"Vaudeville made him famous. Hollywood turned him into a legend. But his journalism keeps him relevant generation after generation."

BY MICHAEL OVERALL World Sta! Writer

On a Thursday morning in August 1935, she opened the local newspaper to find out what her Uncle Will was up to, the same way she always found out, by reading the front page.

If Doris Meyer had ever given it much thought, she would’ve known that it wasn’t the typical way for a teenage girl to keep track of a relative. But Doris – actually, everybody called her “ C oke,” because she spent so much time at the drugstore soda fountain – didn’t really think about it.

Uncle Will had been writing lately about Alaska, where he was flying around with his good friend Wiley Post.

“This Alaska is a great country,” he had written from Fairbanks on Aug. 13. “… when Seward in ’68 bought Alaska for $7 million he even made up for what we had overpaid the Indians for Manhattan Island.”

That morning, they’d be flying all the way to Point Barrow, the northernmost settlement in North America.

C oke read about it in the “Daily Telegram” that Uncle Will sent out from wherever he happened to find himself. Just about every newspaper in America published it, from Kennebunkport, Maine, to Bakersfield, Calif.

People were only half-joking when they used to say that his Daily Telegram had more faithful readers than the Bible.

C oke had just put the newspaper down when the phone rang. The sheri! of Rogers C ounty wanted her dad to come down to the o"ce right away.

“We’re getting some reports,” the sheri! told him, “from Alaska.”

Her dad came back with the news. Uncle Will was dead.

‘A big deal’

This was before Pearl Harbor and JFK. Long before Princess Diana and 9/11. But for C oke’s generation, it was a moment like that – a moment nobody ever forgot, a moment when the whole country dropped everything and waited for the next news flash.

Extra editions rolled o! the presses, headlines screaming in gigantic type. Radio stations canceled regular programming for the rest of the day.

“I guess it didn’t hit me until then how famous he really was,” admits C oke, now 89 and the last surviving relative who can remember the day Will Rogers died.

“I loved him dearly, of course, but to us he was just Uncle Will.”

When Rogers came home to visit, he never mentioned the celebrities he knew or the movies he made. He wouldn’t talk about meeting the president.

“He’d ask us about our boyfriends, and he’d want to know how we were doing in school, stu! like that,” Coke says. “The way we knew him, he didn’t come across as such a big deal.” If you grow up in Oklahoma, you grow up knowing all about Will Rogers. You know about the rope tricks and the black-and- white movies and the plane crash. You can quote him saying he never met a man he didn’t like. You know he’s as much a part of our history as the Land Run and the Oil Boom.

But maybe the way we know him, he doesn’t come across as such a big deal. Important to us, sure. But outside of Oklahoma?

“Don’t take him for granted,” Coke says. “He’s still one of the most famous people in the world.”

‘A real cowboy’

In the summer of 1898, more than 2,500 head of cattle left a ranch in West Texas on one of the last major cattle drives ever to cross the Oklahoma Panhandle. Will Rogers was just another cowboy riding in the dust and sleeping on the ground, and he never wanted to be anything else.

“There wasent a house or a chicken in a whole county,” Rogers wrote about it years later, with his customary poor spelling. “That plains was the prettiest country I ever saw in my life, as flat as a beauty contest winner’s stomach.”

Rogers stood to inherit his father’s ranch near C laremore someday, but it wasn’t the same. More and more every year, northeastern Oklahoma was being crisscrossed by new roads and railways and barbed-wire fences, obliterating the open range and putting an end to the cowboy’s way of life. Before long, Rogers’ dad, C lement, would move into town, open a bank and rent out the old homestead to a wheat farmer.

Times were changing, but Rogers didn’t want to change with them. So he packed up and sailed for Argentina, where rumor had it that a man with a good rope could still make a living as “a real cowboy.”

For the next couple of years, while he drifted across the Southern Hemisphere in search of work, Rogers sent home a steady stream of letters.

The work of a high school dropout, they were full of poor grammar, misspelled words, random punctuation — and charming, sarcastic wit.

His sisters found them so entertaining they started submitting his letters to the local newspapers — first the C helsea Reporter, then the Claremore Progress.

