Friends Bid Final Farewell to One of America’s Last Cowboys

The Rev. William Bjork switched on the boom box and the small chapel in Chatsworth was filled with the sound of cowboy songs--dated tunes with loping rhythms and corn-pone lyrics. Somehow, though, they sounded appropriate in the white stucco room with its wood-beam ceiling and the rugged, boulder-strewn Santa Susana Mountains visible in the distance.

“Water . . . water,” a tenor voice crooned. “Cool, clear water.”

Tiny beads of water rolled down the cheeks of a few mourners, but otherwise the eulogy for Frank Matts was as impersonal and barren as the tape-recorded music and the arid wasteland it sang of.

Bjork, of the First Baptist Church of Reseda, repeatedly called on survivors to remember the retired actor and rancher. Yet only one man came forward to publicly mourn one of America’s last cowboys, saying, “I can’t believe he’s dead, because to me he was bigger than life.”

About 100 people attended the funeral of Matts, who died from pneumonia Nov. 14 at the age of 70 and had spent the last of his six marriages suffering from Alzheimer’s disease in a nursing home.

A number of those in the church wore cowboy hats, boots and string ties.

Among the mourners were Matts’ widow Dorothy Matts, his immediate ex-wife Patricia Matts, and Karin Pedersen, an earlier spouse, since remarried. A lot of them, like his wives, appeared to have met him riding horses, or selling horses, or boarding their animals at his Southern California ranches. His last spread was located in Brown’s Canyon in the Porter Ranch area.

“We just started talking and next thing you know we were friends,” Tom Costello, a retired state police officer, said after the service.

“You did not have to know him a long time to have him enrich you,” said Julie Hermann, whose husband Eric befriended Matts while patrolling Matts’ neighborhood for the Los Angeles Police Department.

“He had a sense of humor that was absolutely unique to him,” said ex-wife Pedersen, a former model and rodeo performer who topped her stylish black wool suit with an off-white cowboy hat.

“Frank was very funny,” agreed Richard Renaldo, a real estate agent whose late father, Duncan, played the title role in “The Cisco Kid,” a 1950s TV Western. Matts played the show’s villain, Black Jack Matts.

Asked to recall an example of Matts’ special humor, Renaldo cited a breakfast in Vallejo with his father and Matts. Renaldo said he was about 12 or 13 at the time. Matts broke everyone up with the way he ordered strawberry waffles, Renaldo said.

Exactly how he ordered them, though, and what made the order so funny, Renaldo couldn’t remember.

“What makes a great conductor great?” Renaldo asked, suggesting that Matts’ genius could not be articulated.

Matts’ only child, a son who has a ranch near San Luis Obispo, did not come to the service.

The Rev. Bjork invoked the words of the Old Testament, the New Testament, Martin Luther, Ben Franklin, and countless other poets and prophets. But like the mourners, the minister had little to say about Matts that painted him in life.

“Despite his villain roles, Frank was a good man,” attempted Bjork.

Cowboy memorabilia fleshed out Matts where his friends failed.

One of the orange and yellow flower arrangements sported a brown plastic horse at its center. A cowboy hat and rope adorned Matts’ elaborate silver and chrome casket. Old black and white photos displayed nearby showed a younger, mustachioed Matts laughing with Duncan Renaldo. And then there were the cowboy songs.

“ I’ll keep rolling along ,” the voice from the boom box warbled.

“ Deep in my heart is a song.

“ Here on the range I belong,

“ Drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds. “

The service concluded, mourners filed out of the pews to the tune of Roy Rogers’ theme song, “Happy trails to you, until we meet again.”

They greeted each other in the courtyard outside--horsemen clasping horsemen, ex-wives bussing ex-wives--and waited to make the short car procession to Matts’ grave site at Oakwood Memorial Park, its acres of lawn unnaturally green beneath the dusty Santa Susanas.

“I like the hat,” Patricia Matts told Pedersen as they embraced.

Matts’ widow and his penultimate wife, Dorothy and Patricia, sat together under the canopy beside Matts’ grave, both in black, both tall, athletic-looking women in their 40s.

Patricia Matts said they “became like best friends” after Frank Matts fell ill, not long after he married Dorothy about five years ago.

She took credit for helping Dorothy run Matts’ boarding stables while he was ill, and for teaching her the business, although Dorothy said that wasn’t exactly so. “It’s my business now and I run it, Pat does not,” Dorothy Matts said, bristling.

“She comes out to ride once in a while. Frank taught me everything I know about horses.”

Still, they were cordial, and Patricia helped Dorothy load her hatchback with the salvaged flower arrangements. Funeral director Bob Franke urged her to save the one with a plastic horse.

“Now there’s a classic,” he said.