Happy Trails, Roy, Till We Meet Again

A photographer from The Times called me 15 or 20 years ago, happy about an assignment she had just been given.

She had to shoot Roy Rogers.

I was jealous. I had grown up watching Roy on TV, with his wife, Dale Evans, and his horse Trigger, and her horse Buttermilk, and their dog Bullet, and their sidekick Pat Brady, and of course their car Nellybelle, which was Pat’s broken-down old Jeep, back in the days before a cowboy had to pay 20 or 30 grand for a really reliable sport utility vehicle.

I felt as if I knew all the hands there on the Double R Bar ranch.

“Tell Roy I said howdy,” I said.

A few days later, my friend the photographer called back.

She said, “Well, I shot Roy.”

I asked how it went.

“Fine,” she said, “except for one thing.”

I asked what.

She said, “Roy was very nice and all, but he . . . “

He what?

“He wore tennis shoes.”

*

I guess I’ve smiled about that every day this week, since hearing the sad news of Roy’s death Monday.

Trying to picture Roy Rogers in tennis shoes was like trying to picture John Wayne on a motorcycle, or Gene Autry in a pair of Bermuda shorts.

It just didn’t fit.

If I had ever run into Roy at a shopping mall in anything but a Western shirt, a big-buckled belt, a bandanna and a pair of stitched boots, I wouldn’t have even recognized him.

Come to think of it, I can’t even imagine Roy in a mall.

A lot of our heroes have images to live up to, based solely on what we know about them from the screen. We expect them to look and act the part until the day they die.

Funny thing is, Roy Rogers did.

He was the ultimate straight shooter, plain and simple, just a regular fella, a name you could trust.

There are younger generations today that only recognize the name Roy Rogers from a restaurant chain that sells roast beef sandwiches. They don’t know if Roy is a real person any more than they know what a jack-in-the-box is.

When I went to school, I went with my sandwich and apple and Twinkie inside a Roy Rogers lunch pail.

I watched Roy chase the bad guys with a rifle hidden inside his guitar. He specialized in ride-by crime.

I heard Roy yodel. Nobody yodels worth a darn anymore.

I remember Roy singing of his horse, “A four-legged friend, a four-legged friend, never will let you down. He’s honest and faithful right up to the end, that wonderful, one-two-three, four-legged friend.”

He was square and we liked him that way.

Bob Hope took one look at Roy in a saloon and told the bartender, “Give this kid a straight celery tonic.”

In the end, Roy had his four-legged friend stuffed. I have often considered doing this with some of my two-legged friends.

Trigger was billed as “the smartest horse in the movies.” He was the kind of beast who could count to 10 with his hoof, exactly the same way many of today’s top professional athletes can.

Back in 1977, when R2-D2, C-3PO and Darth Vader of the “Star Wars” films had their footprints set in concrete at Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood, they were the first nonhumans so honored since Trigger.

In most of the films Hollywood makes today, everybody seems nonhuman.

Roy Rogers was never an antihero. He didn’t play a flawed individual with a dark secret from his past. In those TV shows and movies of his, the worst thing Roy ever did was give Trigger too many lumps of sugar.

We needed heroes like him then.

We could use a few now.

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I am very aware that Roy Rogers was an invention of Hollywood, that he was actually a Cincinnati cowpoke, born Leonard Slye and brought up on an Ohio houseboat.

He did have a real life and an off-screen personality, apart from the fiction and the myth. In an interview once, Burt Reynolds told a hilariously off-color anecdote about being with Roy one night, where something was being consumed other than celery tonic. I regret to say it can’t be repeated here.

Yet for all I know, Roy never drank anything stronger than water from a creek.

His funeral wagon will be driven Saturday in the High Desert along Roy Rogers Boulevard, around his museum in Victorville. I reckon Roy died with his boots off, but will be buried with them on.

And a white hat, I hope.

Mike Downey’s column appears Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Write to him at Times Mirror Square, Los Angeles 90053, or phone (213) 237-7366.