Will Rogers: Man and Myth

When Leland Wilson was in the fourth grade in Aline, Oklahoma, a distinguished man came to his one-room schoolhouse some three years after the death of Will Rogers. He looked around at the blackboards, the displays, the clock, and was aghast that there was no picture of Will Rogers hanging on the wall. ‘Every schoolhouse in America should have a picture of Will Rogers and Abraham Lincoln!’ he declared. So early on Wilson received orientation as to Will’s place in history. Now, some 70 years later, he has become an expert Rogers historian, amassing an extensive collection of the humorist/cow-boy/philosopher’s books and ephemera that he donated to Will Rogers State Historic Park last September. The collection, the largest repository of published Rogers materials outside of the Will Rogers Memorial in Claremore, Oklahoma, includes an astonishing assortment: 1,900 fiction and nonfiction books; 103 magazines, journals and newspaper articles; 250 movie posters, postcards, drawings and related commercial media; 272 cachet/first-day covers and stamps; 38 motion pictures; audio records and record albums; and miscellaneous buttons, pins, coins and belts. Insisting that he is not a professional collector or archivist, Wilson nevertheless saw his avocation yield a significant contribution to Rogers history and scholarship. In the months since Wilson delivered the cache that he had been casually storing in cardboard boxes, the materials have been recorded, archived and placed in the library, reading room and on display in some of the Rogers family rooms. Finding an equivalent of a Will Rogers figure today would be difficult. There are comedians, there are philosophers, and there are actors and cowboys, but not rolled into one individual. Wilson and the ranchers and farmers around his childhood home in Oklahoma felt a personal loss from Rogers’ death in a plane crash in 1935. He was one of them; he hailed from Oklahoma, and remained committed to his home and his family throughout his peripatetic life. When Wilson entered college at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., he was assigned an essay in his freshman English class on some aspect of a person. He chose the political aspect of Will Rogers and began his research at the Library of Congress.   ’I pulled out every book in the card catalogue, and was fascinated by the books he wrote,’ he says.   In 1949, Wilson transferred to McPherson College in Kansas, and it was there that he started collecting Rogers’ books. ‘I began to pick up books that were about Rogers. Every one of the books in my collection has something about Rogers’ Wilson says. ‘It may be in a history of the West or in some newspaper piece, but Will also wrote introductions, prefaces and postscripts for other people’s books.’ Wilson, who is a retired minister and administrator of the National Church of the Brethren in Elgin, Illinois, pursued his hobby often while traveling. ‘It was a fun thing to do,’ he says. He displays the attributes of a true collector. ‘You search and search and sometimes you find something new and it’s delightful, it’s a treasure. It gives your travel some of its purpose. ‘In Hawaii, I found a book that was part of Hawaiian history. Will Rogers had been there at the same time as Franklin D. Roosevelt. I found materials in Hollywood, Acres of Books in Long Beach and in San Diego. In 1975, I found a book in Santa Barbara, ‘The Illiterate Digest,’ published in 1924 and I paid $125. That’s when I asked myself, ‘Can I do this financially?’   Another time, Wilson stopped in Oologah, Will’s hometown north of Claremore, and found himself in an antique shop. ‘I stopped in a store and saw a lamp that featured an airplane circumnavigating the globe. The pilots were Will Rogers and Wiley Post, who died on their way to Alaska. They wanted $225 for the lamp. I drove home, but I kept thinking about the lamp. Pat, my wife, encouraged me to write the store. I didn’t know the name of the store so I addressed the envelope to ‘The antique store in the southwest part of Oolagah.” Wilson purchased the lamp, which now resides in his daughter’s house in Southern California. But as any collector knows, Wilson has had to restrain himself from collecting Rogers materials that he already owns, although he does make one exception. ‘I have 105 copies of P.J. O’Brien’s first biography of Will Rogers, ‘Ambassador of Good Will, Prince of Wit and Wisdom.’ He printed jillions of copies. If there’s any one book you’ll find, that will be the one, but,’ Wilson adds, sheepishly, ‘If I find this book for $5 or less, I’ll buy it.’ All the materials in the Wilson collection are in the public domain; there are no private letters, which inevitably leads to the dominance of Will’s public persona and perception. The 65 years since his death have placed a heroic glow on the man, immortalized for his wit and comedic flair, as well as his talent on stage and in the horse ring. While Will is certainly remembered for the hundreds of pithy, insightful, remarkably relevant and humorous but always good-natured sayings, a number of them have been attributed to him that he didn’t say, nor were they always the truth, Wilson says. Take the quote ‘I never met a man I didn’t like.’ ‘In 1979, on the anniversary of Will’s birth, I heard Jim Rogers [Will’s youngest son] say ‘I don’t know exactly what Dad meant by that. I do know there were people he didn’t like. It’s an ideal; we need ideals.” Another myth has Rogers portrayed as a simple guy with a modest income. ‘He had money,’ Wilson asserts, quite logically, given that during the Depression, Rogers made $500,000 a year. ‘He wasn’t a poor boy; he did face financial difficulties in his time, particularly when he wanted to be his own producer in silent films. He had to go back to the stage to pay off his debts. But then, with a newspaper column syndicated in the New York Times, radio, motion pictures and lecturing, he became a wealthy man.’ Wilson points out that Rogers was famously generous, lending his fame and personality to certain causes, such as the relief effort for the March 31, 1931 Nicaragua earthquake. He was also agreeable about lending his name in advertising, cleverly avoiding endorsing the product outright, as in his ad for Bull Durham tobacco. ‘His ads were often a quip, he never claimed he smoked,’ Wilson says. ‘He did an ad for Baldwin piano, about which he noted ‘The Baldwin is the best piano I’ve ever leaned on.” Wilson had been talking with the ranch about donating his collection for the past 12 to 15 years. ‘This legacy needs to be saved,’ he says. ‘The spirit of the man had a great deal to offer our society now.’ Will Rogers’ life and accomplishments are presented in a new pictorial exhibition in the recently completed museum and gift shop at the ranch. ‘The photos in this exhibition often show items that the visitor is going to see in the ranch house,’ explains Will Rogers Ranch Museum Curator Rochelle Nicholas-Booth. ‘You’ll see books in Will’s study that are part of Wilson’s collection, or the hardback copy of Betty Rogers’ book. We have the original movie posters, whereas before we just had copies. The house and the collection bring two aspects of Will’s life together.’ The ranch site had been thoroughly studied by historic preservationists, structural engineers, educators, archivists, cowboys and artists. Leland Wilson’s collection adds an important piece to the story.