The Will Rogers Statue

This bronze figure of Will Rogers was sculpted by the noted artist Jo Davidson and, according to the marker, given to Oklahoma City by the businessman Sylvan Goldman, the man who invented the shopping cart. It stands at the airport that bears Rogers' name.

Will Rogers was Oklahoma's favorite son, born on a Cherokee ranch in eighteen seventy-nine. He started as a trick roper in vaudeville and grew into the most beloved humorist in America, a newspaper columnist, radio voice, and movie star who gently needled politicians and famously said he never met a man he did not like. He died in nineteen thirty-five in a plane crash in Alaska, alongside the aviator Wiley Post, and the whole country mourned. Davidson's likeness of him was so admired that another casting stands in the United States Capitol representing Oklahoma.