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From the day in the summer of 1915 when he took his first airplane ride, Will Rogers was a flying fanatic. He flew with
Billy Mitchell and Eddie Rickenbacker and Charles Lindbergh. He died with Wiley Post, a one-eyed fellow Oklahoman who had twice broken the round-the-world speed record. On Aug. 15, 1935, the two were in Alaska on the first leg of a journey to, of all places, Siberia. They crashed taking off in a nose-heavy plane from a small, landlocked waterway known as the Walakpa Lagoon. The bodies were found by Eskimos, and a world went into mourning. Why? Because the years from World War I to the Great Depression were times for tears. Will Rogers often diluted them with laughter. His contemporary jokes have not worn perfectly, but they have worn welland, as the sampling below suggests, some are surprisingly timely 40 years on.
WILL SAYING: Every time there is a big conference they always have a war to go with it. If he [Warren G. Harding] had a weakness, it was in trusting his friends, and the man that don't do that, then there is something the matter with him. On account of us being a democracy and run by the people, we are the only nation in the world that has to keep a government four years no matter what it does. Our municipal election ran true to political form. The sewer was defeated but the councilmen got in. You can't make the Republican Party pure by more contributions because contributions are what got it where it is today.