| Summary: | Death in the Arctic Death in the Arctic North over hard, dry hummocks of wasteland to Point Barrow, Alaska one night last week trotted a lone Eskimo. In three hours Clair Oakpeha covered 15 miles. Finally he stopped, exhausted, at the door ol the U. S. Signal Corps station. Out stepped Sergeant Stanley Morgan. 'Bird men," gasped the native runner. "Dead." Sergeant Morgan stared at him. "Red bird," the Eskimo persisted, "Smashed." Sergeant Morgan ducked inside, called Dr. Henry Greist, Superintendent of the Presbyterian Mission Hospital. The tale the native runner panted out was hardly credible. Yet it might be true. Out into the Arctic night went Sergeant Morgan and a native crew in a whaleboat. equipped with an outboard motor. Through bad, murky weather, all mist and fog, they put-putted southward across little ponds and up small streams. Few hours later they made out a splotch of red colored wreckage in the river a quarter- mile ahead near the Eskimo village of Walkpi. They landed, found a little group of natives huddled about a sleeping bag. On the ground, under the sleeping bag, lay the body of Will Rogers, his legs broken, his skull crushed. By his Ingersoll pocket watch, still ticking, it was 3:30 a. m. The shattered plane lay on its back in two feet of water, its right wing smashed, its engine crushed back into the cockpit. Pinned inside was the body of Wiley Post. Someone found a flashlight in the cabin, outlined the wreckage in its small glare. Finally Eskimo villagers pried the ship apart, got Post's body out. A shattered wrist watch had stopped at 8:18 p. m. Both bodies were wrapped in blankets, placed in a native umiak to be towed to point Barrow. From Will Rogers' coat pocket fell a newspaper clipping, a picture of his 18-year-old Daughter Mary, playing in Maine in a summer theatre performance of Ceiling Zero, which has for its climax a fatal airplane crash. At Point Barrow the bodies were placed in the tiny Mission Hospital. Then Sergeant Morgan went to his radio station to tell the world about the end of an Arctic holiday of which Will Rogers had written: "We are sure having a great time. . . . You know who I bet would like to be on this trip? Mr. Roosevelt." At his Hyde Park home Franklin D. Roosevelt solemnly expressed his profound shock and grief at the loss of his "old friend." In Washington Vice President Garner said: "That is awful bad. I can't talk about it. . . ." In the Senate uprose Majority Leader Robinson to quaver: "Probably the most widely known citizen of the United States and certainly the best beloved met his death some hours ago in a lonely and far away place. . . . Peace to them." That night over a nation wide hook-up Senators, Congressmen, aviation and radio celebrities joined in a memorial broadcast to two of Oklahoma's favorite sons. Big, tough Colonel Roscoe Turner wept into the microphone. In Fairbanks Author Rex Beach said: "This is the blackest day Alaska has known." In Wall Street "the stock of Fox Films, which had just agreed to pay Will Rogers $8000 a week, sold off 1 1/4 points. Month ago Wiley Post abandoned his famed Winnie Mae for a faster, low-wing Lockheed. It was a hybrid ship, with the wings of a cracked-up Sirius, the fuselage of a damaged Orion. He planned to fly it on a leisurely pleasure trip to Siberia, had it fitted with pontoons at Seattle. Funny man Rogers joined him at the last minute. Their plans were vague. It was to be a vacation trip by easy stages, possibly around the world, with Rogers paying the expenses and lots of stops for hunting and fishing. Fortnight ago Post and Rogers reached Juneau in their synthetic Lockheed, flew on to Dawson, Aklavik, Fairbanks, Anchorage. They visited the Government's Matanuska Valley farm colony, were on their way to Point Barrow when they came down one evening in a river near an Eskimo camp to inquire their way. Post tinkered the motor and after dining ashore with the natives, they took off for the ten- minute flight to Point Barrow. The plane had soared about 50 ft. when the motor sputtered. Post banked steeply to the right in a desperate effort to get back to the river. But the ship, loggy with the drag of its bulky pontoons, lost flying speed. Out of control, it fell off on one wing, crashed heavily on the river bank. From Point Barrow Chief Pilot Joe Crosson of Pan American's Pacific Alaska Airways took off in a transport plane with the bodies wrapped in blankets, strapped to cots. The embalming, begun at Point Barrow by Dr. Greist, was completed at