Born in Georgia as Floyd Rodgers, he moved with his family to Keene, near Cleburne, and received a brief education there before moving to an uncle's farm in McLennan County. Somewhere along the way, the young boy that everybody would know as Slats developed a fascination with kites, which led to a fascination with aviation and a life that is the stuff of movie serials.
Rodgers' first job was with the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe railroad where he soon became an engineer making the Dallas to Cleburne run. Rodgers enjoyed the speed and thunder of a locomotive, but thought it was a real shame that all that engine power was devoted to something that stayed on the ground. He read all he could find about airplanes and with the help of engineer John C. Fine set about building one. Construction began at a blacksmith shop on Main Street in Cleburne, but he moved it to a rented house in Keene, after the City of Cleburne declared the project "a public nuisance."
Rodgers finished the plane but he didn't know how to fly it. Worse, the right wing drooped, always a bad thing for a wing to do. He taxied around a pasture at length but couldn't control the plane's direction of travel which, combined with the droopy wing, made him understandably reluctant to take to the skies. The first airplane built in Texas (other than a few pre-Wright Brothers experiments) was named Old Soggy No. 1, in honor of the drooping wing. Rodgers displayed picture of the plane on the water tank of his locomotive, which generated interest in the project from Dallas to Cleburne.
The first time he actually flew the plane, in 1912, was a result of attaining a fair amount of ground speed with the plane but in the exact direction of a ditch. He got the plane off the ground just in time to avoid the ditch and spent a few seconds in the air, enough time for him to realize that this was what he wanted to do for the rest of his life. According to some reports, Rodgers may have had a few drinks before taking to the air for the first time.
Of course, when he landed the plane the right wing dropped, caught the ground and was ripped asunder from the rest of the rest of the plane. The wheels fell off, too. That was to be the first of 29 crashes that Rodgers would walk away from.
Rodgers eventually corrected the problem, sort of, by shifting his body weight to the left to counteract the droopy wing effect. As soon as he had Old Soggy repaired, he took it up again and this time landed without incident. He retired the plane by letting it deteriorate in a Johnson County pasture.
Rodgers became a civilian flight instructor during World War I, but the civilians didn't last long as the Army eventually brought in their own instructors. Undeterred, Rodgers began barnstorming and bootlegging. He operated a flying circus, Slats Rodgers and the Love Field Lunatics. The circus was a ruse. The real business of the Love Field Lunatics was bootlegging.
Prohibition provided Rodgers with a new career ferrying bootleg liquor from Mexico to Texas. The operation also included some gambling and moonshining, which eventually resulted in Slats spending six months in a Dallas jail. The end of prohibition did away with the Mexico-to-Texas run, and the novelty of barnstormers like Rodgers waned. He moved to the Rio Grande Valley and became one of the state's first and most successful crop duster pilots.
The stories about Slats Rodgers, many of them drawn from his autobiography titled "Old Soggy No. 1" and co-written with Hart Stillwell, are still legendary. They tell about the time he was challenged to fly a plane between two downtown Dallas skyscrapers; his successful completion of that stunt led to his pilot's license being revoked. Then there's the time he dressed a dummy to look like a pilot and allowed the dummy to fall out of the plane and plummet to the ground in front of a shocked audience while an ambulance raced to the scene.
Rodgers moved to Bandera in 1943, where he bought a ranch and operated a steak house. He went back to McAllen in 1950 to open another steakhouse. He sold that and opened a fishing camp and minnow business in Zapata. He died in 1956, in McAllen, and is buried at Laurel Hills Cemetery in Mission.
