News of death spreads to Will’s family

Wiley Post’s watch stopped shortly before noon our time on Aug. 15, 1935. But it would be the next day before word got back to the United States that Will Rogers and Wiley Post had died in a plane crash in the shallow waters of the Arctic Ocean.      A great family man despite the time his profession kept him from his home, one of Will’s last acts was handing Joe Crosson a telegram to his daughter Mary, who was playing in summer stock in Maine. “Great Trip. Wish you were all along. How’s your acting? You and Mama wire me all the news to Nome. Going to Point Barrow today. Furthest point on land on whole American continent. Lots of Love, Don’t Worry, “Dad”      Will’s wife Betty and her sister had gone to Maine to be with Mary. Reading the telegram, Betty was still hoping he had decided to fly about Alaska a while, then join her in Maine.      If he went to Moscow they agreed she would meet him somewhere, possibly in Moscow.      She was planning to fly back to California, pack and start for Europe.      She was telling this to a man who lived near their Maine cottage when the Lakewood Theatre manager drove up and spoke to her sister.      He carried the bad news.      In “The Papers of Will Rogers,” edited by Arthur Frank Wertheim and Barbara Blair, it was Humphrey Bogart who broke the news. He was playing in Ceiling Zero with Mary and heard the news and rushed to the cottage were Mary and her mother were staying.      Mary immediately left the cast of the play, which had been open only one day.      Jimmy and his cousin, Jimmy Blake, had been working on the Ewing Halsell ranch in Amherst, Texas, and were driving to Maine. Bill was in California about to leave on a Standard Oil tanker for the Philippine Islands.      It was a different trip back to California for the family going home to mourn the man who wrote in April “my geography comes from an airplane window.”      Although he never piloted a plan, Will Rogers was honored in 2003 at the Paris Air Show and inducted into the Aviation Week’s “Top 200 Stars of Aerospace” in a poll of members in the International Council of Aeronautical Sciences and its U.S. Affiliate.      From a field of 760 candidates, Will Rogers was in 46th place in a list led by Wilbur and Orville W right. His name ranks with astronauts, Southwest Airlines Herb Kelleher, Eddie Rickenbacher, Gen. James Doolittle (he was in Claremore in 1979 for Will Rogers 100th anniversary celebration), Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart, Will’s great-niece Betty Pauline Stine was a pioneer woman aviator. The granddaughter of Mary (May) Rogers and Frank Stine and daughter of Jacob Edward (Jake) Stine and Mary Allen, her father lived with Aunt Maude and Cap Lane in Chelsea after his mother died in 1909.      Betty, an only child was born 1922 in Texas named for Betty Rogers and Pauline McSpadden Love, was a member of Women’s Air Service Pilot (WASP) program and the first WASP to be granted a uniform.      She died in 1944 after parachuting from her burning plane.      In “Will Rogers,” by Betty Blake Rogers, she writes of Will’s first flight.      It was 1915. He was playing a vaudeville engagement in Atlantic City and Glen Curtiss was offering flights in “flying boat” moored off the Boardwalk. Passengers were carried to the plane on the back of an attendant who waded through the water.      “Will watched day after day, but courage failed him,” she wrote.      On the last day of his engagement, he bought a $5 ticket. Mary watched him being carried out, then saw the excitement on his face when he landed. He had his picture taken in the plane.      It was the beginning of a love affair with airplanes and pilots. He never missed a chance to fly. His heroes were pilots like Wiley and Lindbergh.      The first time he met Lindbergh was after his transatlantic flight. Will said, “… you have one record I think will remain unsurpassed right on down through the ages. You are the only man who ever took a ham sandwich to Paris.”      The next day he took his first ride with Lindbergh.      Will might have liked calf roping best of all the things he did, but flying was moving up the chain of favorites.      A lot of the last year of his life was spent in the air, flitting from New Orleans to New York to Chicago, Memphis, Arizona and Washington. From cold and snow back to Beverly Hills and Santa Monica, even a stop in Claremore and Tulsa in April.      In a telegram sent from Tulsa he said “ All I know is what I read in the Claremore Progress. Towns booming, fine aeroplane field all lighted, Oklahoma Military Academy,, best polo team in the country … The sweetest town in the U.S. Government loaning farmers enough to get teams, seed oats or corn and a milk cow. That don’t seem such a terribly nutty scheme.”      He made several trips with Wiley before August. They visited Waite Phillips ranch in New Mexico, flew “over, down and through” the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam’s new Lake, then back to California.      While he was working on “Steamboat Round the Bend” in the summer of 1935, Wiley and Mrs. Post went to LA.      Wiley had hatched up the idea of surveying and establishing a mail and passenger air route between the United States and Russia, one which would avoid the hazards of a long flight over the Pacific by taking the Alaska to Asia land route. He had sold the idea to one of the big airlines, which at the last minute decided it didn’t want the survey.      Wiley was still determined to make the trip and planned to put pontoons on his new plane and fly from Nome over the Bering Sea and on across Siberia.      Will had missed out on flying over Siberia the year before when he and his family had to cross by train. He saw a chance to make up for his disappointment.      Although she really didn’t want him to go — Betty was uneasy about the Siberian flight — she tried to be happy about it.      During his packing when she was in and out of the room he told her he “flipped a coin” and it was heads, he won. The trip was on.      His last afternoon at home was spent at a polo game and roping calves on ranch, having supper with Bill, then attending a rodeo before going to the airport where he took a plane to San Francisco.      He last spoke to Betty on Thursday, Aug. 8, about noon before taking off for Juneau, still not definite about going.      The Sunday morning he left they rode over the ranch trails and to a little log cabin they built in the hills. She tried to persuade him to postpone his trip and camp for the night, but he said, “no, let’s wait until I come back.”      It was to his little cabin Betty and her children fled for some private time after Will’s funeral in California.