He Flew Nukes, Captured World Records, and Saved His Way to Wealth...

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I'm Hannah Jewell. I'll get you caught up with The 7 every weekday, so follow The 7 right now. And we continue here with our American Stories. Pilot and world champion runner Orville Rogers trained bomber pilots in World War II flew the B-36 on secret missions during the Cold War, ferried airplanes to remote Baptist missions all over the world, and squeezed in a 31-year career as a pilot with Braniff Airways. Orville also took up running at age 51 and ran his first marathon six years later.

But now let's hear the story, the life story, of Orville Rogers. In 1927, Lindbergh flew the first solo flight non-stop from New York landed in Paris. He made a tour of the central United States and deliberately he circled every schoolhouse he could find, and he circled our schoolhouse. My first airplane ride, that was a fun experience. I think I was about 10 or 11 years old in Sulphur, Oklahoma. I was in the yard one day and a plane flew over very low and it looked like he was going to be landing, so I jumped on my bike and rode out and sure enough he landed. So I went over and talked to him and he said, yeah, I'm giving rides, four dollars. So I had to go back home and break my piggy bank and get the four dollars out to come back and get my first airplane ride. I didn't tell my parents about it until much later.

It was a wonderful experience and it cemented my idea of becoming a pilot. My father deserted my mother and my sister and me when I was six years old and my mother took us back to her parents. So we grew up in the home of my grandparents and he was a farm man. They were not very loving in a obvious way. I knew my grandfather loved me but he never told me so.

But it worked out okay because I eventually came to terms with the realization that that was just that was just their way of life. As a senior at Oklahoma University, I received the impression, I thought it was from God, that I ought to be in vocational Christian service in order to really serve God the best. That was the wrong impression but in order to prepare for whatever God had for me, I knew I had to go to the seminary. So I came to the seminary in September of 1940 and I think it was five weeks later they held the first drawing for the draft for World War II service.

There was a giant fishbowl in Washington, I think it was about five feet in diameter, that held slips of paper with numbers on them from one to a thousand. Well so help me my number was thrown out number seven and so I heard from the draft board almost immediately. So I went down and talked to them and I said, hey I don't want to be in the walking army can I enlist in the Army Air Corps?

They said sure. So I enlisted in the Army Air Corps and was accepted and had my pre-induction physical and they didn't call me up right away but that was God's way of turning me around from my impression that I ought to be in vocational Christian service and told me that I could serve God as well or a whole lot better as a layman. I enlisted in the Army Air Corps November the 1st, 1941, five weeks before Pearl Harbor and we heard about it one Sunday afternoon.

We got the word when they turned the radio on that Pearl Harbor had been bombed. I was in training in San Diego flying a primary trainer. After graduating from flying school the second lieutenant pilots would be assigned to different bases.

My instructor in the advanced training school recommended that I become an instructor. So all my World War II flying career I was in the training command instructing other students how to fly an airplane. We lost a large a large number of pilots, student pilots and instructor pilots to training accidents during the war. They were in such a rush to get the pilots to the front because we needed them badly there and so the program was accelerated to the point that it really was quite dangerous and I flew B-25s for over two years instructing in the advanced phase of the flying training program and I love that airplane.

It was a bomber and a very effective one. At the end of the war I was assigned to training in the B-17. I reported to my training base for B-17 training about three days after they dropped the first atomic bomb.

So then they dropped the second one and the war was over. I went ahead and finished my training in the B-17 but never got to use it and I was separated from the Air Corps shortly after that. In April of 1951 I was recalled to the Air Force as they called it then and I was assigned to Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth flying the B-36, our primary defense weapon against an attack by Russia.

We were on call 24 hours a day. If four had been declared we would have loaded our atom bomb in Fort Worth, Texas, flown to Goose Bay Labrador, refueled there and then take off from there to bomb our assigned target in Russia. The B-36 at that time was the largest airplane in the world. It was longer than a B-29 and a B-17 nose to tail. That's a lot of airplane. We had a crew of 15 people and I loved flying that airplane.

