jr., 73, a retired newspaper publisher, former congressman and sometime actor, lives in Tubac, Ariz. Jim Rogers, 70, is a retired Bakersfield rancher.

Both recall that their father so loved flying that he sometimes “mailed himself” by paying full postal rates on his body weight to fly in the cramped cargo quarters of U.S. mail planes.

First Plane Ride

Rogers, who took his first airplane ride in 1915, never learned to fly. But, possibly because he was an impatient man always anxious to look over the next horizon, the speed of flying had a special appeal for him. He promoted aviation at every opportunity.

Because of the unaffected plainness of the man himself and the simple style of writing and speaking he used, Rogers was almost always referred to as “the cowboy philosopher” or “the cracker-barrel philosopher.”

But Will Jr. said in an interview that his father was “never in his own view any kind of philosopher.” He thought of himself as first and foremost an entertainer.

“And,” he said, “dad was never off stage--he was always on ... but he was never a showoff, he was careful about that.”

“And,” Jim said, “he wasn’t always funny at home.”

‘Rembrandt of Roping’

The brothers agree that Rogers took his greatest professional pride in his skill as a trick roper. At his best, as he was in the silent movie “Ropin’ Fool,” they consider him the greatest lariat artist of all time.

Montie Montana, still active as a professional roper after spending 60 of his 75 years practicing the art, agrees with them. “He was the best that ever lived,” he said.

Rogers could rope a galloping horse and rider with three lariats simultaneously or spin a 100-foot “Big Crinoline” loop over an entire audience. “He could do it all,” Montana said. “He was the Rembrandt of roping. . . . Why once (in a movie) he even roped a mouse.”

On one matter--their father’s most famous words (“I never met a man I didn’t like”)--the brothers disagree.

Matter of Emphasis

“There were a lot of people he didn’t like,” Will Jr. said. He believes that the emphasis should be, “I never met a man I didn’t like,” meaning that he never prejudged anyone. “You have to know a person first,” his son explained. “But once he got to know them, then he could dislike them.” Jim Rogers thinks his father meant just what he said.

“I think he had a tremendous faith in people,” he said. “His faith was that people basically were good, were honest, were generally right. And that’s one of the things that comes through in the man. He liked people, there was no sham in that.”

Will Jr. seemed to shy away from discussing his father’s death.

And Jim admitted that it is still painful to talk about the tragedy. But, he said, in another way he feels that his father was fortunate to die when and how he did.

“Well,” he said, “I’ll put it like this--and possibly this has to do with your philosophy of life--but here was a man who was at the absolute peak of his profession. He was healthy. He was tough as a boot. He could ride, he could rope. He could do whatever he wanted to do. . . . You couldn’t raise yourself any higher in life. And to go out--boom! Now to me that is a very fortunate man.”

Then Jim Rogers added softly: “Of course, it’s very difficult . . . very tough on all those who loved him, depended on him, and are left behind.”