"The only difference between death
and taxes is that death doesn't get worse every time Congress meets."
-- Will Rogers
The 20th century was the dawning of the
age of speed. Man moved farther and faster than ever before and by means
imagined but not anticipated to ever be realized. And, the words of man
also moved farther and faster than ever before. The age of flight was accompanied
by the age of rapid and electronic communication. Airmail cut the
delivery time of the mails from days to hours, even across oceans. Radio and
film carried entertainment and news to the far-flung corners of the nation,
bringing word of the latest feats of aviation derring-do, athletic
accomplishments, and the world of humor and comedy. Radio and movies also
created national celebrities, their word and deed transmitted and recorded, and
a literate population consumed every word written and broadcast about the
movement of celebrities.
This new
age of technology and sport and entertainment would produce many
celebrities. Those who promoted and used celebrity – the celebrities
themselves and also their sponsors -- needed to make celebrities visible to the
new breed of consumer, the celebrity fan. The airplane allowed the more daring
of celebrities to move about the nation and eventually the globe to satisfy the
needs to market to fans, to promote celebrity. Air travel was where business
met news met entertainment met adventure, and smack dab in the middle of all of
it was a rope-twirling good ol’ boy from the Green Country of Oklahoma named
Will Rogers. He was by every possible measure the world’s largest
celebrity, possible the largest celebrity ever. Fittingly enough, he was also
the biggest booster aviation had known.
Will Rogers defined singular wit. Born in 1879 on a ranch on the Osage Reservation (northeastern Oklahoma), Rogers rose to international prominence as a vaudevillian, writer, radio broadcaster, commentator, and film actor. He is still one of the three-most quotable people in the English-speaking world, elbowing with Winston Churchill and Samuel Clemens in a continual fight for first place. He was the Man Who Never Met a Man He Didn’t Like. Will Rogers performed in 71 motion pictures, and made the easy jump from silent pictures to talkies, in part because his radio profile made his one of the best-known voices in America. At the time of his death he was the highest-paid performer in Hollywood. His papers fill five hefty volumes published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Will Rogers penned over 4,000 columns on affairs of the day ("Slipping the Lariat Over") which appeared daily in all the major papers of the United States and over 500 newspapers in all. His writing was both ridiculous and sublime, and his motion-picture “travel guides” were a fitting, fanciful follow-on to Samuel Clemens’ sometimes biting Innocents Abroad.
Before he became the biggest celebrity
figure in the United States, Will Rogers had tried his hand at ranching in
Argentina. He then headed to South Africa to break horses for the British
Army. With the end of the Boer War, Rogers took his roping skills into
show business, joining “Texas Jack's Wild West Circus” before heading to
Australia and then returning to the US as a vaudeville performer. When he
roped a wild steer at Madison Square Garden, it led William Hammerstein to sign
him as a performer – Rogers spent the next decade years doing trick riding and
rope tricks for New York City crowds. In 1915 he joined Ziegfield’s “Midnight
Frolic” and then jumped up to Ziegfield’s Follies the next season. He
mixed rope tricks with biting social and political commentary, ripped from the
headlines. Soon he was signed to do pictures by Samuel Goldwyn, making Laughing
Bill Hyde in 1918. He moved to Hollywood in 1921.
Will Rogers moved into talking pictures in
1929. He did three films with acclaimed director John Ford: Doctor
Bull (1933); Judge Priest (1934); and Steamboat Round the Bend
(1935). He also played the lead (Sir Boss) in the 1931 talking version of
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, thus bringing the Will
Rogers’ sense of comic timing to a Mark Twain storyline. He also toured
globally in the road company performing Eugene O’Neill’s “Ah, Wilderness!”
Rogers declined to reprise the role in film, thereby freeing his summer in 1935
to fly to Moscow with Wiley Post. For six years he aired a prime-time Sunday
night radio show sponsored by Gulf Oil that was the top-rated radio broadcast
in America. In 1935, Rogers was the #2 box office draw in American cinema
and also the top-read columnist in the US. In literally every mass
medium, Will Rogers was America’s choice. Will Rogers’ name
identification was so invaluable, back in Oklahoma an unrelated namesake
won election to Congress for five straight terms in Oklahoma’s at-large ninth
congressional seat from 1933 to 1943; Rep. Rogers once estimated that the real
Will Rogers’ fame was worth 50,000 votes to him. Rogers’ son Will Rogers, Jr.
served a single term in the US House of Representatives, from California.
It is also worth noting that a statue of the real Will Rogers is in Statuary
Hall of the US capitol building. His head is turned toward the House
chamber so as to keep an eye on Congress.