I had always wanted to fly the big airplanes. We had no problem with dropping a bomb although we knew what destruction it could cause. But I think everybody in my squadron, certainly on my crew, had accepted the fact that we signed up to defend our country and while that possibly meant the destruction and the loss of life of many people we were prepared mentally and psychologically in every way to accomplish that. Fifty-two years later in 2004 my wife and I were on a Russian cruise ship. We sailed from Saint Petersburg to Moscow through the river and canal systems and we docked on the northwest side of Moscow after stopping twice in cities en route to minister to the physical and spiritual needs of the Russian people. We had five doctors on board the ship and 10 nurses and many of the people would be street witnessing, giving away English bibles, Russian bibles, children's bibles and literature. The day after we docked in Moscow we had a clinic there in a schoolhouse on a site that was probably less than five miles from where my target was in 1952 if war had broken out. I'm glad we didn't have to drop the bomb to begin with and I'm equally glad that I was able to be a part of a Christian group going to the very same area where my target was 52 years before, taking them the Christian witness and telling them about our Lord Jesus.

There was just a wonderful feeling to accomplish that because instead of dropping death and destruction from above we were carrying in the word of life on the horizontal plane, word of life, eternal life, abundant life available in our Lord Jesus. I met my wife at Oklahoma University. I had attended my freshman year in another school and I enrolled at Oklahoma University so I was a sophomore and met her when she was a freshman. She was dating another boy when I first met her my first year there and they were pretty steady.

It took a year or two but finally we became engaged but one night I woke up in a deep depressive frame of mind because I had dreamed that she was marrying him and I was attending their wedding and that had a profound effect on me for a few days a week or two because I just couldn't stand the thought of losing her. The story of Orville Rogers continues more after these messages. Hello iHeart listener.

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No purchase necessary were prohibited by law. 18 plus terms and conditions apply. See website for details. And we continue here with our American stories and after flying the B-36 on secret missions during the cold war Orville Rogers became a commercial airline pilot and a missionary pilot for Wycliffe Bible Translators. In this segment you'll also be hearing from Orville's doctor Kenneth Cooper, founder and chairman of the Cooper Institute. By the way Dr. Cooper is also my doctor.

Let's continue with Orville Rogers story. I always enjoyed knowing that I was delivering people to their destinations safely and comfortably. Well I flew for Braniff for a little over 30 years and I loved it. I would have flown for nothing but but I was glad they paid me for it.

Braniff Airlines started up with a route structure that only included two cities, Oklahoma City and Tulsa. It was a single-engine airplane but they soon graduated to the DC-3 and they were flying from Dallas to Chicago and gradually expanding. I started out on the DC-3 and flew the Convair 340 and 440 and it was taken over by the DC-6 series and then we had a DC-7 and then eventually got up to the DC-8 and then to the Boeing 727 for most of my flying. But I enjoyed flying the DC-8 to South America. It was a beautiful airplane. It was a long-range airplane. We flew it non-stop from New York to Buenos Aires. It was a 10 hour and 20 minute flight and I think it was the longest non-stop flight in airline business at the time we were flying it in 1976 and 1977.

I really enjoyed that flight but I enjoyed all of South America. I met the founder of Wycliffe, William Cameron Townsend in our church in 1965 and I volunteered to help out with Bible translation and particularly the aviation part of it. And I realized that while I had about maybe a dozen Bibles in my house there were people groups of the world that didn't have to have one word of God's word in their own native language. Just felt like I could be of service in God's kingdom by helping deliver airplanes to the translators around the world who were there aiding the cause of Bible translation by the safe efficient transportation where the roads were difficult or impossible.

