COMMENTARY : Hoppy, Gene and the Lone Ranger Ride Again

The Gene Autry Western Heritage Museum sits at a unique junction of real history and popular culture. Nothing in American history so seized the popular imagination or held it captive for so long as the winning of the West. The myth making began, in florid newspaper accounts and in paperback novels by Nick Carter and others, even before the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the West won and the frontier closed in 1894.

Just how pervasive the appeal of the cowboy hero has been in American culture is enchantingly revealed in a new show at the Autry--”Cowboy Heroes: Hoppy, Gene and the Lone Ranger.”

At a special preview, television’s last Lone Ranger, Clayton Moore, was on hand, along with Autry himself, and Moore recited the Lone Ranger’s Creed, which says in part: “I believe that to have a friend, a man must be a friend . . . that all men are created equal . . . that God put the firewood there but every man must gather and light it himself.”

The show, assembled by the museum’s chief curator, James Nottage, contains more than 400 artifacts from 22 donors and the Autry’s own extensive collection. There are the elaborate, silver-trimmed saddles the heroes sat on and the costumes they wore, including Tonto’s fringed leather outfit, and there are the movie posters, the publicity photos (Autry as a boyish radio cowboy in his early 20s) and a video presentation of the three heroes, narrated by Leonard Maltin.

But above all there are the goods merchandised in the names of Hoppy, Gene and the Lone Ranger. “Many of the items,” Nottage points out, “had nothing to do with the West.” There is, indeed, a Hopalong Cassidy bicycle and a roll of Hoppy wallpaper, and you could also buy Hoppy linoleum. Hoppy bunk beds and dressers were made of pecan for the Southern market, pine for the rest of the country. A million Hoppy pocket knives (98 cents each) were sold in the first 10 days. Gimbels ordered $22,000 worth of Hoppy snowsuits.

One Ohio manufacturer survived and prospered late in the Depression by making and selling Gene Autry cap pistols by the tens of thousands.

What seems miraculous is that cereal boxes and toys and dolls of great fragility (built-in obsolescence with a vengeance) have survived intact and usually in pristine shape for a half-century or more.

“Serious collectors have found some of the items, in their original boxes, by poking around in the back rooms of stores,” Nottage says. “One collector was so crazy about the cowboys that his parents bought him two of everything, one to play with and presumably destroy, and one to keep.” Those he kept are by now very valuable collectibles. “One man specializes in cereal boxes,” Nottage adds, “and he has something like 1,400 of them.”

Autry, a shrewd businessman from early in his career, controlled all his own merchandising. The Lone Ranger products were licensed by George Trendel, the owner of radio station WXYZ in Detroit, where he invented the ranger in the early 1930s as a radio show.

But the dean of the cowboy merchandisers was Hoppy himself, William S. Boyd. Boyd bought back all his films and launched a merchandising blitz so successful it put him on the covers of both Time and Life magazines. “There were some 2,500 Hoppy products,” Nottage says. Time estimated the 1950 sales at $70 million, a whopping sum in those hard-dollar days.

Ironically, when Hoppy began life in 1906 in a novel by Clarence E. Mulford (who had worked as a clerk in a marriage license bureau), he was an unshaven, tobacco-spittin’, hard-cussin’ loner who literally limped from an old gunshot wound in his leg. The period illustrations by N. C. Wyeth and Frank Schoonover (both on view) suggest he might have been more appropriately played by Walter Brennan or Gabby Hayes.

But when Paramount launched the Cassidy films in 1935 with Boyd as Hopalong, Hoppy could have presided over any Sunday School on Earth: clean-shaven, clean-speaking, non-kissing. After one outing, he even lost his limp and the Hopalongs became the most successful of any Western series.

After Mulford retired, four more Hopalong novels were written by Louis L’Amour under the pseudonym Tex Burns.

All three heroes made the transfer to television, of course, which distinguishes them from the many other legendary cowboy heroes like William S. Hart, Tom Mix, Buck Jones, Ken Maynard and the Duke himself, John Wayne. It seems likely that the present three will be visible in reruns until the last set on Earth flickers and dies.

The appeal of the Western is not hard to place, especially when Hoppy, Gene and the Lone Ranger were making their filmed starts in the Depression years. As Nottage says, “They made the world seem a lot simpler than it was.” You could tell the good guys from the bad guys, and not only by the color of their hats. Justice and happiness were restored by the end of the last reel; they were unmistakably heroes, the best kind at that: shy, selfless and self-effacing.

And all the action took place beneath the umbrella, so to speak, of the great American westering movement, with its huge appeal to millions who may or may not ever have seen a prairie or even a cow. The heroes looked back to a time when the future lay ahead, when individual valor was the name of the game and optimism was the operative tone.

By now the reassessors and the demythologizers have taken the bloom off the Western experience (and--until “Dances With Wolves”--had just about done in the Western as a film genre).

The new version of Western history is that a shortsighted self-interest did not so much conquer the West as despoil it, overgrazing, overplowing, overwatering, overbuilding. Yet the mythic West lives on, if a bit tarnished.

And thus the “Cowboy Heroes” show has a kind of double nostalgic appeal: for the West of the untarnished myth, and for our individual pasts when we watched the heroes for the first time.

A later generation may ask sharp questions. Wasn’t the appeal of the cowboy heroes largely for boys? (Nottage says there was an equal amount of merchandise, at least, aimed at girls.) Wasn’t all the emphasis on guns and shooting a dangerous conditioning? Actually these three heroes tried valiantly to deliver the guilty to jail, intact. But those times were in some ways innocent, and the gunplay was closer to fantasy than social reality. But, yes, the pretty firearms draw a different reaction from today’s adults.

A Cub Scout den, moving through the museum, oohs and ahs over the fancy saddles and, true enough, the fancy pearl-handled Colts. Their elders gaze at the posters and the fragments of the films and TV shows and say, “Oh, Lord, I saw that.”

Indeed, for a generation or two, the memories are of Saturday afternoons, a double feature and an Autry serial and maybe a cartoon, all for a dime.

They don’t make money, or the West, the way they used to.

The show continues at the museum through Sept. 8. Information: (213) 667-2000.