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Shows the connection between play and America’s democratic ideals.

Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

Returning to “Go” With Will Rogers
It’s only the inspiration of those who die that make those who live realize what constitutes a useful life.–Will Rogers
I was lying on my back on one of the flat, gray concrete banisters that edged our front steps, watching the stars flicker to life in the Kansas summer twilight. The lightning bugs were in flight, and the rhythmic buzzing of locusts in the trees across the street filled the air.
Dad sat on our porch swing, quietly smoking his favorite cigar, a Roi Tan. From time to time, a trail of well-formed smoke rings expanded into the still air. Then for no apparent reason he asked the question I have so clearly remembered all these years: “What do you want to be when you grow up?”
Being a grown up was not as yet a burning concern for me. Although at times I did manage to see myself somewhere in the future as a cowboy, a fencing Musketeer, an African explorer and big-game hunter, a Mississippi river boat captain–all subject to change based on the next exciting adventure movie at the local Paramount Theater. Sometimes the image of a song-and-dance man in vaudeville slipped in, but only fleetingly. I knew vaudeville was not what it had once been. Besides I could not carry a tune. As for dancing, I’d never tried.
For the moment, however, Dad’s out-of-the-blue question touched a reflective nerve. I looked inside myself as deeply and as seriously as an eleven-year-old is able. As I gazed up into the darkening sky, thinking, Will Rogers, everybody’s hero, came into my mind.
He had seemed special to me for some time. So many things about him I liked. Not lost on me was that others liked him, too. Before he died, only a year or so before, much of the townsfolk’s conversation had included quotes from his newspaper columns and radio programs. Many of his sayings were still being repeated, always with the same effect: a smile and an approving nod. I never heard anyone say a bad thing about him.
“What do you call someone like Will Rogers?” I asked. “A humorist.” “That’s what I want to be–a humorist.” Even now I recall that those words revealed my deepest heart-
felt secret. I had just offered Dad my pearl of great price. However, as we were in the middle of the Great Depression, Dad’s response, although a disappointment to me, was probably predictable: “You need to be practical.” That ended our discussion about my future plans without either of us giving any thought to what being a humorist might have meant to me. Had I been asked I would have been hard pressed for an answer. However, I was aware that Will Rogers was a man who made people feel good and that he drew them together. At some level, I knew I wanted a part in that togetherness.
I continued to admire Rogers, but never to the point of idolizing him. I did have sufficient interest in the humorist to make him the subject of a college sociology paper. The prof scrawled on the cover sheet: “Good statement of a philosophy of life, but this was not the assignment. C–.”
Later, after college and out in the real world I read a couple of Rogers’ biographies. I could sometimes come up with one of his quotes when an occasion suggested it. My old conversation with Dad sometimes surfaced when I tried my hand at humor writing. Still, I found other humorists to be as enjoyable and of equal interest, if not more so, writers such as Robert Benchley, H. Allen Smith, James Thurber, O. Henry and Ogden Nash.
It was not until a half-century after my evening conversation with Dad that I began to realize how central Will Rogers must have always been in my life. This awareness came only slowly after I had decided to portray this great humorist and initiated the required research and study to do so faithfully.
My journey with Will Rogers began as a portrayal of the importance of play for the individual. Play is a resource to transcend the limitations imposed by society and life. In his autobiography, renowned psychoanalyst Karl Jung described a personal crisis during his mid-thirties. He discovered that reconnecting with the play of his childhood helped him clarify his thoughts and situation. He said of this reconnection, “That was the turning point of my fate.” I began to incorporate some aspects of play into my hospital counseling, and eventually developed a small-group experiential workshop I called Playlife: Rediscovering the Secrets of Childhood which was meant to introduce people to the importance of play in adult life. This effective program helped participants to revisit their own play experiences and bring them into the present, and showed clearly that playful energy can transform the humdrum and mundane, into thrilling, stimulating, creative events that excite the imagination. Playfulness belongs to all of life, not just youth.
I had a chance to put it to the test personally in the late 1970s. I had been working at a full-service hospital with over 400 beds. I was the entire chaplain department. For twelve years, whenever needed, I was present in emotional and traumatic situations. Suddenly without warning, I felt a gut-level message: “Enough!” I realized I could no longer deliver the quality of service that patients and hospital were entitled to, and I resigned, moving into an uncertain future. The transition was neither smooth nor swift.
Driving home following my last day of work, I realized my identity was no longer connected to the hospital. Another thought came and began playing tag with the first. This was the first time in my adult life my identity was unrelated to some institution, business, or organization. As the department head of a state mental hospital, the pastor of such and such a church, a U. S. Marine, a representative of a financial institution, or a university student, I always had identified myself in terms of something that was not me. It was a sobering realization.
What was my identity? Who/what was I–as a person–in my own right? The thoughts tumbled through my mind as I came face to face with one of life’s most confounding questions: What does it mean to be a human being? Or as it is sometimes asked: Who am I? Why am I here? What can I do about it?
Fast forward. Fall 1991. I am immersed in a book project to incorporate some hospital experiences and my independent studies in humor and play. But the very spirit the book was to celebrate seemed missing. It was simply pages of thoughts without soul. As in a failing marriage, my labor of love had turned into drudgery. I felt the irony in losing my way while trying to describe the very workshop I had designed to encourage playfulness and spur creativity, imagination, and ingenuity. The natural thought was to engage myself in one of my own workshop’s activities. If that didn’t bring renewed vitality to the writing, perhaps I had no business offering it to others.
I found myself making a “spider” from a pencil eraser, held by a bent straight pin, and wrapped with four dangling legs cut from a rubber band. The spider was suspended from a thread. Immediately I was transported back to the balcony of the local Paramount movie theater in the hometown of my youth. There I would tie the spider to an extra long piece of thread wrapped around a pencil stub. Leaning over the rail from the front row of the balcony, during the movie, I would lower it slowly in front of an unsuspecting moviegoer seated below. Gratified results guaranteed! Being smart for my age I never used the spider twice during any one show.
My spider triggered something else. The image of Will Rogers burst suddenly into my mind. Instantly, in an intuitive moment, I knew there was a connection to my moment of playfulness and Rogers’ special connection to the American people.
I immediately turned to re-read a biography I had not looked at in years. There I discovered, or re-discovered, halfway through the first chapter, that Rogers had learned to rope at the age of four. Roping each day was a normal part of his adult life, and he became one of the world’s most accomplished fancy trick ropers. I realized that Rogers, who had been thrust into my consciousness by some unexplained presence, had, throughout his life actually lived the play process.
Reading about Rogers’ childhood roping was my Eureka moment. It linked Will Rogers to my investigation and developmental work in the experience of play. The more I read, the more I discovered that Rogers epitomized every one of my theories concerning personal fulfillment. Often his life enlarged the concepts behind my theories.
I began to revise my presentations on the nature of play. I decided to incorporate, as best I could, a brief Rogers-style monologue, which I would script from published quotes, to convey his playful nature to those who had little or no knowledge of his Oklahoma cowboy persona. This would, however, mean learning to rope.
Finding a spinning rope became an adventure of its own. They were not stock items, even in western-wear stores. A trick roper could have given me the information I needed. But I didn’t know any trick ropers, and they are not hanging around just any street corner. I was on my own.
Eventually, I found a pre-packaged trick-roping kit. Printed across the top of the package were Rogers’ portrait, his autograph and an action picture of him doing a rope trick. Included with a 12-foot, 100% cotton spot cord rope was a 52-page instruction booklet: Will Rogers Rope Tricks, by Frank Dean, who had been a friend of Rogers.
One of my earliest Rogers presentations was given to my Lions Club, and I asked for the members’ written comments afterwards. One particular comment, from a friend of mine, was a turning point. He wrote, “We would like more of Will Rogers and less of you.” I first laughed, then thought: “Of course, why should I tell Will Rogers’ story? Let him tell it himself.” I found myself taking one of the most reluctant steps of my life: performing as Will Rogers on the stage.
As I continued to learn more about Rogers, I became more aware that the social dynamic embodied in the spirit of play was active in Rogers’ relationship to the American people. When children engage in spontaneous play, often without any or very little discussion, they intuitively group themselves around the essentials for any meaningful interaction: Fairness, caring, respect for one another, trust. Indeed, group play has its own ethics.. This, I realized, was what went on between Rogers and the people. It was this ethics that bonded Rogers and the people. The exuberance of his playfulness connected with the natural spirit of play that resided in others and they formed their own community of trust. The people gave him their trust, a trust he never violated. He in turn gave his to them, believing in the hopeful realities of a people-matter society.

