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Roy Rogers: ‘He Was a Real Cowboy’

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TIMES STAFF WRITER

Ken Jackson tipped his 10-gallon Stetson Monday and uttered an emotional goodbye to a part of his own childhood innocence, and, he said, America’s as well. On the day Roy Rogers died, Jackson stood inside the old cowboy’s museum in Victorville, surrounded by a throng of fellow fans, and bid farewell to the man he called the nation’s last straight shooter.

Although a handful of other icons of Hollywood’s cowboy era, such as Gene Autry, are still alive, Rogers’ fans said the death of the figure known as the King of the Cowboys was the ultimate loss.

“There are no more heroes after today--that’s it, the mold’s been broken,” said the 44-year-old Riverside insurance adjuster. “Roy Rogers was the last of the real good guys, the guy in the white hat. As America goes to hell in a handbasket, he was really the only one who still stood for anything decent. And now he’s gone.”

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Those happy trails Rogers sang about were lined with tears early Monday as hundreds of well-wishers--family, friends, fans and other moon-eyed mourners--showed up at the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum to pay their respects.

They came in pickup trucks and on motorcycles, in lumbering mobile homes and by bicycle. They wore baseball caps and wide-brimmed cowboy hats, toted children who had been taken out of school for the sad occasion. Outside in the 100-degree July heat, the tiny American flags they had attached to their car antennas for Independence Day flapped and fluttered at half-staff.

Out-of-town fans called in from as far away as Canada, South Africa and India. The museum had five people on hand just to handle all the calls.

Like Jackson, many local fans heard the news on the radio and high-tailed it out to old Roy’s museum to share in the day. Others got the news when they walked in the door, fanning their faces at the word that the 86-year-old actor, songwriter and entertainer had died in his Apple Valley home earlier in the morning of congestive heart failure.

Out here in the land of the tumbling tumbleweeds, in the high desert that lies 80 miles northeast of Los Angeles, they know a good cowboy when they see one. And they know how to say goodbye to one as well.

On Saturday, just before his funeral, local sheriff’s deputies will drive Rogers’ body out on the recently dedicated Roy Rogers Boulevard, cruising several times around his beloved wood-sided museum that sits along Interstate 15 like some outdated Wild West fort--like Rogers himself, something of a throwback to another era.

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Until then, though, the aging baby boomers who grew up watching Rogers on television each Saturday as young whippersnappers--sending away cereal box tops for his autographed gadgets and gizmos, the rodeo pins and saddle rings--were flocking to his gift shop for one final memory of the man they say shaped their childhoods.

They came not only because of Rogers’ film and television presence--from 1943 to 1955 he was America’s No. 1 cowboy star at the box office, starring in 87 movies. They came because he stood for something, a now-outmoded sense of integrity they say is sorely missing from today’s Hollywood icons.

“His career didn’t go to his head--he was just a good ole boy,” said 63-year-old Marilyn Stephenson.

Added Patricia Butler of Victorville: “Unlike other stars, Roy never let his fans down. He didn’t get busted for drugs or alcohol. He stood for something. I can’t tell you the depths of emotions his death has stirred in me.”

In his old cowboy roles, fans say, Rogers never shot to kill but was content to just blast the gun out of the other guy’s hand. In a seemingly simpler era after World War II, Rogers represented for children and their parents the good side of a black-and-white moral world.

Dressed in fancy Western wear with fringes and sequins, he was the height of Americana, representing home, hearth and horse. Even after he filmed his last movie, Rogers and Evans remained a cottage industry, opening restaurants and other businesses, filming touching holiday TV specials.

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“My dad always said that the world was pure black and white, that there were no grays in between,” said son Roy Jr., nicknamed Dusty. “That’s why folks respected him. They always knew where Roy Rogers stood.”

Nearby, 8-year-old Michael Jones put it more succinctly: “He was a real cowboy,” he said. “My mother told me that.”

Dressed in Western hat and boots, Dusty Rogers greeted fans Monday and fielded press calls from as far away as Europe and Asia. In the morning, he stepped outside and read a news release from his mother, Dale Evans, who he said was resting at the family home in nearby Apple Valley.

“To say I will miss him is a gross understatement,” the release read in part. “He was truly the King of the Cowboys in my life. He loved his God, his country and his family.”

Dusty Rogers said doctors had given his father only days to live when his heart ailment was diagnosed nearly a month ago. “But he was a tough old character and he defied those doctors,” the younger Rogers said. “He said, ‘I’m not clearing out just yet.’ ”

Brought home at his wife’s request, Rogers spent the last three weeks of his life with family. About 2 a.m. Monday, Dusty Rogers said, a nurse heard his father talking to himself, saying “Well, Lord, it’s been a long, hard ride.”

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“Then at 4 a.m. he took one last deep breath and he was gone,” Rogers’ son said. “Now he’s with Trigger and Bullet, riding the range again.”

Months before his death, Rogers spent most mornings at his museum, riding the electric cart he called Trigger 3, signing autographs and posing for pictures with his fans.

Judy Story, 61, of Chesapeake, Va., recalled meeting Rogers a few years back. “He had on this neck brace and he greeted me just like I was an old friend. He said ‘Guess what I did? I fell out of bed this morning and now I’ve got this old neck brace on.’ He was just as sweet as can be.”

But not all Rogers fans got to meet their cowboy hero.

On Monday, 59-year-old Terry Harris wept as he stood outside the museum, near the huge statue of a rearing Trigger. He had written Rogers three times and had finally flown out from Florida to meet his hero.

He and his wife, Sue, arrived in Los Angeles on Sunday and showed up at the museum Monday morning, where they heard the news. “I just wanted to get my picture taken with Roy,” he said, sobbing.

On Monday, officials were charging no admission at the museum, where 75,000 fans annually come to see a collection of Rogers artifacts, including the taxidermically preserved palomino Trigger.

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Dusty smiled sadly and said Rogers’ old friends had suggested something similar for his dad. “They wanted to know if I was going to lift him up and put him atop Trigger just one more time,” he said.

Then he paused. “But I think there’s laws against that.”

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