Since 1944, the year the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo moved permanently from the North Side Coliseum, the Will Rogers Memorial Center has been reserved for the three weeks in January and into February for the historic Stock Show and Rodeo.
The promoters don’t embellish when they say it’s legendary. The Will Rogers Memorial Center is a special place, named in honor of a special person.
Will Rogers wasn’t from Fort Worth, but his could easily be the face of the city.
“I never met a man I didn’t like,” synonymous with Will, should be the city’s motto.
For this man of action, rodeo was his preference in sporting events.
When his death was inevitable, his companions all said at the time, Will Rogers was not frightened. “That word was not in his vocabulary.”
His favorite dish was chili con carne.
That about checks all of the boxes to being a Fort Worth citizen.
Will Rogers was a jewel, the philosopher from Oklahoma, who used his cowboy charm — his shows always included him twirling a rope — to captivate audiences and deliver witticisms and observations that are as relevant today as they were in the 1930s.
His was no Hollywood act, but genuine sincerity.
“We shouldn’t elect a President; we should elect a magician.”
“Remember, write to your Congressman. Even if he can’t read, write to him.”
“A fool and his money are soon elected.”
Sadly, many of his cultural contributions are long forgotten. Like Plato, he should live forever.
After his death in a plane crash in Alaska in August 1935, the testimonials came pouring in. Rogers’ life was, one wrote, “unsoiled by the greed of profits. A life, unspoiled by the accumulation of the world’s appreciation. A life, based on the simple philosophy of fellowship and faith.”
More than a memorial to one man, the Will Rogers Memorial Center is a monument to something so much bigger and consequential: loyalty, love, and friendship.
“Your going to Seattle was the … most comforting thing of all the loving things that was done for him,” Rogers’ wife Betty wrote Amon Carter only weeks after Will’s death. The letter is among Carter’s papers stored at TCU. “No one but you could have thought of this and how I love you for it. All those long hours my thoughts were with you. I do want you to know how deeply touched we were and how each one of us appreciate your warm affection and sincere friendship for him.
“He loved you.”
Carter and Will had been intimates for more than 15 years at the time of death.
“I do not suppose there is anyone he really dislikes,” Carter wrote. “I am positive there is none he hates. Hate is absolutely foreign to his nature. That is the reason he can say such cutting things, point out such obvious truths, josh the biggest about their mistakes and frailties, without leaving a sting. The shots hit home, but they leave no sting, for those hit know there is no malice behind them.”
The Will Rogers Memorial Center was constructed for Fort Worth’s Texas Centennial celebration in 1936. The city, through Carter’s network, received Depression-era program funding for the project. Postmaster James Farley flippantly told President Franklin Roosevelt that Carter wanted a grant because “Amon wants to build a cowshed.”
It takes a politician to know bull leavings.
The complex was not built to be a memorial to Rogers, though it could have been in the back of Amon Carter’s mind. Who knows? The City Council had tossed around the idea of naming it for him.
To the president, probably Hoover, Rogers appealed for help for a former classmate who was in jail in Arizona. The classmate had been busted for possession of mescal, which Rogers called “the staff of life in that country.”
“I guess the usual procedure is to say that he didn’t do a thing in the world and shouldn’t be there. But I expect he did; it’s not a case of mistaken identity, as nobody else looks like him, but he is not a bad fellow. And like all fellows that get in trouble, he has a family, and they need him worse than the jail does.”
Moreover, this guy would actually be welcomed home by his wife, making him a bit of a novelty for a recent jailbird, Rogers continued. Furthermore, if his friend were released from the pokey, Will guaranteed that he would go on a “Coca-Cola diet and vote the straight Republican ticket.”
The Will Rogers Memorial Center was public money well spent, a worthy home for the Stock Show and Rodeo for almost 80 years.
We should never forget what it and “sweet, old Will” represent.