84 Facts About Will Rogers

1.

William Penn Adair Rogers was an American vaudeville performer, actor, and humorous social commentator.

2.

Will Rogers was born as a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, in the Indian Territory, and is known as "Oklahoma's Favorite Son".

3.

Will Rogers died in 1935 with aviator Wiley Post when their small airplane crashed in northern Alaska.

4.

Will Rogers's rope act led to success in the Ziegfeld Follies, which in turn led to the first of his many movie contracts.

5.

Will Rogers's 1920s syndicated newspaper column and his radio appearances increased his visibility and popularity.

6.

Will Rogers crusaded for aviation expansion and provided Americans with first-hand accounts of his world travels.

7.

Will Rogers's mother was one quarter-Cherokee and born into the Paint Clan.

8.

Will Rogers's father remarried less than two years after her death.

9.

Will Rogers's father, Clement, was a leader in the Cherokee Nation.

10.

Will Rogers served as a delegate to the Oklahoma Constitutional Convention.

11.

Will Rogers was more easygoing and oriented toward the loving affection offered by his mother, Mary, rather than the harshness of his father.

12.

Young Will Rogers went from one venture to another with little success.

13.

Only after Will Rogers won acclaim in vaudeville did the rift begin to heal.

14.

Will Rogers was a good student and an avid reader of The New York Times, but he dropped out of school after the 10th grade.

15.

Will Rogers later said that he was a poor student, saying that he "studied the Fourth Reader for ten years".

16.

Will Rogers was much more interested in cowboys and horses, and learned to rope and use a lariat.

17.

In 1899, Will Rogers appeared in the St Louis Fair as part of the Mulhall Rodeo.

18.

Will Rogers was hired at James Piccione's ranch near Mooi River Station in the Pietermaritzburg district of Natal.

19.

Will Rogers began his show business career as a trick roper in "Texas Jack's Wild West Circus" in South Africa:.

20.

Grateful for the guidance but anxious to move on, Will Rogers quit the circus and went to Australia.

21.

Texas Jack gave him a reference letter for the Wirth Brothers Circus there, and Will Rogers continued to perform as a rider and trick roper, and worked on his pony act.

22.

Will Rogers returned to the United States in 1904, appeared at the Saint Louis World's Fair, and began to try his roping skills on the vaudeville circuits.

23.

Will Rogers roped the steer to the delight of the crowd.

24.

Will Rogers's run at the New Amsterdam ran into 1916, and Rogers's growing popularity led to an engagement on the more famous Ziegfeld Follies.

25.

At this stage, Will Rogers's act was strictly physical, a silent display of daring riding and clever tricks with his lariat.

26.

Will Rogers's cowboy was an unfettered man free of institutional restraints, with no bureaucrats to order his life.

27.

At one performance, with President Woodrow Wilson in the audience, Will Rogers improvised a "roast" of presidential policies that had Wilson, and the entire audience, in stitches and proved his remarkable skill at off-the-cuff, witty commentary on current events.

28.

Will Rogers built the rest of his career around that skill.

29.

Will Rogers made his first silent movie, Laughing Bill Hyde, which was filmed in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

30.

Will Rogers could make a film, yet easily still rehearse and perform in the Follies.

31.

Will Rogers eventually appeared in most of the Follies, from 1916 to 1925.

32.

Will Rogers bought a ranch in Pacific Palisades and set up his own production company.

33.

Will Rogers wrote many of the title cards appearing in his films.

34.

Will Rogers made two other feature silents and a travelogue series in 1927.

35.

Will Rogers made 48 silent movies, but with the arrival of sound in 1929, he became a top star in that medium.

36.

Will Rogers played a homespun farmer in 1933, an old-fashioned doctor in 1933, a small town banker in 1934, and a rustic politician in 1934.

37.

Will Rogers was in County Chairman, Steamboat Round the Bend, and In Old Kentucky.

38.

Will Rogers appeared in four films with his friend Stepin Fetchit : David Harum, Judge Priest, Steamboat Round the Bend and The County Chairman.

39.

Will Rogers's popularity soared to new heights with films including Young As You Feel, Judge Priest, and Life Begins at 40, with Richard Cromwell and Rochelle Hudson.

40.

Will Rogers wrote frequently for the mass-circulation upscale magazine The Saturday Evening Post.

41.

Will Rogers advised Americans to embrace the frontier values of neighborliness and democracy on the domestic front, while remaining clear of foreign entanglements.

42.

Will Rogers took a strong, highly popular stand in favor of aviation, including a military air force of the sort his flying buddy General Billy Mitchell advocated.

43.

Will Rogers began a weekly column, titled "Slipping the Lariat Over", at the end of 1922.