Well I delivered 46 missionary airplanes in my career. They were challenging because you don't go down to the filling station and buy a road map. You have to be prepared for the over ocean flying which means the airplane must be equipped with additional radio equipment. It must have additional fuel for the long flights either Europe or Africa or Southeast Asia wherever you may be going. Because you look on a globe or a map at the Pacific Ocean and you see islands scattered all around everywhere. But when you get out there and fly it you can fly for hours and hours and never see an island. So if the radio station on that island went out or if you had difficulty with your receiver you'd be on your own looking for throughout that vast expanse of water to find that tiny little dot of an island down there.

So it's a grave concern to be able to navigate successfully. Took my first prairie flight for George in 1965. About a year or two later they put me on their board and I was on their board for 39 years. That's remarkable.

I can't believe it. And three or four years later the board chairman retired and they made me chairman of the board. So I was chairman of the board for 13 of those 39 years and it was a delight to serve God that way. And let me tell you about the climax of every missionary ferry flight. When you taxi into the ramp, open the door and hand the keys to the airplane to the missionary pilot already there who's going to be flying that airplane in the work of Bible translation.

I read a book by Dr. Kenneth Cooper when I was in Chicago on a layover from our Braniff Airways flight and I literally read it through in almost one sitting and it was a highly motivational book. I started running the next day and I've run a little over 42,500 miles in the last 50 years. Your feet are in remarkably good condition for a person who has run for as long as you have. That person looks good for a man of any age. Get real deep so he has a two and a half inch expansion which is very good. Don't let me push it out. Hold it real tight, real tight, and that's like iron.

You have very good quadriceps muscle strength. Yeah, we're over at 100 years of age you're like a man about 60. So you have slowed down the aging process as you know there's very few people past 100 years of age that can begin to keep up with you even being alive as you know. Yeah my objective is to slow down as slowly as possible. Slow down as slowly as possible. And you've proven to what I've said for years it's fascinating to know that one can grow healthier as one grows older and not necessarily reverse.

Who determines that? You do. Here you're 100 years of age. I'm 87 years of age still practicing medicine every day. So we're enjoying life the fullest and our goal for you and for me both is to live that long healthy life of fullest and then die suddenly.

We call that squaring off the curve and you've already passed that. But you know as we tell people coming to our clinic we call them getting cooperized by all the recommendations we give to our patients over 145,000 patients. Now if you follow recommendations for diet and weight and exercise all the various things that we that we recommend that you should live 10 years long on the national average. That would mean you should live 87 years.

I'm already 87 trying to prove that you're way beyond that. I started running early on with a group called the Cross Country Club of Dallas and it was competitive but in a friendly way and I gradually outgrew the group out aged them and I looked around and the world records seemed to be attainable. So a little over 10 years ago now when I was approaching 90 I looked up the world records for the one mile and the 800 meters and I thought maybe I can do that.

So I engaged the trainer and he coached me on starting and breathing and pacing and I went to Boston 10 years ago. I ran the 800 meters in world record time. I think I broke the record by about 30 seconds but I really slaughtered the mile. I think the record was 11 minutes to some seconds and I attacked it vigorously and finished with a time under 10 minutes. I think it was 9 57 something or other and I'm still the only man in the world that had run a 10-minute mile after the age of 90.

I like that. In March this year I attended the national indoor championship meet near Washington DC. It was a track and field meet. I entered five running events ranging from 60 meters up to 1500 meters and I had no competition so I got gold records just by showing up and suiting up starting and finishing but the icing on the cake was that I was able to set five new world records one for each of the five events that I entered. So I now hold or have set 18 world records.

I think two or three of them have been broken but I have set 18 world records officially. And what a story this is Orville Rogers story and we'd like to thank the folks at Vision Video for giving us access to their wonderful documentary Flying High for the Glory of God the Orville Rogers story. Check out their full documentary and the 1900 more titles of uplifting family friendly videos at visionvideo.com. Orville Rogers story continues here on Our American Stories. Hello iHeart listener.

