He worked on ranches, roped cattle, broke horses, and eventually began his show business career as a trick roper in Texas Jack's Wild West Circus In South Africa. He quit that circus and moved to Australia, where he went to work for the Wirth Brothers Circus. In 1904 he returned to the United States, and appeared at the St Louis World Fair.
In 1905 Rogers was at Madison Square Garden when a wild steer broke out of the arena and climbed into the stands. Rogers roped the cow, receiving font page attention in the newspapers, and landing him a job with Willie Hammerstein, in his vaudeville act.
In 1908, in addition to working vaudeville, he was in his first movie, Laughing Bill Hyde. He went on to act in many more films (71 in total - 50 silent and 21 "talkies") often as himself.
"With his voice becoming increasingly familiar to audiences, Rogers essentially played himself in each film, without film makeup, managing to ad-lib and sometimes work in his familiar commentaries on politics. The clean moral tone of his films resulted in various public schools taking their classes to attend special showings during the school day. His most unusual role may have been in the first talking version of Mark Twain's novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. His popularity soared to new heights with films including Young As You Feel, Judge Priest, and Life Begins at 40, with Richard Cromwell and Rochelle Hudson."
From 1929 to 1935, he made radio broadcasts for the Gulf Oil Company. This weekly Sunday evening show, The Gulf Headliners, ranked among the top radio programs in the country. Since Rogers easily rambled from one subject to another, reacting to his studio audience, he often lost track of the half-hour time limit in his earliest broadcasts, and was cut off in mid-sentence. To correct this, he brought in a wind-up alarm clock, and its on-air buzzing alerted him to begin wrapping up his comments. By 1935, his show was being announced as "Will Rogers and his Famous Alarm Clock". (You can listen to some of his radio broadcasts here)
In other words, he was one of the most well known, and well liked, celebrities of the day.
Originally a Black and White photo, this is a restoration print of
Will Rogers with one of the mail planes on which he frequently hitched rides to his lecture circuits
Charles Lindbergh and Will Rogers in Red Butte Airport during the summer of 1928
Will Rogers was friends with Charles Lindbergh, and many or Rogers writings and radio broadcasts campaigned for air travel, expounding on its safety.
On a 1928 mail flight, in poor weather, his plane landed in a farmers field in Beaver Springs Pa. A week later, Rogers wrote about his entire trip, including his surprise landing, in an article for the Saturday Evening Post.
You can read the entire article here -
but only a short portion of this article involves his time on the ground in Beaver Springs.
Pilot Thomas Nelson was piloting the mail plane from Cleveland to New York. Rogers writes that it is completely up to the mail pilots whether or not they fly, based on the conditions. Nelson determined it safe to make the trip, but an hour or so in to the flight, changed his mind and began looking for a safe place to land. Rogers writes,
"I noticed he (the pilot) dropped down into a valley, a kind long narrow valley, and he started circling it. I knew then that he was looking for a place to land. It was pretty hilly. There were lots of prosperous old farmhouses but very few fields of any length Everything was cut up with fences."
"Well he (Nelson, the pilot) started over toward the nearest farmhouse. But Lord, he didn't need to. here come people that hadn't ventured out in the rain three days over this field where we had landed. He was about thirty miles south of his course, not so far from - I think it was the town of Beaver Falls - not Beaver Falls New York, but Pennsylvania"
The town was actually Beaver Springs Pa.
"Well by this time the Pennsylvania farmers were just thick: they all was mighty pleasant and nice, and wanted to do anything they could. If it had been a lot of farmers they would have wanted us to take the thing our of there and give them relief."
The plane was stuck in the mud, so it was decided to leave it until morning. The pilot hired a truck to come get the mail and take it on to the next station, and one of the farmers, Otto Wagner, volunteered to drive Rogers 25 miles to a station near Harrisburg to catch a train into New York.
Rogers wrote, "Well, the farmer has a nice closed car and the rain didn't matter."
They returned to the mans house, and while they got ready to drive to town, Rogers went "back in the kitchen by the stove. It seemed like old times on an old ranch back in Oklahoma. I never saw as many things cooking at once. Believe me, these people sure do live back there. It was an old brick farmhouse, over 100 years old, and the barn older, he said then that. Those things cooking did smell so good but my eating was over for that trip. I could still feel that aeroplane dropping out from under me.
On the way in I asked him all about how they farmed and what they raised and how much the land was worth, and then I asked him if there was any Pennsylvania Dutch around there: I had always heard of them and wanted to see some. It would have been like him landing in Oklahoma accidentally and wanting to see some Indians. He said there was a few here - that all was around the car was of that breed. I says, why, they looked all right, and they talked pretty good English that is as well as I could judge.
He said "I am one"
Well here I was with a Pennsylvania Dutchman and didn't know it. he told me the old-timers do talk their language yet. They are a great people and I liked the way they lived. I want to stop in there and stay awhile again some time when I am feeling better"
An article by Jane Kessler, in the Daily Item in 2009 refers to Rogers visit, and gives us more details about the location of his landing:
"directly south of the Beaver Vocational building near Beaver Springs. A crowd gathered, but no one recognized him." It also identifies the farmer with the "nice closed car", who provided him with transportation, as Otto Wagner.
That article concludes with:
"Unfortunately, Rogers never got the opportunity to return to Snyder County. He died in a plane crash near Pt. Barrow, Alaska, on Aug. 15, 1935, when he and Wiley Post were on a journey of goodwill. Thomas Nelson, the pilot who was forced to land in Beaver Springs, also lost his life when he crashed in a ravine in eastern Ohio during a fierce snowstorm."
Read More:
- https://www.dailyitem.com/news/will-rogers-wanted-to-loaf-in-beaver-springs/article_8284887d-f518-5a87-a4ab-4a0fdaec77c3.html
- https://ia600901.us.archive.org/10/items/the-saturday-evening-post-1928-01-28/the-saturday-evening-post-1928-01-28.pdf
- http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/will-rogers-about-will-rogers/692/
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