Memorial staff, docents visit Will Rogers High School
Will Rogers Memorial celebrated a 70th birthday in 2008. Will Rogers High School in Tulsa is celebrating a 70th birthday this year.
Each second Monday night during the school year of 2009, Will Rogers students and staff will host an open house and tours of the school, built in Public Works Administration days of a construction quality perhaps never again available. The art deco structure is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places.
Surprisingly for a school building, the floors and walls of the original structure are in the same mint condition as the day the school opened.
About half the group gathered for the second of the open house tours included staff from Will Rogers Memorial Museums and Will Rogers Ropers, docents who volunteer at the Claremore Memorial and Will Rogers Ranch.
Touring a Tulsa historical high school
Tulsa’s Will Rogers High School is celebrating a 70th anniversary in 2009 and hosting “second Monday” tours of the art deco building listed on the National Registry of Historic Places. Will Rogers Memorial staff and docents touring the school, led by high school docent Iesha Smith, included Linda Bradshaw (from left) Gene Lloyd (left), Mary Lee Spinks, Judy Eagleton and Hoytanna Benigar. Lynette Bennett, a WRHS grad who performs a one-woman show of Betty Rogers, and her husband, Warren Danskin, were in the group.
There are many commonalities between the school and the Claremore Memorial. The high school, inside and out, is built with museum qualities from the floors to light fixtures.
When the high school was built, grazing cattle surrounded it.
When the Memorial was built on the hillside, it was in a rural setting.
High School students are known as Ropers.
Docents at the museum are called Ropers.
Dr. Raymond Knight, Will Rogers High School principal, served on the Will Rogers Memorial Commission from 1963 until his death in 1978. He served two terms as chairman.
Dr. Knight served on the board with Col. Lee Gilstrap, father of Mary Lee Gilstrap Spinks, a Will Rogers Roper docent, who attended the open house with her husband.
Lucky
Will Rogers nose on the bust in Tulsa Will Rogers High School entry hall is shiny from “good luck” rubs like the toe of his shoe in the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore. Memorial docent Carlene Webber takes that extra chance.
Will Rogers High School has its own docents who lead the school tours.
The high school has an auditorium that outpaces most auditoriums, even those where Will played on Broadway.
Two Will Rogers Memorial employees attended Will Rogers High.
Museum docents are Will Rogers High graduates. WRHS docents Iesha Smith and Phycilia Walker were tour leaders for the museum staff-docents visit.
The iron trimmed light fixtures in both buildings are of similar design.
Bob Hope appeared at both facilities.
Walls of the school are lined with huge reproductions of the life of Will Rogers; many of the same are on display at the Claremore museum.
On stage
Just one of the “wow” factors of Tulsa’s Will Rogers High School is the auditorium, where Kristina Vassella presides over the schools’ theater presentations. Linda Bradshaw (from left), a Will Rogers Memorial docent and WRHS graduate, joins Vassella and school docent Iesha Smith, Gene Lloyd, museum docent and WRHS graduate, and (back) Lynette Bennett and her husband, Warren Danskin. Bennett, a WRHS graduate, performs a one-woman show “His Wife Betty’s Story.”
Tom Lingenfelter, former Claremore man whose mother witnessed the groundbreaking and opening of the Claremore museum 70 years ago, taught at Will Rogers High and married Judy Kirk, a former Roper, who also taught there.
All the marble, granite and terrazzo — the remarkable art deco building — is a compliment to the memory of Will Rogers and special to those students who have walked those halls.
Library (crop lady on right)
Gene Lloyd, Will Rogers Memorial Museums docent, recounts his days in Tulsa’s Will Rogers High School library for fellow docents Mary Lee Spinks and Carlene Webber as they tour the 70 year-old building.
(Editor’s note: Second Monday tours, 6:30-8 p.m. at the school, 3909 E. 5th Place, will continue through the 2009 school year.)