Tom Milam has fond memories
of Uncle Will’s visits

By PAT REEDER OKLAHOMA CITY — Tom Milam’s fondest recollections of ‘Uncle Will’ are when he visited Tom’s grandmother in Chelsea and stopped at his parents' wherever they were living and — Tom’s own visits to the Santa Monica ranch.      The son of William Walker Milam and Maude Irene McSpadden, Tom, 86, lives in Oklahoma City. His mother was the daughter of John Thomas and Sallie Clementine Rogers McSpadden.      Milam’s family says he inherited his great-uncle’s wit and humor as well as his love of flying. He has a degree in aeronautical engineering and is a licensed pilot. He also shares the family dedication. His only sibling, Walter Mortlock (Mort), died in 1934.      Tom was one of the kids in the family who flew with Capt. Dixon, Hal Roach’s (Roach was a movie producer) pilot when the first Claremore airport opened.      “It was a Orion six-place monoplane. The kids were ferried back and forth to Tulsa. Capt. Dixon was killed in a crash of Hal Roach’s Lockheed Ryan. I never met Hal Roach, but met his pilots.”      The Milams lived in Chelsea until the year Tom started school. He would run away and go to his grandmother’s house. His earliest recollections of his uncle were his visits to Sallie McSpadden’s house.      “We would go to the ranch,” he reflected, also remembering the visits and talks with “Uncle Herb about the ranch.” His mother’s brother, Herb McSpadden, managed the ranch for Will Rogers.      “On Sundays they roped goats, a past time of the community. They would rope them, then round them up, put them in the pen and rope them again,” he said with a chuckle. He fondly remembered his mother in those days riding horses on the ranch where she grew up.      When he was about 12, Tom’s family visited the Rogerses’ California ranch where they stayed in guest quarters in the garage.      “Uncle Will would be up about 5 or 6 to go to the studio, come home for lunch, then saddle up and rope until dinner time in the arena at the ranch.” Tom learned to rope with his uncle, who also taught his father how to rope.      He remembers Will as in “superb athletic shape, a fine horseman.      “The most quiet I ever saw him was when he was reading the paper. And he read all the papers he could get his hands on.”      Tom was in Lake Tahoe on location when Will was making a movie. “Uncle Will was performing and the director saw him wink at me. He thought I was somebody and invited me to sit by him,” Milam said, grinning.      Will’s relationship with his friends and family was always the same, no matter the fame and fortune. ‘     When he was in Oklahoma City, he would stay with us, or when he was in Chelsea, we’d go visit my grandmother,” Milam said. “He would always stop where he had relatives, and he knew them all. He was very, very kind. We were all close personally.”      All the family was hospitable. “Grandmother’s house was always open. Our family learned that from Grandmother Sallie.”      Tom said Will would have pilots land in a field across from his parents' place in Oklahoma City. “There is a picture of my father with me at a plane when I was about six months old.      “During barnstorming days I wanted to fly,” he said remembering those early days. He learned to fly in 1938 and earned his degree in aeronautical engineering at the University of Oklahoma. He joined Boeing on Monday prior to World War II and spent the war years working for Boeing, test flying and working on design and aerodynamics.      When Will visited his grandmother Sallie, Tom would go with him to file his daily telegrams. “We would go to the train station where he filed everything collect,” he remembered with a laugh. “I still see him sitting with the typewriter on his knees writing his report and my grandmother and mother cooking beans and making lemon pie.”      Tom’s family lived in Coffeyville and Caney, Kan., while his father was building cotton gins in Coffeyville, Caney and Wayside. They went to Texas with ITIO Oil, then returned to Oklahoma City. Tom went to school at Caney and Classen High in Oklahoma City and followed his Uncle Will to Kemper Military Academy.      When Will visited the Milams in Oklahoma City, he would notify his friends and they would stop by. “People like Bob Crosby (a champion roper with Chelsea roots) stopped by with his horse and trailer and spent the night. Some of my friends were interested in Will Rogers and I’d take the boys to meet him.      “I remember riding my bike home from school and Uncle Will would be sitting in the living room.”      Tom was often Will’s driver when he would be in town. “We would drive down the street and he would see somebody loafing he knew. We would stop and he would go talk. He was truly interested in what they were doing and what was happening.”      Tom’s first time to drive outside Chelsea was when he was about 11. “Uncle Bogue’s [Maurice Rogers “Bogue” McSpadden] train was stopping in Vinita. Grandmother decided we would go meet him. She got pillows for me to set on so I could see."      Will was generous with his family. Even as far back as 1902 when he was in Argentina, he sent gifts and wrote his sisters from Buenos Aires to “tell the children that I will try and bring them something.…” The gifts he sent his sisters were admired by their friends.      “There were Christmas gifts for all the nieces and nephews and grand-nieces and grand-nephews,” according to Milam. “Sisters and nieces and nephews got cars, my class got $100.”      He remembers his grandmother receiving a set of china from “Uncle Will. He picked it out himself. It was beautiful. He always bought his own gifts.”      More than gifts and money, Tom Milam remembers the compassion Will had for his family. “Aunt Paula, who would never give any quarter although crippled by polio, was brought up to think she could do anything. And that’s the way she lived and died. She never knew when Uncle Will had her to come to California to take care of his children, it was a ruse to get her there to see a doctor.” (Note: Paula McSpadden Love, Tom’s mother’s sister, was the first manager of the Claremore Will Rogers Museum, a position she held from opening in 1938 until her death in 1973.)      Growing up, the Rogers cousins didn’t get to spend much time together, but Tom remembers Jim visiting and sleeping on the front porch at the homeplace ranch. “Before the sun came up, flies would get after us and we had to hide under the covers. Jim was a character.”      Tom said the Oklahoma cousins were always well dressed. “Aunt Betty would send her family’s outgrown clothes to grandmother. We always had good top coats, top coats with fur collars.”      One of his prized possessions is a hand-me-down — a leather coat Will used for roping which he gave him in the early 1930s.      “I wore it to high school. He wore it working cattle and it was bloody,” he said proudly.      “Aunt Betty” was just as popular with the family as her husband. Milam’s favorite Aunt Betty story is a train trip to California. “She was reading a book about Will Rogers when a gentleman seated nearby started talking about Will and how well he knew him.      “‘She laughed when she told her family. Asked why she didn’t tell him she was Will’s wife, she said ‘he’d think I was lying just the way he was.’”      Tom Milam is much traveled, but he’s still very much at home in Rogers County. As a boy and after he had his own family, he has attended events in Claremore that dealt with Will Rogers.      He and Betty Virginia Skogsberg were married in 1943 in Wichita. She died in 1995. They have eight children.