He also loved aviation. Rogers was the first
civilian to fly from coast-to-coast. Among his friends and acquaintances he
counted flyers such as Charles Lindbergh, Juan Trippe, Howard Hughes, Billy
Mitchell, Wiley Post, and Jimmy Wedell. Rogers was one of the first
enthusiastic supporters of aviation in the popular media, writing often on the
tremendous benefits of aviation and also writing of his ventures in
flight. It was estimated that Will Rogers traveled a half-million miles
in the air during his life. The New York Times, in eulogizing
Rogers, observed that “he had become, in recent years, one of [America’s]
leading boosters of air travel. He wrote thousands of words in defense of
the argument that it was safer to travel by plane than by train and
demonstrated that he meant it by following his own advice.”
Rogers’ second-to-last published communiqué, wired
from Alaska to the New York Times , was about a flight.
Having some down time in Alaska on their “vacation trip”, Rogers went off to
fly up Mount McKinley, the tallest peak on North America:
Well, we had a day off today and nothing to do, so we went flying with friends – Joe Crosson, Alaska’s crack pilot, who is a agreat friend of Wiley’s and helped him on his difficulties up here on his record trips, and Joe Barrows, another fine pilot. In a Lockheed Electra we scaled Mount McKinley, the highest one on the American Continent.Bright, sunny day, and the most beautiful sight I ever saw.
Crosson has landed on a glacier over half way up in a plane and took off. Flew right by hundreds of mountain sheep, flew low over moose and bear. Down in the valley now, where they sent those 1935 model pioneers.
Hours after the column was published, Rogers and
Post were dead, victims of an engine failure on takeoff from a lake near Point
Barrow, Alaska.
Post, too, was a
romantic character and he loomed larger than life. Post had loved one woman
ever, and had swept onto a pasture of her father’s Texas farm to elope, ducking
bullets on the way out. He was the first person to ever fly around the world;
had pioneered high-altitude flight and developed one of the first aviation
pressure suits; and is also generally credited with discovering the jet stream,
though empirical scientific documentation of the “river of air” predated Post’s
more publicized discovery. It was this river of air that had allowed the
one-eyed former outlaw and oil field hand to obliterate the competition in
cross-country air races. He and fellow relocated Oklahoman Will Rogers
found each other in California, where their ties to entertainment and mutual
love of flying fostered a fast friendship.
Working in the oil fields of Oklahoma after
World War I, he had become destitute and stole a car, ending up in the county
prison. Paroled after a year, he lost an eye in an oil field accident in
1926 and ended up taking a disability compensation settlement. He used
that money, $1,800, to buy his first plane. He retrained his one good eye
to perceive depth, and then took his $1,800 plane into the barn-storming
business in 1926. He met Will Rogers when the star of film and stage
needed a lift to a rodeo, which Wiley gladly provided. His relationship
with Oklahoma oilman R. C. Hall had financed his flying and
experimenting. Hall was rich. And he had a daughter, Winnie Mae, who was
wild about flying. The Lockheed Vega that Post used to compete for aerial
records was bought by Hall and named for Winnie Mae. A later, more
modern Lockheed Vega (model 5-C) was used by Post starting in 1930.
In June 1931, Wiley Post and his navigator,
Australian aviator Harold Gatty, set what was then a world record for
circumnavigating the globe in an airplane, making the trip in eight days,
sixteen hours, flying west to east from New York City to New York City (Gatty
founded Air Pacific, the national airline of the Fiji Islands, in 1951.).
Post bought the Winnie Mae from R. C. Hall and became his own boss; his
book with Gatty, around the World in Eight Days, featured an introduction by
his friend, aviation enthusiast Will Rogers. Two years later, Post would become
the first man to fly solo around the world, breaking his previous pace by 21
hours. On the way, he set a non-stop record from New York to Berlin of 26
hours.
Having mastered “around” the world, Post turned to
“up” – and started exploring altitude. Aircraft of this era were not
pressurized – consequently, if you flew too high, the air became to rare, and
the pilot would lose consciousness. With funding from
Bartlesville, Oklahoma-based Phillips petroleum and scientific know-how of B.
F. Goodrich, Post designed a pressure suit, and on September 4 1934
soared to over 40,000 feet. It was here that he found the “river of air”
that is now identified as the jet stream.
Will Rogers and Wiley Post were Occidental
travelers in an era where the public mind was obsessed with speed and the
daring of the men and women who took to the air on wings of wood and fiber and
metal, propelled by petroleum engines. There was a necessity of the time,
always present in the adventures of Wiley Post. Rogers and Post,
Oklahomans relocated to southern California, would take the northerly route up
to Alaska. Their vehicle was a unique hybrid aircraft, a Lockheed Orion-Explorer
equipped with seaplane floats. Post was interested in exploring
commercial air routes from the US to Russia, and needed a craft that would
allow him to land on the lakes of Alaska and Siberia. Working from limited
funds with some help from Pan Am, he salvaged the fuselage and engine of a
Lockheed Orion, and then married to it the wing of a Lockheed Explorer and a
set of pontoons.
