Will Rogers pioneered broadcast commentary

BEVERLY HILLS, Cal., Feb. 23 “… I believe it (radio) is our greatest invention, far greater than the automobile, for it don’t kill anybody. It don’t cost us millions for roads. When we are too lazy, or too old to do anything else, we can listen in …” From Daily Telegrams in 1930

 

During the first week in February in 1922, Will Rogers was on tour in Pittsburgh, Pa., with the Ziegfeld Frolic when the opportunity came for a radio broadcast. KDKA, at 15 months, was the nation’s oldest commercial radio station. And there Will made his first broadcast.

He was the pioneer in broadcast commentary as he was in silent pictures and talkies. He was a part of the first international radio hook-up to originate in Los Angeles.

Wordsmith that Will was he said “Radio is a tough thing for a comedian. That little microphone is not going to laugh.”

A new gallery in the Will Rogers Memorial Museum is devoted exclusively to Will’s career in radio, a medium where he rose to be a prized commentator for both NBC and CBS.

The gallery will officially open Friday morning, July 1, at 9:30. At the same time, bench seating will also be dedicated (see related story). The public is invited to the museum to share in the occasion and be among the first to see the new gallery.

Special guests will be a group of Claremore residents who participated in a photo shoot representing a family seated around the radio. They are Lisa Fink, Jacob and MacKenzie Ogle and Steve Egleston.

Will’s work in radio was varied.

He contracted with American Tobacco Company to write 26 humorous ads for Bull Durham at $500 each and admitted he didn’t smoke Bull Durham.

He found a new source of income in 1930 when Squibb Company paid him $77,000 for a series of 15-minute talks. Two years later he agreed to be a regular on Ziegfeld’s Follies of the Air. He was limited to four minutes, which did not suit him and when he kept going overtime Chrysler, one of the sponsors, sent a man to rein him in. That didn’t work and they cut him off in the middle of a sentence. He didn’t know this until he got home. He promptly sent a three-word telegram to Chrysler to “get another boy.”

Will signed with Gulf Oil in 1933 for a weekly half-hour Sunday evening series, The Good Gulf Show.  He was paid $50,000 for the first seven weeks and gave half to the Red Cross and half to the Salvation Army. That  show was a rousing hit and continued for the rest of his life.

The first week on air a minister reported a 50 percent drop in Sunday evening church attendance. To counter such defections, another church placed a radio in the chapel and tuned it to Will’s broadcast.

Radio was often the medium for his philanthropic works. On Oct. 18, 1931 he did a nationwide broadcast, part of a national drive for unemployment relief.

In the midst of hard times, when American Olympic sponsors feared people would not come to the games in Los Angeles in 1932. He issued an official invitation on the radio airwaves, broadcast from California, for people to attend Olympiad 10.

Will Rogers and actresses and actors, representing countries of their birth, went on air asking the “world, the ‘cockeyed’ world, and the world is certainly  ‘cockeyed’ to come to our Olympic games.”

Radios throughout the Americas, Europe and Japan were tuned to the hour-long international radio-hookup, sent across the seas by short wave leading to a successful Olympics.

It was on one of his live, unedited radio programs that he made his famous remark regarding the government’s Indian treaty to give the Indians “ground as long as the grass grows and water flows. Now they have settled the whole thing by putting them on land where the grass won’t grow and the water won’t flow, so now they have it all set.”