
The Everett Collection
A crowd gathered in the green space outside Will Rogers Memorial Center, all of them eager for the unveiling of the almost 10-foot-high, 3,200-pound sculpture.
Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, not yet president but being courted to run for the highest elective office in the land by Amon Carter and Sid Richardson, would do the honors on this November day in 1947.
“Will Rogers always regarded Fort Worth as a home of his heart,” said former U.S. Congressman Fritz Lanham, one of only five people to represent District 12 in the last 100 years. “He was always a cowboy — and here he found the expositions and friends of his heart.”
Said Ike, the hero of WWII: “He was an observer rather than profound thinker; entertainer rather than interpretive actor. But though he belonged to neither of those fields, he invaded both and in doing so gave to his contemporaries thought for everyday consumption; bits to spur our minds even as we smiled at the package in which we received the gift.”
With that, Ike stepped from the speaker’s platform and drew back the drape. There for the first time, Fort Worth saw “Riding into the Sunset,” the work of Electra Waggoner Biggs, showing Will Rogers atop his majestic steed, Soapsuds, heading west, naturally.
Mayor Edgar Deen accepted the gifts on behalf of the city. The portrait of Will by Seymour Stone, also uncovered by Ike and that still sits in the main lobby of Will Rogers, was the other.
Also in attendance that day and playing an active role in the festivities was a representative from Harry Truman’s White House.
Margaret Truman, the president’s daughter and aspiring vocal performer, presented her rendition of “Home on the Range,” said to be Will’s favorite tune.
Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam. … Where seldom is heard a discouraging word.
That alone would have been worth taking the time to go down there.
No record exists of how that performance or the concert she gave at Will Rogers Auditorium the night before was received. The critics, however, were often left wanting the talent displayed at recitals.
In 1951, a German newspaper quipped that Miss Truman was going to make a concert tour of West Germany in order to “inspire German approval of rearmament.”
That could have blown the NATO alliance to pieces. The critics risked agitating the rage of a doting father, who famously knew how to give them hell indeed.
“I’ve just read your lousy review of Margaret’s concert,” the president wrote to a Washington Post reviewer, post haste and with the ire of a cape buffalo, three years after the Fort Worth unveiling. “It seems to me that you are a frustrated old man who wishes he could have been successful.”
Ticked-off Truman thundered: “Someday I hope to meet you. When that happens, you’ll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteaks for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!”
Suffice to say, no one at Amon Carter’s newspaper, the Star-Telegram, would be spilling any opinions that weren’t favorable to Miss Truman. So, it appears, they said nothing at all about her vocals.
At a news conference at the Fort Worth Club, where she and Ike and other VIPs spent the night, Truman charmed the socks off with her “sincerity and natural graces.”
She captured her host city’s heart from the moment she stepped in it, one writer said.
One reporter observed: “She looks straight into the eyes of any person addressing her. Her expression is one of only denoting kindness, but she has no hesitancy in expressing an opinion, and one knows that her naturalness and her ability to follow through on her desire to sing is the result of the Trumans’ insistence that their only child lead her own life.”
Of the presence of Secret Service agents protecting her, the 23-year-old said that she had her limits. “I put my foot down on the idea of having a Secret Service man go along on my dates, though. That was just carrying the idea too far.”
At her concert in Fort Worth was a group of the local Pi Beta Phi, her sorority. A luncheon was held in her honor at River Crest Country Club. Then it was off to Oklahoma City for another concert.
When you’re the president’s daughter, opportunities — and knives — abound.
“It is our studied opinion,” the reviewer of the Daily Oklahoman said, “after hearing the soprano on three different occasions that she is not equipped with a voice of artistic proportions.
“Her delivery is extremely throaty, and the voice could in no stretch of the imagination be classed as a coloratura. In the only song which attempted the coloratura gyrations, she was continually off pitch and executed cadenza very awkwardly.”
Will Rogers undoubtedly would have had something to say about those kinds of manners.
In Fort Worth, we’d have asked for an encore.