Will Rogers: ambassador of good will, prince of wit and wisdom (1935)

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206 WILL ROGERS Lindbergh in their secluded home on Sourland Mountain. There Will had played with the Lindbergh's firstborn, Charles A. Lindbergh, Jr., the baby who was kidnaped and murdered. Frank Hawks, noted speed king of the air, was another favorite pilot of Rogers. Hawks, himself from the Southwest, had flown Rogers thousands of miles through that section on charity missions in behalf of drought and unemployment victims in Texas in 1931. As a part of their act, Rogers taught Frank to make a speech. The flier, however, unconsciously picked up many of Will's mannerisms and quaint expressions. "I sometimes think I'm Will Rogers," Hawks once told a group of actors. As he made the remark, he reached up and scratched his head in the familiar Rogers manner. It created an uproar. But. Wiley Post, with whom he died, was Rogers' favorite. On the occasion of dedicating the landing field at Claremore, Oklahoma, Rogers said: "It wasn't ambition that drove Wiley Post up in the air. It was the boll weevil. Wiley used to be on a cotton farm. If it hadn't been for the Republican administration, he might have remained an underfed, overmortgaged farmer. So you got to quit knocking the Republicans; they really made Wiley Post what he is. "He got his mechanical knowledge from working in a garage. He worked in cahoots with a feller in the next town and they got so's they could fix a car so it would fall entirely apart when it reached the other feller's place.