The Lockheed Orion was designed by Richard A. Von
Hake and devolved from the Altair, with some elements from the Lockheed
Vega—such as the high-mounted open cockpit. The Orion had low-mounted
fixed wings and retractable landing gear; 35 were produced. The
Explorer was a fabulously unsuccessful design, originally pursued for Sir
Hubert Wilkins Antarctic expeditions. Deriving from the high-fixed-wing
design of John Nortrup’s Vega, only four were ever produced – and all were lost
in crashes. The wing for the Orion-Explorer was salvaged by post from one
of these craft, and affixed to the Orion because the additional six feet of
wingspan would accommodate the seaplane floats.
Rogers’ decision to accompany Post all the way
across Siberia was a surprise to the world. As early as July there had
been talk of the rope-twirling philosopher accompanying the one-eyed pilot to
Red Russia. Indeed, it was national news suitable enough for the
Associated Press to report on and for the New York Times to
pick up and carry in their front section:
LOS ANGELES, July 22
(AP) – Wiley Post tuned up his monoplane today for a leisurely flight to Moscow
and back, but whether his friend, Will Rogers, screen humorist, would accompany
him remained a matter of conjecture.
Mr.
Rogers has two more days in which to make up his mind, since Post said he did
not expect to reach Seattle, his first stopping point, before Thursday.
“Will was out here last
week to look over the plane, and joked about putting a bed in back and going
along,” said Post, adding however, that he did not think the actor would make
the 7,000 mile flight to the Soviet capital.
The actor could not be reached, but Mrs. Rogers was reported to have told
friends she thought he might accompany Post, and at Rogers’ office it was said
that his vacation plans were not definite. The cowboy humorist is an
enthusiastic air traveler.
Post,
who has twice circled the globe in the air, will have at least one passenger in
the person of his wife.
Although
the aviator has said he is going to Russia for hunting and sight-seeing, a
report obtained credence that he will map a potential northern air route via
Alaska and Asia to Moscow when it was learned that pontoons for his plane were
being supplied by Pan American Airways . . . Mechanics have installed a large
compass in the brilliant red monoplane and have placed a temperature gauge on
the engine. Post will carry a receiving radio set but no sending
apparatus. Tanks giving an additional gasoline capacity of 220 gallons
have been installed.
Rogers remained coy about the trip. In his July 23
“cable” to the New York Times, he started by observing that “Wiley Post
and I have been blathering about flying over to a ranch in New Mexico and some
guy with poor slant on geography got it missed up with Siberia in Russia.
Looks like New Mexico has got a suit.” Rogers joined the Posts, flying to New
Mexico, Colorado, and Seattle, from where Post would leave for Russia.
While in Seattle, Rogers took the time to tour the Boeing facility where he saw
what he termed “the world’s greatest bombing plane being finished.” On August
7, Post and Rogers left for Alaska, with the press understanding that Mrs. Post
would join Wiley in Alaska by boat. However, Mae was going back to
California, and it was not until W. W. Conner of the National Aeronautic Association
made the announcement that Will Rogers was going to Siberia, and that he
“didn’t say anything about it, because he and Mr. Post liked to keep things a
mystery, but he had made up his mind to go on to Siberia.”
The Point Barrow crash shook the world. It
was if all of the greatest stars in America had fallen at the same time – the
world’s greatest movie star, broadcast star, stand-up comedian, and political
columnist had all died in that crash. All business in Claremore,
Oklahoma, Rogers’ home town, stopped. On hearing of Rogers’ death, the
longtime targets of his wit -- the US House of Representatives and US Senate --
stopped debate. House Speaker Joe Byrns claimed to have had a bad
premonition of Rogers going on the Siberian adventure; messages of loss were
forthcoming from major political leaders of both parties. Governments around
the world honored the loss of Post and Rogers. The German government, not
known for its embrace of either individualism or humor, memorialized Post as “a
brusque, rough adventurer” and Rogers as “a philosopher in fifteen lines . . .
his words were a safety valve for the American soul.” Juan Trippe, head of Pan
American Airways and friend of Rogers and Post, dispatched a seaplane to
recover the bodies of Post and Rogers and return them to California. Wiley
Post’s widow, Mae, got off a witticism worthy of Will Rogers himself regarding
of the trip to retrieve Wiley’s remains: “It was just the way Wiley would have
wished it. Coming home in an airplane.”
