According to the Mount Pleasant Tribune, friends and family held funeral services for Floyd H. "Slats" Rodgers in Mission on July 8, 1956. Mourners reportedly marveled that he had died in bed of natural causes, given his reputation as an accident-prone pioneer aviator. The article says he was born in rural Georgia in 1889 and moved with his parents to Texas, settling in Keene in Johnson County.
Rodgers worked for the Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railroad after leaving home at 18, and he eventually became a locomotive engineer on the Cleburne-to-Dallas run. The article says that after the Wright Brothers' 1903 flight, he began building his own airplane in a Cleburne blacksmith shop. Local officials later outlawed the project as a public nuisance, so he moved the materials to Keene.
The article says Rodgers first flew his airplane in 1912 and crashed on that flight. He later said it was the first of 29 crack-ups. He rebuilt the plane, named it "Old Soggy No. 1," and flew it about 50 more times. During World War I, the article says, he taught Army cadets to fly in 1916, and later bought a surplus Jenny and joined barnstorming shows.