Will was not poor growing up. He had everything he needed except a mother. When Will was ten years old, Mary died of amoebic dysentery. Will was deeply grieved. A loving and attentive mother, she taught him to read before he ever went to school. Later in life, he spoke of her, saying, "My mother's name was Mary, and if your mother's name is Mary and she was an old-fashioned woman, you don't have to say much for her. Everybody knows already."

Because he was at a loss as to how to deal with his growing son, Clem sent Will to various boarding schools. But Will didn't like school very much. He did well in things he enjoyed, like history, politics, and elocution, but he was too restless to apply himself to the subjects he didn't like. Playing the class clown, Will was constantly getting into trouble. He summed it all up by saying, "After three years in McGuffey's Fourth Reader, I knew more about it than McGuffey did." Clem finally got so frustrated that he sent Will to Kemper Academy, a military school in Boonville, Missouri. But Will didn't care for that very much either. He said of the experience, "I spent two years at Kemper. One was in the fourth grade and the other one was in the guardhouse…One was about as bad as the other."

Will was very bright, and a good argument could be made that the sterile school environment of his day was too stifling to maintain his interest. He had a formal education to what would be considered the tenth grade today. This was at a time when many people went only as far as the fourth grade, learned to read and write, and then went on to work at hard labor on a farm, a ranch, or in a factory. Even though Will quit Kemper after two years, his schooling demanded strong reading and memorization skills. As a result, he got a very good basic education. Will's career successes prove how much native intelligence he had, while his love of travel, technology, and current events give strong evidence of an inborn curiosity that flowered throughout his life.

"America invents everything, but the trouble is we get tired of it the minute the new is wore off."

Will, like all of us, had a split personality when it came to progress. On the one hand, he loved the promise of all the new developments of his day. Near the end of his life he said, "We are living in great times. A fellow can't afford to die now with all this excitement going on."

On the other hand, he could see that there was a downside to such rapid progress and he longed for simpler times,

"People take themselves too serious, they think if they don't break their neck gettin' from one place of business to another that the World will stop. Say, all they have to do is just watch some man die that is more prominent than they are, and in less than 24 hours the world has forgot he ever lived. So they ought to have imagination enough to know how long they will stop things if they left this old earth. People nowadays are traveling faster, but they are not getting any further (in fact not as far) as our old dads did."

Regarding the Chicago World's Fair in 1933, Will questioned its theme, "A Century of Progress," when he pointed out, "We were on the gold standard in 1833; there was no golf except in Scotland; there were no chamber of commerce luncheon speakers; and you lived until you died and not until you were run over by an automobile."

Although automobiles were fast becoming symbols of a newfound freedom, Will was not very fond of them. He was slow to warm up to telephones as well. But he had a romance with aviation that made him one of its biggest boosters. Ironically, this passion would lead to his death in 1935. But like so many others, Will saw airplanes, along with those who flew them, as the epitome of all that was exciting and adventurous. Defending aviation and gouging Prohibition, Will said, "Seven people were killed in the whole of America over the weekend in airplanes, and the way the newspapers headlined it you would have thought Nicaragua had invaded us. Yet in New York City alone, fifteen was killed and seventy wounded with bad liquor, to say nothing about Chicago. So it's safer to take a flight than a drink."

Will's love of aviation combined with his general contempt for automobiles parallels our ambivalence about progress. The difference is that in Will's day, simpler times were not such a distant memory. Today we have gone so far down the technological highway that getting off now would be like trying to back down a Los Angeles freeway exit ramp. We are just too dependent on our technology to escape it.

--Jim Rogers