Entertainer Will Rogers made America laugh through the Great Depression—not easy. But his brush with Alaska left no one laughing.
Rogers did radio shows, he appeared on other people’s radio shows. He wrote columns for newspapers. He appeared in movies. Sometimes he just made it up. But the consummate entertainer made people laugh.
Almost as famous as Will, his close friend Wiley Post didn’t entertain people. Wiley Post flew airplanes; flew them better than any other pilot alive. The first pilot to make a solo flight around the world, Post also worked on high altitude flying; developed one of the first pressure suits.
Link to Another Story “Bush Pilots in Canada”
And he discovered the jet stream.
When, in August 1935, Rogers decided to see Siberia, he couldn’t have chosen a better pilot than Wiley Post. On the way Rogers had socializing to do. When they stopped in Fairbanks, Alaska, Rogers “bummed around being the entertainer, making friends”—and of course he made Alaskans laugh.
He clearly liked Fairbanks.
When the duo flew away from Fairbanks, they aimed at Point Barrow on the Arctic coast, but bad weather forced them to land about fifteen miles short of their destination to get oriented. When they took off again, the engine died, the plane crashed and both men died instantly.
Will Rogers left his last newspaper column rolled in his typewriter. He wrote of his meeting with dog musher Leonhard Seppala who “is as identified with dogs as Mae West is with buxomness.”
Much of the information in this story comes from the book Fairbanks by Dermot Cole.