The most widely known citizen

The country mourned him the way it mourns presidents, and almost nobody who mourned him had ever been in a room with him. Rogers died on 15 August 1935 near Point Barrow, Alaska, in a plane flown by his friend Wiley Post; it failed on take-off from a lagoon in fog. Federal and state authorities ordered flags to half-staff; both houses of Congress suspended their proceedings when the news came; newspaper editorials asked Franklin Roosevelt to declare a national day of mourning. At two in the afternoon on 22 August, twelve thousand motion picture screens across the country went dark for two minutes - a tribute the National Air and Space Museum describes as the kind of mourning the nation has rarely undertaken outside the death of a president. He earned that with the two cheapest channels of intimacy available: a syndicated daily column and a Sunday-night radio programme, read and heard by millions who had never seen him and never would. The New York Times put the fit in one line: 'the most widely-known citizen of the U.S. . . . and the best beloved.' The mourning was real, entirely one-sided, and perfectly legible - the site's claim stated in a single week of August 1935. Twelve thousand dark screens are the audience's half of a conversation the other half never had to have, and the size of the answer is the measure of how many people were asking. (The accounts split by one day on the crash: the National Air and Space Museum gives the 15th, the National Park Service the 16th.)