Eventually, Rogers skipped the middleman and began mailing his letters straight to the Progress. Before he was a vaudeville star, before he made any blockbuster movies, Rogers became a journalist.

On the day he died, when rescuers pulled his body from the plane’s wreckage, they found a typewriter next to him with paper still in it. He never quit writing.

‘Rock bottom’

On a train ride across South Africa in 1902, when Rogers was looking on yet another continent for the open range and the cowboy lifestyle that had disappeared in Oklahoma, somebody walked o! with his luggage.

He wrote home that he was left with nothing but $13, one soiled shirt, an unmarried sock and a clothes brush.

“It’s a myth that Will Rogers grew up poor,” says Pat Reeder, who handles public relations for the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore.

The fact is that his family was extremely wealthy and influential. Rogers C ounty, contrary to popular impression, wasn’t named after Will Rogers. It was named after Will’s father, C lem — a testament to the family’s clout even before Will became famous.

“But, it’s not a myth,” Reeder continues in her basement o"ce, cluttered with Will Rogers movie posters, “that he worked his own way up from rock bottom.” Broke and stranded in a foreign country, Rogers noticed an advertisement for Texas Jack’s Wild West Show, a sort of traveling circus that was touring South Africa. Rogers asked for a job driving tent posts, but Texas Jack asked if he knew any rope tricks.

Did he ever. Rogers had been roping since he was a schoolboy, more than once having a lasso confiscated after trick-roping other students on the playground.

On his first night with the Wild West Show, Rogers’ horse bucked into the tent’s center pole, knocking out the lights and panicking the audience. And so began one of the most successful show business careers in history.

‘A household name’

Every year on the 15th of August, the Will Rogers museum has a wreath-laying ceremony, usually at the family tomb just outside the front entrance, with a sweeping view of Claremore and the wooded valley beyond.

This year, the 73rd anniversary of Rogers’ death, the threat of rain chased the crowd indoors, where more than 50 spectators huddled around his bigger-than-life statue in the foyer.

C oke Meyer, dressed in a bright-pink prairie dress like she wore as a little girl, laid the wreath at the statue’s base before everybody spread out to tour the museum.

Before long, several guests meandered into a small theater, where the screen was already flickering with a black-and-white movie.

In a scene that must have looked a little racy to its original audience, Rogers and a beautiful young woman are changing clothes in a hotel room, oblivious to each other until they both turn around.

Hilarity ensues.

“Do you know what movie this is?” one guest asked the others.

Another guest shrugged: “Will Rogers was in the movies?”

Oklahomans might tend to forget. For us, the iconic image still comes from the vaudeville stage — Rogers in a cowboy hat, oversize chaps and spurs, a giant lasso twirling above his head while he cracks jokes.

By the time he was starring in the “Ziegfeld Follies,” an annual theatrical production that showcased the best vaudeville talents from around the world, the rope was pretty much just a prop. People came to listen to him, not to watch him.

Rogers basically invented the nightly stand-up routine, ri"ng on the day’s headlines and gently poking fun at politicians. “Be thankful we’re not getting all the government we’re paying for,” he’d say.

On opening night of the 1918 edition of the Follies, the audience included Sam Goldfish — a Polish immigrant who combined his name with business partner Edgar Selwyn’s to launch the Goldwyn Pictures Co.

“Goldwyn” later became the “G” in MGM.

Goldfish was scouting for someone to play the starring role in “Laughing Bill Hyde,” a silent movie about an escaped convict. And Rogers impressed him.

Before he died just 17 years later, Rogers would star in more than 70 films — an average of one movie every three months.

Although most silent-movie stars floundered in the talkies, Rogers thrived. Demanding as much as $180,000 per picture — a whopping sum during the Great Depression and more than $2.5 million in today’s money — he was easily the highest-paid actor in Hollywood.

“He’s still one of the biggest names around here, one of the very biggest names,” says Todd Vradenburg, who lives in Southern C alifornia and is executive director of the Will Rogers Motion Picture Pioneers Foundation, a charity that raises millions of dollars a year for medical research. Around Hollywood, Vradenburg says, people still mention Rogers’ name in the same breath as Fred Astaire, Clark Gable and Charlie Chaplin.

