Will Rogers Memorial, Claremore, Oklahoma

If we want to play the “People I’d love to go back in history to meet” game, then Will Rogers would be very high on my list.

A Cherokee cowboy turned vaudevillian with his rope tricks; his wit on stage made him a successful humorist; his popularity led to a movie career in silent and feature films; as a newspaper columnist and non-partisan social commentator he reached 40 million readers every day and his radio shows got to everyone else. He traveled the world and was the first civilian to fly coast to coast with pilots on the first air mail flights. He supported efforts to get people back to work in the depression working for President Hoover. His end came too soon in a plane crash in Alaska when he and Wiley Post were exploring routes from the west coast to Russia.

The Will Rogers Memorial Museum is in Claremore on land that he bought for his retirement home. It’s a small place but does an excellent job of telling his amazing story with taste and humour.

Here is a photo of his notes for a 1931 radio address that seems all too relevant today …

“Now we read in the papers every day, and they get us all excited over one or a dozen different problems that’s supposed to be before this country. There’s not really but one problem before the whole country at this time. It’s not the balancing of Mr. Mellon’s budget. That’s his worry. That ain’t ours. … There is no other one before us at all. It’s to see that every man that wants to is able to work, is allowed to find a place to go to work, and also to arrange some way of getting a more equal distribution of the wealth in country.

Now it’s Prohibition, we hear a lot about that. Well, that’s nothing to compare to your neighbor’s children that are hungry. It’s food, it ain’t drink that we’re worried about today. Here a few years ago we was so afraid that the poor people was liable to take a drink that now we’ve fixed it so they can’t even get something to eat.

So here we are in a country with more wheat and more corn and more money in the bank, more cotton, more everything in the world—there’s not a product that you can name that we haven’t got more of it than any other country ever had on the face of the earth—and yet we’ve got people starving. We’ll hold the distinction of being the only nation in the history of the world that ever went to the poor house in an automobile.”