1967 - SSBN 659 (WILL ROGERS) Sea Trial Letter

This is the sea trial letter for SSBN 659 signed by Rickover while underway on February 13 1967.

Text of letter:

At Sea, North Atlantic

13 February 1967

Dear Mr. Noss:

We have just successfully completed the first sea trials of our 41st Polaris nuclear submarine, the last of this type currently authorized by Congress. The USS WILL ROGERS was built by the Electric Boat Division of the General Dynamics Corporation, Groton, Connecticut. We also have in operation 27 attack-type nuclear submarines, making a total of 68. This ship is named for Will Rogers (1879-1935), the Oklahoma cowboy who became one of America's foremost humorists.

Will was born and raised near Oologah, Indian Territory, in what is now Rogers County, so named for his father, a prosperous rancher prominent in the councils of the Cherokee Nation and a member of the convention that drafted the first constitution of the State of Oklahoma. Both parents were part Cherokee, and Will was named for William Penn Adair, an Indian chief who was his father's friend.

The only son of a well-to-do family, he was offered every educational advantage but never got beyond the fourth grade. As told in Will's autobiography, his father "tried terribly hard to make something of him," sending him to "about every school in that part of the country." Will, who hated school and loved the outdoor life of the ranch, seldom lasted more than four months at any one of them before deciding that the teachers weren't "running the school right, and rather than have the school suffer," he would leave. Though he joked about the tricks he used to avoid schooling, Will did not recommend them to others. "I have regretted all my life," he would say, "that I did not at least take a chance on the fifth grade." When he left home at 19 to make his own way, he had little formal education but was an expert cowpuncher and lariat thrower. Neither he nor anyone else could have foreseen that these skills would open the door to a highly successful career.

He began modestly enough as a cowboy on ranches in Texas and Oklahoma. Wanting to see the world, he worked his way on cattle boats, roped mules in Argentina, and broke horses for the British Army in South Africa. It was there, in Johannesburg, that he got his start in show business. He joined Texas Jack's Wild West Show as a rope artist and trick rider. Calling himself "The Cherokee Kid," he toured South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand for three years. On his return to the United States in 1905, he appeared regularly in Wild West circuses and on the vaudeville circuit.

Quite by accident, Will discovered he had a gift for making witty impromptu remarks which kept his audience in paroxysms of laughter and greatly enhanced the popularity of his rope tricks. When he joined the Ziegfeld Follies in 1915, he was an instantaneous success, though to hear him tell it, he "was the least known member of the entire aggregation," doing his "little specialty with a rope and telling jokes on national affairs, just a very ordinary little vaudeville act by chance sandwiched in among this great array."

From the stage, Will moved to screen and radio, becoming one of the highest-paid performers of his time. His rope tricks had given him a start, but what made him a well-loved figure was his talent as a humorist.

He was a humorist, not merely a comedian. He wrote his own lines, and it was their content no less than his inimitable delivery that appealed to the public. This is why he could progress from showmanship to authorship. In 1922, he became a newspaper columnist for the McNaught Syndicate, his column eventually being printed in 350 papers and reaching an audience of 35 million. He was the only syndicated columnist of his time whose daily comment was printed on the front page of metropolitan papers. In addition to his column, he wrote many magazine articles and was in great demand as a radio broadcaster, platform lecturer, and after-dinner speaker. His popularity was not restricted to the United States. He traveled extensively and met many of the world's greats, but fame never changed his innate modesty or his natural and unassuming bearing. "I'm just an old country boy in a big town trying to get along," he once said. "I have been eating pretty regular, and the reason I have been is because I'm an old country boy."

He wrote for what he called "the big Honest Majority" and felt himself a part of this majority—the people who believed in doing right, in tending to their business, and in letting other fellows alone. He shared with them a certain skepticism toward the men elected to public office, a suspicion that these were not always doing what the voters wanted nor telling them the whole truth about the country's position in the world. Will appointed himself reporter to the American people on the doings of the government. His comments were sometimes sharp but usually fair and never wounding. Perhaps because he never met a man he didn't like, Will was more lenient toward individuals in public office than toward groups such as the Congress or the bureaucracy. He shared with "the big Honest Majority" a tendency to deprecate the Congress, seemingly not realizing that it is the great bulwark of the people's rights and closer to the electorate than any other branch of government.

Will got the material for his comments from the newspapers, from personal observation, and from contact with people. He traveled the length and breadth of this country, taking its pulse, watching its foibles and follies, joshing it gently, and sometimes telling it disagreeable homely truths. Since he dealt mostly with contemporary events, much of what he said has a slightly archaic flavor now, but some of his remarks remain relevant. Here are a few samples, just as he wrote them, with spelling and grammar unchanged:

"We are going at top speed because we are using all our natural resources as fast as we can. If we want to build something out of wood, all we got to do is go cut down a tree and build it. We dident have to plant the tree. Nature did that before we come. Suppose we couldent build something out of wood till we found a tree that we had purposely planted for that use. Say, we never would get it built. If we want anything made from steam, all we do is go dig up the coal and make the steam. . . . If we need any more Gold or Silver, we go out and dig it; want any oil, bore a well and get some. We are certainly sitting pretty right now. But when our resources run out, if we can still be ahead of other nations, then will be the time to brag, then we can show whether we are really superior." He returns to this theme time and again. "The Lord has sure been good to us," he wrote. "Now, what are we doing to warrant that good luck any more than any other nation?" These ideas cannot have been overly popular in isolationist America of the 1920s and 1930s.

Then, as now, Americans found it hard to understand why they were not as popular abroad as they thought they should be. "It will take America 15 years steady taking care of our own business and letting everybody else's alone to get us back to where everybody speaks to us again," was Will's comment.

Another time he said, "You don't know what a country we have got till you start traveling around it. Personally, I like the small places and sparsely populated states. A place looks better before it gets houses on it than it does afterward." And here are a few shorties: "Humanity is not yet ready for either real truth or real harmony." "A remark generally hurts in proportion to its truth." "You must judge a man's greatness by how much he will be missed."

Charles Collins said of Will Rogers that he was "the average American, as that theoretical figure likes to imagine himself." His humor was in the tradition of Mark Twain, Artemus Ward, and Finley Peter Dunne's "Mr. Dooley." It was typically American in its determination to see things as they are and in its lack of reverence for established pomposities and pretensions. In his homely way, Will made sense out of life as it is lived by ordinary men and women. And he made them laugh. He once wrote, "I have been over 20 years trying to kid the great American public out of a few loose giggles," and again, "Somebody had to act the fool, and I happened to be one of the many that picked out this great business of trying to be funny."

The sense of loss so widely felt at his untimely death in an airplane accident showed that Will Rogers had done far more than entertain his public; he had touched their hearts.

Respectfully,

H. G. Rickover

The Honorable John E. Noss

U.S. House of Representatives