Saturday marks the 80th anniversary of the death of Will Rogers in a plane crash at a lagoon near Barrow, the northernmost city in Alaska. Rogers, a writer and actor with an enormous national following, was killed while attempting a round-the-world flight with aviator Wiley Post.
Word of Rogers' death stunned the country, said Steve Gragert, former director of the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Oklahoma and lifelong Rogers scholar. "The reaction was phenomenal," he said. "It was nationwide. It was crushing for so many people because, on a daily basis, they were reading what he had to say."
Rogers' daily and weekly newspaper columns were read by an estimated 40 million people at a time when America's population was 120 million, Gragert said. The size of the audience for his Sunday radio program was likewise substantial. At the time of his death he was the second most popular movie actor in the country, right behind Shirley Temple, and was the best paid.
A member of a prominent Cherokee family, Rogers began his show business career as a vaudeville performer, doing cowboy rope tricks and wisecracking about what he'd read in the newspaper that day. The wisecracks turned out to be more entertaining than the tricks and he became famous as a commentator and author who mixed down-home humor with sharp insights into politics and society.
Gragert said that the Will Rogers Research Project, a comprehensive collection of Rogers' work, exceeds 2 million words.
"I've had the pleasure and opportunity to edit and publish 18 volumes of his writings," said Gragert, who joined the project as a graduate student at the University of Oklahoma. "That's not meant as a brag, but just to show how prolific he was as a writer."
Rogers brought a portable typewriter everywhere and was constantly typing, in the car, on the movie set -- and while flying with Post.
"He was way ahead of his time. He used a laptop," Gragert quipped about the typewriter. "His daily columns were two or three paragraphs. I call them 'blogs.'"
Post, like Rogers, was from Oklahoma. The two were friends, and when Post proposed circling the globe via a new northern route, Rogers asked to come along. The plane, a single-engine Lockheed Orion on floats fitted with the wings of a Lockheed Explorer, was said to be nose-heavy.
Rogers and Post took off from Lake Washington in Renton, Washington, on Aug. 7, 1935. Their stops included Juneau, Anchorage (with a side trip to Palmer) and Fairbanks. There Rogers met musher Leonhard Seppala, who recounted a story about a husky's fatal encounter with a polar bear and took what may have been the last photographs of the fliers.
They left Fairbanks on Aug. 15, intending to land at Point Barrow. Rogers hoped to interview trader and Barrow patriarch Charles Brower, Gragert said.
But they were disoriented by cloudy weather and put down in a lagoon at Walakpa Bay, 13 miles southwest of their destination. There they met hunter Clair Okpeaha and his family. Post determined the direction and distance to Barrow and attempted to take off. As the floats cleared the water, the engine stalled. The plane slammed down nose-first and flipped onto its back. Both Rogers and Post died instantly.
Okpeaha raced to the village to report the crash. He did not know the identity of the two men in the plane but people in Barrow expecting their arrival knew it had to be Rogers and Post. They quickly confirmed the deaths and from there the news spread throughout the country and the world and into history.
Nowadays it is difficult to conceive of the depth and scope of the mourning, Gragert said. It was as if everyone in America had lost their best friend. When Rogers' funeral took place, movie houses across the country closed for the day and left their screens dark in tribute, something they did not do at the deaths of Presidents Roosevelt or Kennedy.
Gragert and his wife Helen, an artist, will be in Barrow for the anniversary, part of a 10-day trek through the state. It is their first trip to Alaska.
"Both of us have always had the dream of visiting Barrow," said Gragert, who retired from his museum post one year ago. "We hope to have the opportunity to go to the crash site, and I'm also hopeful that we'll be able to speak to descendants of Clair Okpeaha."
It has been speculated by some biographers, like John Evangelist Walsh in "When the Laughing Stopped: The Strange, Sad Death of Will Rogers" (University of Alaska Press), that Rogers was not killed by the crash impact but by his portable typewriter, which flew through the cabin and struck his head.
Gragert said it's hard to be certain about such details, given the violence of the crash.
"But we have that typewriter in the museum. It's smashed."
He's read the last column written on that typewriter, probably pecked out as Rogers flew north from the Chena River. It dealt with the tale of the husky and the polar bear he'd heard in Fairbanks.
Eerily, Gragert said, "The very last thing he typed is the word 'death.'"