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18 plus terms and conditions apply. See website for details. And we return to the story of Orville Rogers and his doctor Kenneth Cooper founder and chairman of the Cooper Institute located in Orville's hometown of Dallas Texas. But both of these guys well they come and hail from Oklahoma. We will also be hearing from Orville's daughter Susan, his sons Rick and Bill and his great-grandson. Let's begin with Dr. Ken Cooper. First of all it's not that amazing anymore people live past 100 years.

They're becoming quite that's quite readily known. But people past 100 years of nature are still competing athletically running events. That is extremely unusual.

One out of a million of them. So Orville has he's had his problems. He was a marathon runner when I first met him at age 54. That's 46 years ago on his first examination here at the clinic in 1971. I followed him every year after that too. But what has happened is he's had some medical problems back in 1993. All of a sudden we discovered he had severe coronary disease without any chest pain whatsoever when he had a six vessel coronary bypass procedure. That was 1993. Then in 2011 he had a major stroke that occurred in 2011.

But he's the only capacity for 30 days. He's all back running again. One aspect of my running is that it gives me a platform to speak a word for my Lord Jesus.

I became a Christian when I was 10 years old and I've tried to follow my Lord for 90 years now. I've run in races where people alongside me or near me would falter just a little bit as they approach the finish line. Two or three or four or five yards. It seemed like they were saying to themselves there's the finish line. I've made it and they kind of relax and slow down a little bit.

That's not my style. I want to power through running to the very end of the tape and it served me well. A year ago in Albuquerque I was running against a 94 year old man and he got up. There's just the two of us in the 60 meter race and he got off to a fast start. I don't have fast twitch muscles which enables a fast start in running and so he was three or four yards ahead of me almost immediately. But I kept plugging away and maintaining the pace that I thought would be applicable to that distance and he must have slowed down because I certainly wasn't speeding up. But I began gaining on him at the halfway mark and at the finish line I leaned forward just enough to beat him by five hundredths of one second.

The magazine came out with a statement that we had met five times after that race and I beat him every time and I don't want to slow down at the finish line. I don't want to be disqualified by not serving my Lord well all through every day of my life. I want to finish strong for my Lord. Don't you? I hope you enjoy life as much as I do.

I love life. My son was a marine helicopter pilot and was on a rescue mission in Vietnam in 1970 and was killed when they ran into very adverse weather conditions in the extraction process. Well God can use any experience of life to the benefit and one of the good things that came out of this was the realization that Curtis lived a wonderful life and he died in service for our country and if it had to happen that was the best way he could. My advice to anyone in a similar situation would be that God is still in control.

He knows what is happening and he is in control and he can be relied upon to supply you comfort and help anytime it's needed. My wife and I served for 13 months in Tanzania. I had a beautiful Cessna 210 flying over Tanzania which is as big as Texas and part of New Mexico. The interesting part about that trip was when we left Honolulu I had not explained to my wife that radio waves are straight line just like sunlight and once you fly about 100 miles or so depending on your altitude away from your home departure station you lose radio contact.

So I was halfway to Johnston Island or so and trying to work anybody that would talk to me and nobody would talk to me. I wanted to make a position report and I sensed that maybe she was getting a little bit nervous about the situation because I was using a loudspeaker and she could hear the conversation. So I took off my headset and laid it down and put my bike down. I reached over and gave her a big hug and I said honey when you married me did you ever think you'd be having this much fun?

She didn't hit me. I'm free to express my life story in that manner. If my viewers understand that I'm doing it as a Christian witness I want no glory for it. I want no commendation for it but I found out early in life that it would be wise to save enough money as possible and invest it so that in the future I could be a vehicle for helping God's work bringing his kingdom to earth from heaven as he asked us to do and so I got interested in investing. I invested in the stock market in land and oil and gas and God blessed in that.