“He really was one of the all-time greats,” he says. “When he died, he was more popular than any of them.” A couple of years ago, 20th Century Fox reissued several films on DVD, “The Will Rogers Collection, Vol. I.” Sales were brisk enough to release a second volume just a few months later.

But still, Vradenburg has to admit that outside of Hollywood, Rogers’ films haven’t been as well reemembered.

“He’s still a household name anywhere you go in the country,” he adds. “And his movies are a big part of that.”

But not necessarily the biggest part.

‘First and foremost’

Just to be thorough, let’s include a couple of numbers that, when added together, kind of sum up who Rogers was.

The first is 300,000. That’s how many miles Rogers had flown during his lifetime. It’s an astounding figure, considering that he wasn’t a pilot, just a passenger, at a time when every takeo! was still considered a daredevil adventure.

In the 1930s, newspaper reports noted that Rogers had spent more time in the air than any other man alive, pilots included. Whether that was literally true or not, the American public associated Rogers with aviation almost as much as C harles Lindbergh, Amelia Earhart and Rogers’ good friend Wiley Post, a fellow Oklahoman.

Here’s the second number: 2 million – the number of words Rogers published during his lifetime.

“Prolific doesn’t begin to describe Will Rogers,” says Steven Gragert, director of the Will Rogers museum in C laremore, where he’s described as the world’s leading expert on “the Rogers canon.”

“And every single word was typed like this,” Gragert says, stabbing two fingers at an imaginary typewriter.

Some celebrities might dabble in writing to promote their show-business careers, but with Rogers it seemed to work the other way around. You might say he dabbled in show business to promote his writing career, using his name recognition as a movie star to sell newspaper columns and magazine articles.

“He was a lot of things. A humorist, a cowboy philosopher, an actor,” Gragert says, sitting in the museum near a replica of Rogers’ personal study, where he did most of his writing. “But I think if you would have asked him, he would have considered himself a journalist.”

Rogers’ writing and flying went together, Gragert says, because no journalist can find a story just by sitting at his desk. Rogers traveled the world to find stu! to write about.

That’s why he went to Alaska with Post. It was a good story.

Post intended to fly across the Arctic to Siberia, proving that aircraft could navigate through the barren, frozen tundra. It would open the shortest possible route between the two continents, paving the way for today’s routine commercial flights.

But on the way to Point Barrow, Post got lost in the cloud cover. Running short on fuel after a few hours of circling, he landed the amphibious plane on a small lagoon near a handful of Eskimo huts.

Rogers climbed out to ask for directions, discovering they were only 15 miles southwest of Barrow. It would take only a few minutes to get there.

Just after takeo!, the engine sputtered. The right wing dipped. And the plane nose-dived into the water.

Post always kept his wristwatch on Oklahoma time. It stopped at 8:18. Back in C helsea, C oke Meyer and the rest of Rogers’ extended family was probably finishing dinner and getting ready for bed.

The next morning, Coke opened the paper to read her Uncle Will’s last Daily Telegram.

‘Getting at the truth’

The crowd has changed a lot over the years at the museum’s annual wreath-laying.

It used to be a lot of relatives and people who knew Rogers personally or at least were old enough to actually remember him.

Now there’s a bunch of tourists and high school students on field trips. C oke’s the only one who knew him, the only one who remembers.

It won’t be long before no one’s left from Rogers’ time.

“People won’t forget him,” Coke insists. “I’m not worried about that.”

She remembers being at the museum one day not long ago, when she met a group of sightseers from Japan.

“Can you imagine that?” she says, eyes wide open in astonishment. “All the way from Japan.”

They read some of his famous quotes.

“I’m not a member of any organized political party,” Rogers used to quip. “I’m a Democrat.”

The Japanese tourists laughed out loud. Political parties are the same everywhere.

“He had a way of getting at the truth that made people think and made people smile at the same time,” C oke says. “You can read what he had to say back then and you would think that he wrote it yesterday. It’s just as true now as it ever was.”

Vaudeville made him famous. Hollywood turned him into a legend. But his journalism keeps him relevant generation after generation.

Michael Overall 581-8383 [email protected]