Remembering Will Rogers’ Home
By Jill Hunting
Hello, everyone! From Pasadena, California, this is Jill Hunting with an HPPR BookByte.
From the age of 10 until I left for college, I lived in Oklahoma City. Ours was a New England family relocated to the Midwest because of my father’s work, first as a schoolteacher in Lake Forest, Illinois, and then as a writer of flight manuals and exams for the Federal Aviation Agency. We were, you might say, in Oklahoma but not of Oklahoma.
I recall with happiness the blue skies, colorful sunsets, and warm summer nights. My parents loved the friendliness and wit of Oklahomans. One of the best-loved of them was the cowboy and political satirist Will Rogers. He was a humorist who never took things too far. A Cherokee born in Indian Territory before Oklahoma was a state, Rogers grew up on trails that became Route 66, also known nationwide as the Will Rogers Highway. In 2026 it celebrates its centennial.
He was a movie star, and in the early 1930s the highest-paid actor in Hollywood. He was friends with Henry Ford and Thomas Edison. In 1935 Rogers was killed in a tragic plane crash in Alaska. Did you ever hear the saying “I never met a man I didn’t like”? Will Rogers said that.
I mention him at the close of 2025 when I’m recording this BookByte and reflecting on things past. Perhaps you are, too. In 2025, Will Rogers’s home in Pacific Palisades burned to the ground. I had visited the ranch, which was on the National Register, a couple of times. Rogers told the architect of his 31-room house there that he wanted an ordinary place with a big, wide porch. The house sat prettily on a gentle slope. In siting it, he specified level ground in front so he and his guests could “ride our horses up,” he said, "and hitch ’em right in front of the house.” The horses were polo ponies, with their own polo field. The ranch was, his wife said, “the joy of his life.”
Now—like hundreds of other homes in Los Angeles County, including my husband’s childhood home in Altadena—the Will Rogers ranch has been lost to fire. I've heard many people say they are glad to be turning the page on 2025. Gone but not forgotten. Mixed feelings often visit us when one year turns to another. In bittersweet times, Will Rogers is a good role model for humor--a celebrity who kept his ego in check, a man full of good advice. "Live your life in such a way,” he said, "that you wouldn't be ashamed to sell the family parrot to the town gossip.”
For something to make you laugh when you need it, check out the movie clips of Rogers doing his famous rope tricks. He could lasso, all at once, the four LEGS of a running horse. With a spectacular figure-8 throw, he could catch a rider and horse moving at full speed. If we but look for it, a sense of wonder and joy can carry us into the future.
This is Jill Hunting—thinking of my childhood in Oklahoma, also the birthplace of Will Rogers long before he built his beloved home in California, now a cherished memory.