If people ask me how did I do that I say I did not do it. God did it and it was our privilege and I asked my wife's death to give away over 35 million dollars to God's work. I knew that dad flew a lot but it never felt like he missed important things like piano recitals or football games or anything. And he's getting us back for that now but we're going to his track meets and interviews and banquets and birthdays. Every day is a gift and I think he is the one that really epitomizes that. I mean he knows that every day every year and it just it gives us a great sense of purpose and looking toward the future and I think that's the way he's made it from 90 to 100 for sure. I remember when he first realized he couldn't run a sub 10-minute mile anymore and my friends in their 60s all say I can't run a sub 10-minute mile and they're in their 60s. They can't remember when they could run a sub 10-minute mile so it's pretty fun. We try to keep him humble I mean I tell him all the time that I could do what he does and be in the newspaper the next day too but the only problem is I'd be in the obituary section and he's in the sports section. One of my big memories of my dad and my mom was looking in their bedroom and seeing them on their knees praying.

It was regular and not for show. They were prayerful people and made it just a core to their life and they're always reading the Bible and they prayed through the missionary prayer list which I don't know if it bothered them it made me kind of crazy sometimes but they prayed for every Southern Baptist missionary on their birthday throughout the whole year. It's pretty amazing discipline. I'm in track right now and I just think that it's great having a grandpa that is 100 running track so when I run I just think about him a lot so I just think that's great. My dad and my mom wanted to be with us on vacations. There's a lot of people that talk to them and say what you know that's not a vacation if your kids and grandkids are there but he started it over 30 years ago and we go on fabulous trips every summer and it's a job now coordinating that many people so it's over 30 people for over 30 years going together someplace crazy anywhere from the North Pole to Antarctica to Europe or Africa but they've been an amazing way for this family to bond. I enjoy reading and studying Hebrews 12 one and two because Paul speaks there of running as being a metaphor for living and I think I can quote it says therefore since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses let us cast aside every weight and the sin which does so easily beset us let us run with endurance the race that is set before us looking to Jesus the author and finisher of our faith who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross despising the shame and henceforth is set down at the right hand of the throne of God and what a story we just heard what a life well lived in his hundreds and still running and running being a metaphor for life his faith a fundamental part of his life the kids vision of the parents sitting in that room kneeling down and praying for other people and we tell their stories here on this show just as we tell everyone's stories faith no faith no difference to us beautiful stories are beautiful stories that he gave away 35 million dollars that he'd made investing because he didn't think it was his my goodness what a story to tell by itself and what a heart what a generous heart and by the way that he lived so long you know we do a lot of these stories about living longer and cutting down costs and living better these are these are stories that the cooper clinic has turned us on to ken cooper's life work and the work with chuck stetson and his family office better living at lower costs and my goodness this story is a metaphor for all of those things orville rogers story here on our american stories hello i heart listener we have a confession to make both i heart in this commercial you're listening to right now would probably sound a heck of a lot better on the new roku pro series tv it's got side firing speakers that fill your room with sound dobi atmos audio that puts you right in the middle of the entertainment and the ability to pair seamlessly with your home theater sound systems that already have surround sound and booming bass if all that sounds too good to be true it'll sound even better on the new roku pro series your hearing isn't better your tv is an october morning in a quiet suburb in a town in scotland a man is walking his dog when suddenly shots are fired from a car the man falls to the ground and the car speeds off an ordinary residential area but extraordinary things happen in ordinary places the instant right away was it was a political thing we're talking about russian trained high-ranking officer in the secret service an assassin comes to town a six-part podcast available now wherever you get your podcasts the following is a high-five moment from highfivecasino.com welcome to burger would you like a high apple pie today yes yes yeah i won so that's a yes on the apple pie i just went big time playing high five casino on my phone real cash prizes free daily rewards over 1200 games so yes or no on the apple pie whoa i won again i'll take that as a yes drive around have you had your high five moment today only at highfivecasino.com i five casino is a social casino no purchase necessary void where prohibited play responsibly conditions apply see website for details high five casino