Rembering Will Rogers

The Tulsa World newspaper today has a wonderful package of photos, videos, stories and quotes online in memory of Will Rogers, the entertainer, humorist, world traveler and journalist who died in a plane crash at Point Barrow, Alaska, 75 years ago yesterday. As a native Tulsan, growing up I knew his story well, having visited the Will Rogers Memorial at Claremore and being fortunate enough to attend the high school named for him, Will Rogers High School, which was built as a WPA project in the Great Depression and opened in 1939. The opening page of the coverage can be found by clicking here: Will Rogers Remembered. I was thinking of writing my own tribute but the World has a plethora of material.

One of the thoughts that has kept coming back to me over the past few years is "Where is Will Rogers When We Need Him?" By this I mean that public discourse and disagreement has gotten so nasty that we could use a dose of his humor, his gentle jabbing at all parties, to perhaps cool the rhetoric and help reframe the argument. At least I hope we aren't too far gone as a nation to appreciate quotes like these, all from his writing prior to his untimely death in 1935:

• The truth can hurt you worse in an election than about anything that could happen to you.
• Republicans want a man that can lend dignity to the office. Democrats want a man that will lend some money.
• When a party can't think of anything else they always fall back on lower taxes. It has a magic sound to a voter, just like fairyland is spoken of and dreamed of by children.
• It's a great country, but you can't live in it for nothing.
• Wars will never be a success until you have a referee and until they announce before they start just what it's for.
• When ignorance gets started, it knows no bounds.
• There is nothing that keeps poor people poor as much as paying doctor bills.
• I'm not a member of any organized political party. I'm a Democrat.
• As bad as we sometimes think our country is run, it is the best run I ever saw.

And then there is the all-time favorite Will Rogers quote:

• "I joked about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn't like."