44.

Will Rogers had already published a book of wisecracks and had begun a steady stream of humor books.

45.

Will Rogers wrote from a nonpartisan point of view and became a friend of presidents and a confidant of the great.

46.

Will Rogers was not the first entertainer to use political humor before his audience.

47.

Radio was the exciting new medium, and Will Rogers became a star there as well, broadcasting his newspaper pieces.

48.

Since Will Rogers easily rambled from one subject to another, reacting to his studio audience, he often lost track of the half-hour time limit in his earliest broadcasts, and was cut off in mid-sentence.

49.

In 1911, Will Rogers bought a 20-acre ranch near Claremore, Oklahoma, which he intended to use as his retirement home.

50.

Will Rogers paid US$500 an acre, equal to $14,541 per acre today.

51.

From about 1925 to 1928, Will Rogers traveled the length and breadth of the United States in a "lecture tour".

52.

Will Rogers visited Mexico City, along with Charles Lindbergh, as a guest of US Ambassador Dwight Morrow.

53.

Will Rogers gave numerous after-dinner speeches, became a popular convention speaker, and gave dozens of benefits for victims of floods, droughts, or earthquakes.

54.

Will Rogers traveled to Asia to perform in 1931, and to Central and South America the following year.

55.

Will Rogers had tentatively agreed to go on loan from Fox to MGM to star in the 1935 movie version of the play.

56.

Will Rogers was a Democrat but has historically been known as apolitical.

57.

Will Rogers was friends with every president starting with Theodore Roosevelt, and he notably supported Republican Calvin Coolidge over John W Davis in 1924.

58.

In 1932 Rogers supported Democrat Franklin D Roosevelt, who was his favorite president and politician.

59.

Will Rogers ran as the "bunkless candidate" of the Anti-Bunk Party.

60.

Every week, from Memorial Day through Election Day, Will Rogers caricatured the farcical humors of grave campaign politics.

61.

Will Rogers symbolized the self-made man, the common man, who believed in America, in progress, and in the American Dream of upward mobility.

62.

Will Rogers made whirlwind visits to numerous European capitals and met with both international figures and common people.

63.

Will Rogers's articles reflected a fear that Europeans would go to war again.

64.

Will Rogers reasoned that for the moment, American needs could best be served by concentrating on domestic questions and avoiding foreign entanglements.

65.

Will Rogers effectively used up-to-date slang and invented new words to fit his needs.

66.

Will Rogers made frequent use of puns and terms which closely linked him to the cowboy tradition, as well as speech patterns using a southern dialect.

67.

Brown argues that Will Rogers held up a "magic mirror" that reflected iconic American values.

68.

Will Rogers was the archetypical "American Democrat" thanks to his knack of moving freely among all social classes, his stance above political parties, and his passion for fair play.

69.

Will Rogers represented the "American Adam" with his independence and self-made record.

70.

Will Rogers furthermore represented the "American Prometheus" through his commitment to utilitarian methods and his ever-optimistic faith in future progress.

71.

Will Rogers became an advocate for the aviation industry after noticing advancements in Europe and befriending Charles Lindbergh, the most famous American aviator of the era.

72.

Will Rogers attached a Lockheed Explorer wing to a Lockheed Orion fuselage, fitting floats for landing in the lakes of Alaska and Siberia.

73.

Will Rogers visited Post often at the airport in Burbank, California, while he was modifying the aircraft.

74.

Will Rogers asked Post to fly him through Alaska in search of new material for his newspaper column.

75.

Will Rogers was buried August 21,1935, in Forest Lawn Park in Glendale, California; it was a temporary interment.

76.

Will Rogers was reinterred at the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore, Oklahoma.

77.

Will Rogers used a set that was designed for a larger type of plane, making the already nose-heavy hybrid aircraft even more nose-heavy.

78.

Will Rogers agreed on the condition that his image would be placed facing the House Chamber, supposedly so he could "keep an eye on Congress".

79.

On May 19,1944, Will Rogers's body was moved from a holding vault in Glendale, California, to the tomb.

80.

The Will Rogers Turnpike is the section of Interstate 44 between Tulsa and Joplin, Missouri.

81.

Near Vinita, Oklahoma, a statue of Will Rogers was installed at the service plaza that spans the interstate.

82.

Will Rogers always performed in front of a special jewelled curtains and had two of them.

83.

In 1976, Will Rogers was among the historical figures depicted in the artwork Our Nation's 200th Birthday, The Telephone's 100th Birthday by Stanley Meltzoff for Bell System.

84.

The Tony Award-winning musical The Will Rogers Follies, produced on Broadway in 1991, starred Keith Carradine in the lead role.