Will Rogers (Davidson) to send him some of Rogers worn clothes, which “still contained his personality,” which she did, and they were modeled on the nude clay. When he had completed the life-sized clay model, he made a plaster cast and sent it to the Valsuani foundry in Paris, where two casts were made, one for the National Statuary Hall Collection and the other for the Will Rogers Memorial, then recently opened in Claremore, Oklahoma, near Rogers birthplace. When that statue was unveiled, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt broadcast a message live on coast-to-coast radio from his home in Hyde Park. The plaster cast
Will Rogers audience, in stitches and proved his remarkable skill at off-the-cuff, witty commentary on current events. He built the rest of his career around that skill. A 1922 editorial in "The New York Times" said that "Will Rogers in the Follies is carrying on the tradition of Aristophanes, and not unworthily." Rogers branched into silent films too, for Samuel Goldwyn's company Goldwyn Pictures. He made his first silent movie, "Laughing Bill Hyde" (1918), which was filmed in Fort Lee, New Jersey. Many early films were filmed and produced in the New York area in those years. Rogers could make a film,