A 90-Year-Old Cowboy Is No Longer Preaching Sermons From a Mount, but Is Still Rounding Up Those Who’ve Gone Astray Lord’s Lasso

Leonard Eilers pulls out his long, worn rope, ties a quick slipknot and then begins twirling it around his body, above his head and then . . . snap! He lassos the nearest person.

“Yep, I’ve been doing this all my life--roundin’ up people for the Lord,” he says with a chuckle.

At age 90, Eilers still loves to perform that favorite routine for visitors to Eilers’ Ranch in Granada Hills. And he still is a beloved, one-of-a-kind “Preachin’ Cowboy” to his many friends and acquaintances.

He’s a man who grew up on a South Dakota ranch and moved to Hollywood in the 1920s, swept up with his dream of becoming a Western movie star. Somewhere along the line, he turned to God, his lasso, and the telling of good old cowboy tales throughout the country to make his livelihood.

And even though his arthritic bones are keeping him off horses these days, he is quick to fashion a fable around his rope tricks for longtime friends or anyone else who asks him to preach a sermon in cowboy talk.

“I may not have much A -bility left, but I’m still A -vailable,” he said, adding characteristic punch to his phrases.

Eilers estimates that he has preached at more than 700 churches in the past 60 years, bringing his cowboy-themed Gospel messages to tens of thousands of people. Although he never became the Hollywood movie cowboy that he dreamed of, he has endeared himself to a faithful following of friends, some of them stars.

“He can captivate people with his stories and his ropes,” said longtime friend, singer and author Dale Evans, the wife of cowboy actor Roy Rogers. “Leonard is in a class all by himself. We have always felt very close to him and admired his goal to serve people.”

Eilers was born a real cowboy in 1898, the son of South Dakota homesteaders. But he was raised to be “first a Christian,” he said.

He can clearly recall the first big turning point in his life, when at age 13 he attended a wild west cowboy show and was fascinated by roping tricks. He practiced until he could do them himself and later worked as a stagehand for the show.

So enamored was he with what he described as the “romantic adventurous life” of performing cowboys that he left his job with the Wyoming show in 1921 and took a train to Hollywood to stake his claim to stardom.

“But when I got here there were 1,000 other cowboys like me trying to get a job as an extra on a movie,” he said. So he took a job as a waiter.

“But I didn’t tell anyone. It would have been a disgrace for a cowboy to be a waiter,” he said. In 1923, thanks to a church member who worked in the film industry, he learned of a job as an assistant cameraman for the studio that later became Paramount, his first break in Hollywood.

But remember, now, Leonard Eilers was first a Christian.

“I became very disillusioned with many of the people in Hollywood,” he recalled. “It hurt me to see the women smoking and hear the language they used.”

At the same time he was helping to build the landmark First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood on the corner of what is now Gower Street and Carlos Avenue. He had fallen in love and married Frances, the church secretary. He was teaching Sunday school on the side using his rope tricks as an attention-grabber.

So it made perfect sense, he said, to leave the studio in 1928 and take a 2-year course at the Bible Institute of Los Angeles.

In the Depression years, however, churches could not support pastors, and Eilers took to the road with his sermons, becoming an evangelical preacher with cowboy boots, earning anywhere from $5 to $50 a week.

He can tie his rope in a series of knots to show how a life can become a tangled mess without direction. He rattles off a “barnyard mystery” question: “How could a black cow eat green alfalfa and give white milk that could be turned into yellow butter?” Then he glances upward to the “Ranch in the Sky” to answer his question.

While he was out on the road preaching, Frances Eilers used their money to buy an 11-acre ranch in Granada Hills in 1941, paying $1,595 with 10%--or $160--down to qualify for the bank loan.

She became known as the “Keeper of the Home Corral” for the hundreds of children she took in during World War II, when their mothers worked and fathers were in the military. Later Frances Eilers, who died three years ago, welcomed foster children and foreign exchange students.

“The Eilers would give to anyone who came to their ranch,” said Ralph Osborne, the associate pastor of First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood and a family friend. “And Leonard, well, he’s a landmark type of a man because of that cowboy person he’s always been.”