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• "ALL I know is what I read in the papers," you used to say — smiling that shy, boyish smile of yours, talking in that querulous drawl, as if you, personally, wouldn't guarantee that the papers were right.
Now, we've got so used to having you joke us about believing all the headlines, that we're 'suspicious of half of them. We don't believe half of them. Like those about you and Wiley Post, for instance.
The first ones said you and Wiley — a great flier, that pal of yours ! — were off on a flying vacation. To Alaska. Maybe on to Siberia and Russia. Maybe on around the world. You didn't know. Wherever you were going, you were happy about going by air.
Those particular lines of type were easy enough to believe. We knew how you had made three pictures in a row, without a rest, just so you could get away for a real holiday. We knew how you loved flying. Maybe we wished you wouldn't do so much of it — or take off for places where mountains and fogs and storms didn't seem to like strangers. But we sort of flew along with you, sharing your adventuring.
We were happy to hear about the hit you made up North. That was easy enough to believe, too — and "More power to you," we said. We understood how the Alaskans felt about you.
Then, one morning the headlines about you stopped being small and casual. They jumped to giant size ; they started screaming. They said that you and Wiley had crashed on that bleak Alaskan tundra, that the torn, twisted wreckage of the plane had been found . . . and two broken bodies.
They said that the world had lost you.
We couldn't believe that. Not that last part. We had to believe the part about the plane slipping, smashing to earth . . . about the two bodies. They showed us pictures of a shattered plane, of two flower-covered coffins.
But we couldn't believe them when they said that you were gone. The Will Rogers we all knew couldn't perish in an airplane crash. Or in any other way.
• YOU may have stopped writing those pungent little Letters to the Editor. And maybe you don't stand up in front of a microphone any more, with an old alarm clock at your elbow, philosophizing to the folks until the alarm clatters. But you're still with us — in your books, in your pictures, in our hearts.
You showed us plenty of ways to live more fully, no matter who we were or what we were. You showed us how far a little philosophy, with a sprinkling of laughter, could take us. You showed us the fun of being a little more honest with ourselves, a little more tolerant of the neighbors — a little more warmly human all around.
And we still want to be shown. We're going to see those last two pictures of yours — Steamboat 'Round the Bend and In Old Kentucky. And we're going to ask to see pictures like State Fair and Judge Priest and David Harum and Doubting Thomas again.
Just to prove to ourselves, Will, what we know already : Those headlines were mistaken when they said you died in Alaska.
Newspaper headlines said Will Rogers was dead. But "Steamboat 'Round the Bend" makes that hard to believe
i, R^a