Long before Route 66 became a byword for postcard nostalgia, it carried a nickname with real Friday at 3pm CT, High Plains Public Radio invites listeners to discover why that name still matters, with a new special: "Rachel Jackson on Will Rogers: The Man and the Highway."
Will Rogers was, by most accounts, the most famous man in America in the 1920s and '30s — a rope-trick vaudeville performer turned newspaper columnist, radio voice, and the highest-paid star in Hollywood, all while never quite leaving behind the ranch outside Oologah, Oklahoma, where he was born a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. He wrote more than 4,000 syndicated columns, circled the globe three times, and famously cracked that his ancestors didn't come over on the Mayflower — they met the boat. When he died in a 1935 plane crash in Alaska, the loss hit the country hard enough that Oklahomans began petitioning to rename U.S. Highway 66 in his honor within days.
That's the man. The highway is its own story, and it's one HPPR listeners have been getting acquainted with all year, as the station has marked Route 66's 100th anniversary with a season of programming tracing the Mother Road across the High Plains and beyond. This special draws those threads together, pairing Rogers' singular American story with the road that still carries his name from Chicago to Santa Monica.
Guiding the conversation is Rachel Jackson, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma and a familiar voice to HPPR's Radio Readers audience — and, as it happens, a distant cousin of Will Rogers himself. That family connection gives the hour a perspective beyond the usual highway-history recitation: a look at Rogers not just as "Oklahoma's Favorite Son," but as kin, and as a fellow citizen of a nation with its own long relationship to the land Route 66 crosses.
Jackson brings serious scholarly chops to that storytelling. She's an Assistant Professor of Native American Literatures and Rhetorics at the University of Oklahoma, where her work centers on sustaining Native languages and cultural knowledge and lifting up Indigenous storytelling traditions. She partners with tribal leaders across Oklahoma on community projects, including the Kiowa Clemente Course in the Humanities and kiowatalk.org, an online archive devoted to Kiowa language and culture — work that's earned her recognition including a Ford Foundation Fellowship and honors from the National Council of Teachers of English.
Listeners who caught HPPR's Spring Read coverage earlier this year may already recognize Jackson's voice; she contributed a series of reflections on Rogers and Route 66 as part of that program, tying the highway's centennial to Rogers' legacy and to the deeper history of the tribal nations who called this land home long before it was a numbered federal highway. This HPPR original program builds on that groundwork with a fuller, more personal conversation.
Rogers is buried today beneath a hilltop in Claremore, Oklahoma, near a tomb inscribed with the line he's still best remembered for: "I never met a man I didn't like." Nearly a century after his death, his name still marks the road, the museums, the highway markers from Illinois to California — and, in this original production, an hour of High Plains Public Radio.
"Rachel Jackson on Will Rogers: The Man and the Highway" was recorded live at Chapterhouse Books on Route 66 in Amarillo, Texas, and airs Friday at 3 p.m. Central Time on HPPR Mix. For more information, visit hppr.org or call 800-678-7444.
This program is a production of the HPPR Radio Readers Book Club. Special thanks to Lauren Pronger and Chapterhouse Books for making the live event possible.
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