If the ordinary folks of the land could not exercise their own playfulness as readily as Rogers, they could at least experience it vicariously through him. It was said the people could look in a mirror and more nearly see themselves as Will Rogers than as any other person on the American scene. Perhaps they could not execute the desire, but they could feel themselves freed from the negatives, freed from trying to control others, to control events, to control life– liberated from the trappings of power, status, position. And so freed, what else is there to do but to radiate hope, joy, trust, and seek satisfaction in the moment–just as Will Rogers did.
As part of my research into Rogers, I visited the Will Rogers Memorial Museum in Claremore, Oklahoma and experienced another rediscovery: Will Rogers was part Cherokee and was raised on the Cherokee Nation. This heritage would prove to be a principal landmark guiding my future thoughts. When a friend recommended Forgotten Founders by Bruce E. Johansen, I came across a new insight into the American way, and into Will Rogers’ impact on the American public. Our cherished American way is in fact a blending of important American Indian cultural values and the emerging European value of individualism. I realized that the values Will Rogers expressed were inherent in the value systems of many American Indians. And that it was those values—fairness, tolerance, the importance of community, compassion and caring for others—that struck such a deep chord with the American people during the Great Depression. His commentary and observations were common-sense ways these values related to the events of the day, with people saying, “He’s right about that.” It resonated with their inner wisdom.
I found myself again looking at the importance of an active spirit of play in a functioning society. For Rogers, his playfulness grew naturally out of the values he learned from his Cherokee mother and others around him during his childhood. His spirit of play helped keep his people-matter values foremost in his living, even in desperate times. I began to understand that a healthy spirit of play also creates and sustains community. Together the playful individual and the caring community form an environment of trust in which human life flourishes. In Will Rogers one sees that personal fulfillment and creating a better world is a matter of child’s play.
As children, many of us were admonishing to “Grow Up!” And we did. Will Rogers showed us the wiser command would be, “Grow Young!” Fortunately, it’s never too late to do that.

Read more about WILL ROGERS and E. T. (Cy) Eberhart HERE.

Copyright 2010 E. T. (Cy) Eberhart. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.