Rogers’ kin hitches plane ride to home place

Jim Gardner with his annual passenger Bob McSpadden, touch down at the Dog Iron Ranch landing strip for the 2006 Will Rogers-Wiley Post Fly-In in Gardner’s Tri-Pacer. Gardner, who lives in Vinita, has been flying to ranch every year since the event started.

Jim Gardner shares a passion for flying and Cherokee heritage with Will Rogers. Every year since the annual Will Rogers-Wiley Post Fly-In at the Dog Iron Ranch near Oologah started, Gardner has been dropping down on the grass strip adjacent to the home where Will Rogers was born.

Gardner’s customary passenger has a feeling of déjà vu’. Bob McSpadden, great-nephew of Will calls his Vinita neighbor and flying friend “to catch a ride” to the place where he grew up and where her and his wife and infant son returned for a short time.

A retired teacher, Gardner divides his time flying and “shooting bows and arrows at cornstalks with the Indians.”

Although he has always had a passion for aviation, he didn’t learn to fly until he was 43; that same year he bought his first plane. “We never had an airport when I was going up or I would have,” said the pilot taught by Wendell Prentice at the Vinita airport.

He’s been coast-to-coast flying model airplanes (not the battery-operated kind) and he’s duplicated that in his own flying machine.

He has flown to places like Portland, Ore., three years ago; and Kingston, Ontario last year.

“Remember the guy who crashed in New York (Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle),” he reflected. “Well, I have flown around the Statue of Liberty.

“Ain’t bad for a little guy from Vinita,”

Gardner taught school in Arkansas City, Kansas, but most of his years were in Vinita, where he retired.

“Every day I go to the airport,” he said, “if I’m not shooting cornstalks.” Cornstalk shooting is shooting into stacked (85-100) stalks. “The one that spears the most stalks get the highest score.”

A traditional Cherokee game, it is one of several that has “returned to primitive ways since Chad Smith was elected chief.”

“I’ve been all over shooting bows,” he said, remembering his days of shooting in the Claremore armory gallery. “I think I won the bear bow champion,” he said.

He makes his owns bows and arrows —chipping the arrows from rock. Right now he is in the process of making 80 bows for Cub Scouts … to “demonstrate, no arrows,” he laughed.

Gardner’s finding retirement a lot of fun. He can always find something to do and someplace to go— a cornstalk shoot here, a fly-in there.

Spectators can meet Gardner and dozens of other small plane pilots and get a close up and personal look planes from antique and experimental to homemade and ultralights and event helicopters at the ranch fly-in.

Will Rogers was a Cherokee Indian boy who turned his rope spinning talent into world-wide reputation as a cowboy humorist, trick roper, star of stage and screen, daily newspaper columnist, author and radio commentator. He never piloted a plane, but flew at every opportunity and was a recognized aviation expert.

He was often a passenger with Wiley, a fellow Oklahoman, who flew around the world twice — one of them alone — and was inventor of the first space suit.

Will had just finished filming “Steamboat Round the Bend,” when he and Wiley flew to Alaska. Wiley was looking for a mail and passenger air route between the United States and Russia with the destination across Siberia. It was in the takeoff from a little river near Barrow, Alaska, the plane went down and the two were killed.

Will is buried in Claremore on the grounds of Will Rogers Museum, opened three years after his death. The museum and birthplace ranch are open 365 days a year from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission is by donation.