Will Rogers Tells Us

Everybody who lives in my commune would know who Will Rogers was because we are all old.  For everyone else I will tell you that in the 1920s and '30s he was a national celebrity of Oprah Winfrey magnitude.  Big, big enchilada.

Rogers was a Cherokee citizen born in 1879 in the Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, in what is now the state of Oklahoma.  His father was a hard-working, prosperous ranch owner who had fought as a Confederate officer in the Civil War and was himself an owner of slaves. Both his parents, Clem and Mary, had Cherokee blood.

Of all the Indian tribes, the Cherokees were the most successful at adapting to the White American culture.  They adopted American names.  They became farmers and ranchers.  They believed in education. In their nation they adopted American political structures and even wrote their own constitution. Rogers took great pride in his Indian heritage although he rarely referred to it in his professional life.

Will was riding horses when he was 3 and his father  hired a man to lift him on and off the saddles.  Like his father, Will did not find schools to his liking and only attended for a short time.  While his father was a gruff, humorless, but savvy business man, his mother was well educated, witty and charming.  It was from mother Mary that Will Rogers inherited his charismatic talent to become a national, iconic, celebrity.  He delivered Mark Twain-like monologues. He acted in movies (silent and talkies). He wrote newspaper columns (the editor of the New York Times instructed those working on Roger's copy to change nothing in his spelling, sentence construction, or punctuation).  He performed lariat rope routines in the Ziegfeld Follies.

In 1935 Rogers was filing copy on a ten-day flying tour of Alaska with his pilot friend, Wiley Post, when their plane went down near Point Barrow, Alaska.  Both men died in the crash.  America went into a shocked state of national mourning for the beloved cowboy humorist and schools all over America adopted his name.

Let's give the last word to Will:

             Live in such a way that you would not be ashamed to sell your parrot to the town gossip.

.

Hear Will Rogers

I don't belong to an
organized political 
party, I'm a democrat.

Will Rogers Says

Everybody is ignorant
only on different
subjects.

Advice From Will Rogers

An onion can make
you cry but there's
no vegetable that
can make you
laugh.

Kid Days

Lately my thoughts have drifted back to my pre-teen years on that farm seven miles west of Grants Pass where my best pals were the Wardrip brothers, Bob and Lee; Bob my age and Lee two years older. Yeah, the ones with whom I went on that spelunking fiasco.

One time we started playing with hoops, using those metal rings barrel makers used to hold the barrel's staves in place. We would cut a three foot long stick from a board and then nail a piece of lath about five inches long crosswise to the end of the stick making it a T-device for driving the hoop as we ran behind it. We drove those hoops for miles.

One day we went hooping with some beer bottles to the Applegate Tavern where each one would net us a nickel which we would immediately spend on candy bars carried by the tavern. It was necessary to cross a narrow highway bridge over the Applegate River to get to the tavern so driving the hoops over the bridge was too dangerous. There was a high bank at the entrance to the bridge and we would throw our hoops up to the top of the bank and then walk across the bridge. This time Lee and I were successful in getting our hoops to the top of the bank, but Bob didn't release his in time and it went flying back over his head right into the windshield of a farm truck approaching the bridge. Loud sound of shattering glass.

The driver couldn't stop on the bridge but he pulled off on the other end and came running back shouting as us. He was using adult language. We knew it was in our best self-interest to not discuss what happened with an angry farmer, so we scrambled up the bank and went running through the woods to escape his vengeful justice. We did feel guilty about the unfortunate accident but considered the loss of our beer bottles and the consequent loss of the Mounds chocolate bars to be payment for our sins.

The whole thing pretty well cooled our enthusiasm for hooping and we never went back to it.

Robert W. Service, Yukon Gold

I know, I know. His critics say his stuff is not poetry.  They call it doggerel and even Robert W. Service himself said he wrote verse, not poetry. So, whatever you call it, its lowbrow.  And I love it. So it rhymes.  So what?  From The Cremation of Sam McGee:  "...He turns to me and Cap, says he, I'll cash in this trip I guess and if I do, I'm asking you won't refuse my last request. Well, he seemed so low I couldn't say no, then he says with sort of  moan: yet 'taint being dead -- it's my awful dread of the icy grave that pains..."

That's from memory...a few words may be wrong.  Anyway, I consider Service to be someone I envy for his talent in making his own kind of music, critics be damned.  So I let RWS's spirit guide my fingers on the keys when I write lowbrow stuff.  Like this unfinished country western song (Netarts is a small community west of Tillamook, Oregon).

My sweetheart's in Netarts and I'm in the slam,

I shouldna done what I did.

With smokin' and drinkin' and now here I am

From actin' like some half-ass kid.

(to be continued)

Once I complete the libretto I will have to find somebody to compose the music or maybe find something in the public domain so no royalty issues would be involved.  I considered the Star Spangled Banner but it just didn't feel right.  So that goes into the ToDo bucket.

My Russellville home is celebrating April's poetry month and has invited contributions from the inmates. Here is my submission:

Save the Rose Garden

We've lived year by year with terrible fear

Of bombs raining down from the sky

But now the real fear, it seems to appear

Is breath from that next to us guy.

We slink to our rooms and stare at the walls

The TV feeds unending gloom

Loop after loop, walking the halls

So it seems our future is doom.

Our years we are told, suggest we are old

In truth that is hard to deny

But hear what we say before we go cold

We're still here, we're not dead, watch us fly.

Hey, some of Shakespeare's early stuff wasn't all that grand either.  Of course, he was only three.

Scotty Drops His Wrench

In one of my father's episodes of syncopation (irregular movement from bar to bar), he met the big Scotsman with whom he shared an adventure when they both wore a younger man's clothes. Although they never crossed paths at the time, they were both soldiers in the army of the United States fighting the Moros in the Philippine Insurrection of 1902.  That formed a bond between the two old vets so when it turned out we needed some plumbing work done, the man my father called was his old comrade in arms, Scotty the plumber.

The plumbing issue was under the floor of the house that required going into the crawl space, which had only about two feet of clearance.  Scotty said that was no problem and he crawled in on his back dragging an extension cord with a light fixture and his pipe wrench.  My father and I were crouched down outside the access hole, ready to give any assistance that might be needed.

Scotty had just started work when he suddenly started screaming and shrieking extreme curse words as he began a violent back-crawling to the exit hole.  When finally making it out he leapt to his feet, clutching his crotch with his right hand.

A rat had crawled up his pants leg and when the plumber felt the rodent moving he started screaming (wouldn't you?) and clutched the invader just as it reached the jewel box. One thing Scotty would not do is release his hold on the rat. But one thing he would do is get the hell out of there using his left arm and both legs and his butt-lifts to make that happen. All the while screaming and cursing and banging his head.

Once out of the hole Scotty yelled at my father to unhook his overalls and pull them down while he still clutched the rodent. But the rat was done for, sent to its after-life reward by the pressure of Scotty's grip.  The plumber told my father that was it for the day so they talked me into retrieving  Scotty's wrench that was still under the house.

He should have worn his kilt.