LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Will Rogers: Father
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Rogers was born in New York City. He grew up in Beverly Hills, California due to his father's involvement in the motion picture industry and attended school there. He received the Bachelor of Arts degree from Stanford University in 1935. Upon completion of his studies, he served as publisher of the Beverly Hills Citizen newspaper, a role in which he continued until 1953. He ... was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Reserve Officers' Training Corps. However, upon U.S. entry into World War II, he decided to enlist as a private in June 1942, but was commissioned in the field artillery the next month and assigned to the 893rd Tank Destroyer Battalion.
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Rogers's father Clem had been a small town banker, so there may have been some Oedipal rejections in Will's negative appraisal of that vocation. The real blame for the Depression, he thought, lay with the big bankers who were a target of many Western social critics (WA, Vol. 5, 136). President Roosevelt's first act was to close all the banks, and Rogers said it was a good thing he acted quickly because he beat the depositors to it by about twenty-four hours ( Vol. 6, 6). Instead of being criticized, Roosevelt should have been praised for saving American banking. He allowed the solvent banks (and most of them were) to sort out from the overextended. A few days later, FDR gave a fireside chat.
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Rogers had a minor career as an actor and was most noted for playing his father (whom he closely resembled), particularly in The Story of Will Rogers (1952). He ... appeared frequently in the 1950s television anthology, Schlitz Playhouse of Stars. He was also one of several actors to host reruns of Death Valley Days, with the episodes that he hosted airing under the title The Pioneers. For one season in 1958 he was host of the CBS morning show and was replaced by Jimmy Dean.
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Rogers left Kemper Military School in Boonville, Missouri at the age of eighteen and relocated to a ranch in Higgins, Texas. In Texas-and later in New Mexico and California-Rogers lived a cowboy's life. He "rode seven days a week, rounding up cattle, roping and branding calves, as happy as a teen-age boy could be, with a horse and saddle and bedroll of his own, working with seasoned cowhands for $30 a month" (Ketchum, 45). Rogers eventually returned to his father's ranch in Oklahoma. In 1899, Rogers traveled to St. Louis, where he participated in a roping-and-riding contest. According to Rogers, this was "the beginning of his show business career" (Ketchum, 62).
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Will was, according to his father and his father’s standards, wild and irresponsible. He had learned roping as a child and became quite an expert with a lasso, constantly practicing more and more difficult tricks. He was ... quite an adept wrangler and cowboy.
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