He led a life like few others could have dreamed: from a child of the prairie to the world traveller, an adult on the world’s stage, to screens throughout the world. He managed to be born twenty-one years before the turn of the twentieth century, and he died in the year he had turned fifty-five, but his words and images kept living, as strings of quips and stories poured forth from him, written and spoken in the ways of deepest Oklahoma Territory.
Now, on that rare cool summer day, when the clouds are all the many phases of black colors, from cold burned silhouettes of the darkest blues, to the stones from the earth that made this memorial, through the glass of almost a hundred years of age that can let what sun has been able to carry its weight burn through and the vision of his clothes changes, the shadow falls across his right cheek and eye, and the light of the building creates its place across the fullness of his heart.
William Penn Adair Rogers still stands, and appears to look out the doors to the future of the world, the little half grin of Will Rogers and his calmness keep him here .
Ralph Peck
Photo by Ralph Peck
Will Rogers Memorial and Museum
Claremore, Oklahoma
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