Will Rogers Writes from Waynoka
By Sandie Olson
Saturday, December 11, 2004
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Legendary Will Rogers stands in front of a Ford Tri-Motor airplane in this undated post card.
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Will Rogers, from Claremore, Oklahoma was one of America's best loved and most widely read newspaper columnists until his untimely death in a plane crash in Alaska in 1935. Will was an aviation enthusiast. Evidence indicates he was in Waynoka more than once, taking advantage of the Transcontinental Air Transport coast-to-coast service.
Will arrived in Waynoka late on a Sunday afternoon in his private plane during the TAT era. Teenager Punk Kelsey, who lived across the road from the TAT Airport, described Rogers' plane as being like an office inside. Kelsey asked Will how much he was paid to write his daily newspaper column. Will reported, 'A dollar a word.' So thereafter Punk counted the words in the columns to calculate how much Will was paid.
Rogers entertained the local boys who gathered at the train station, according to the Woods County Enterprise, and 'very courteously gave the boys an audience from which they got a real kick'. At 11 p.m., his train left for Clovis, where he boarded a TAT plane bound for Los Angeles.
According to his autobiography, Will filed the following story from Waynoka on a trip from New York to Los Angeles in 1929-
-Waynoka, Oklahoma, October 30 -
'What does the sensational collapse of Wall Street mean? Nothing. Why, if the cows of this country failed to come up and get milked one night it would be more of a panic than if Morgan and Lamont had never held a meeting. Why, an old sow and a litter of pigs make more people a living than all the steel and General Motors stock combined. Why, the whole 120,000,000 of us are more dependent on the cackling of a hen than if the Stock Exchange was turned into a night club. 'And New Yorkers call them rubes.'
One can imagine that on Will Rogers' ride to Waynoka from the TAT Airport, a few miles northeast of town, that Will observed those cows, pigs and hens that he mentions in his column written from Waynoka. On October 31, 1929 from Los Angeles, he gave sound advice to his readers who might be investing in the stock market: '...take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don't go up, don't buy it.' It would be hard to find any better advice today, nearly 73 years later.
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