Fairbanks. Then Pilot Crosson flew on to Seattle where a change was made to a large Douglas for the trip to Los Angeles. Meanwhile Will Rogers Jr. flew from California to New York to escort his mother, brother and sister back across the continent for the Rogers funeral at Los Angeles. Like Will Rogers, Charles Curtis, Mrs. Edith Gait Wilson, Eugene Luther Vidal. Tom Mix and many another noted U. S. citizen, Wiley Post was part Indian. Born 36 years ago on a Texas farm, he was raised in the Indian Territory oil fields, showed an early mechanical bent. One day a red-hot steel splinter flew into his left eye, blinded it. Given $1,800 disability compensation, he promptly bought an old "Canuck," was soon barnstorming the Southwest. In Sweetwater, Tex., he met & married a pretty 17-year-old girl named Mae Laine who regarded him and his occupation with a wide-eyed enthusiasm not shared by her rancher father. Year later Wiley Post took a job as aerial chauffeur for Oilman Florence C. Hall who had bought a Lockheed Vega monoplane, called it Winnie Mae after his daughter. When one-eyed Pilot Post had piled up 700 hours air time, the Department of Commerce gave him a physical waiver and a license. In 1930 Oilman Hall bought a new Lockheed Vega also called Winnie Mae. In that ship Post quickly got national attention by winning the 1930 Bendix Trophy Race, scooting from Los Angeles to Chicago non-stop in 9 hr. 9 min. With laconic Australian Harord Gatty as avigator, Wiley Post made his first round-the-world flight in 1931 in 8 days 15 hr. 51 min. Two years later, embittered over his failure to get rich, he took off on his second round-the-world flight-alone, without even a parachute or life-raft. Seven days 18 hr. 49 1/2 min. later he was back in New York. Airmen the world over agree it was the outstanding individual feat in aviation history, second to none. This year, after lapsing into comparative obscurity, he devised an oxygenated "stratosphere suit." tried four times to cross the continent in record time at high altitude. After the fourth failure he abandoned his five-year-old Winnie Mae, bought the hybrid plane which last week brought him death. Into that luckless craft, had gone his last cent. When at 55, he was killed last week, William Penn Adair Rogers was worth about $3,000,000 including nearly $1,000,000 in life insurance. Part Cherokee, he was born in Oologah, Indian Territory, adopted Claremore, Okla. as his hometown. In school he was backward ("I spent ten years on McGuffey's Fourth Reader"). He got the rudiments of education at Kemper Military Academy, had little use for books ("All the fiction I ever read is in the newspapers"). His father, a well-to-do rancher, helped draft the constitution of Oklahoma, had a county named for him. When his parents set him up with a cattle ranch, son Will sold it, went off to South America where he broke horses for British cavalrymen to use in the Boer War, later joined a traveling Wild West show. An appearance in Madison Square Garden led to a small-time vaudeville career in 1904. He developed an incidental patter to build up his act, soon became more monologist than lasso artist. Spotted by a Ziegfeld agent, he was long starred in the Follies. ("Shucks, I can't act. I just act natural.") Never a great success in silent pictures, Rogers broke box-office records in such talkies as Judge Priest, State Fair, David Harum, became Hollywood's highest-paid actor. ("I'm entirely different from the other movie stars, I still got the wife I started out with.") Since 1928 he had flown half a million miles, constantly boosted air travel in patter and paragraph. ("I bet a lot of guys will be on my neck saying some airplane company paid me a lot of money to knock the railroads.") In the course of a round-the-world trip in 1932 he flew over Manchuria, India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Palestine. Same year he made 15,000 mi. air tour of South America. Wherever he was, he managed to wire his daily newspaper column which began with an unsolicited cable to the New York Times from London in 1926, and paid him $3,000 a week. Five years ago he wrote, "When I die my epitaph, or whatever you call those signs on gravestones, is going to read: 'I joke about every prominent man of my time, but I never met a man I didn't like.' I am proud of that. I can hardly wait to die so it can be carved. And when you come around to my grave you'll probably find me sitting there proudly reading it"
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