New watch dropped in mud at Memorial groundbreaking

Good luck rub
Tom Lingenfelter, who grew up knowing about Will Rogers and taught at Will Rogers High School in Tulsa can't resist rubbing the nose of Will's bust in the hall of the school, which will celebrate a 70th anniversary in 2009. His mother, Jessie Lingenfelter, of Claremore, and older brother, Jerry, were at the Will Rogers Memorial Museum groundbreaking and opening in 1938.

 

There was steady downpour April. 4, 1938 when about 50 old friends and admirers of Will Rogers watched Sallie Rogers McSpadden lift the first spade of dirt for the Claremore Memorial honoring her brother.

No one remembers that rain more than Jessie Lingenfelter and all because of her new watch. The young mother, now 93, was standing in the mud holding her toddler son.

“It was real muddy so I had Jerry in my arms,” she reflected. “I was wearing a watch I hadn’t had very long.” It must have come off while wrangling with a three-year-old and she “looked down and there (in the mud) was my watch.”

She came back again on Nov. 4 that same year when the museum opened.
“I was most impressed with the statue (Jo Davidson statue in the rotunda). All the kids wanted to touch it.”

She still comes, especially “when some of my folks visit.”

Her late husband, Ralph, who ran a service station at Will Rogers and Missouri (now Terry Chases’s Edward Jones office), remembered as a teen-ager selling newspapers on the street. “When Will came to town he would always sell him a paper,” he shared with his family.

Mrs. Lingenfelter remembers seeing Will and hearing him talk “in the park by City Hall where a lot of people gathered.”

The Lingenfelters were again linked to Will Rogers when son, Tom, went to Will Rogers High School in Tulsa to teach. There he met Judy Kirk, a WRHS graduate who was there doing her practice teaching. They married and since retiring make their home between Claremore and Owasso.