Autry’s Code as Owner Was Class

At the front of the program handed out Tuesday night to the guests at Gene Autry’s memorial service at Edison Field was the Gene Autry Cowboy Code.

The Cowboy Code consists of 10 rules that Autry, in his life as “America’s Singing Cowboy,” thought any upstanding cowboy should live by.

Things like “He must never go back on his word, or a trust confided in him.” “He must keep himself clean in thought, speech, action and personal habits.” “He must respect women, parents and his nation’s law.”

Which leads to this question--how did this gentle, friendly, happy, honest, generous man ever become a baseball owner?

The consensus of the eight men who spoke honor of Autry in front of about 1,000 friends and fans was that there never will be another baseball owner like Gene Autry, who died at his Studio City home on Oct. 2 at the age of 91.

“You’ll never see an owner that great again,” Don Baylor said. Baylor, who signed with Autry’s Angels in 1976, along with Joe Rudi and Bobby Grich, said that Autry “was a friend of every player who ever played with the Angels.”

Can you imagine George Steinbrenner being eulogized in the same way?

As the owner of the newly crowned baseball champions, the New York Yankees, no one personifies what it takes to be a World Series-winning baseball owner more than the high-strung, foul-mouthed, tyrannical Steinbrenner. If you work for George Steinbrenner and you do not contribute to winning World Series titles, you are fired.

If you worked for Gene Autry and you did not contribute to winning World Series titles, you felt very, very bad and you probably got a raise.

Which might be why Autry’s Angels never did win that elusive World Series.

Gene Autry lived by the Cowboy Code. George Steinbrenner lives by the Win Or Else Code.

Rod Carew, both a player and a coach for Autry, spoke in a quavering voice thick with emotion, of how Autry “never walked by anyone in the clubhouse. He always had a smile for every player.

“I went through a tough time in 1996 when my daughter became ill. Gene Autry was not concerned about the Angels. He was concerned about me and my family. I knew the man not only as an owner, not only as my boss but most of all as a friend.”

You will not hear any Angel player or coach speak that way of Michael Eisner or any other Disneyite. Will there be a Dodger player years from now who will get teary-eyed about Rupert Murdoch or whatever Fox bigwig it might be that owns the Dodgers?

Gene Mauch, white-haired and tanned and with a soft voice, was eloquent in telling how Autry might just as well have rode up on his horse, Champion, and grabbed Mauch by the chest and pulled Mauch from in front of a speeding train. Because, Mauch said, Autry truly did “save my life.” Mauch said that Autry came to Mauch when “circumstances had put out all the fire and desire in me,” Mauch said, “and he asked me to come back to work. As hard as I tried, I could never thank him as completely as I wanted to.”

Ross Newhan, the present day national baseball writer for the Los Angeles Times, who had covered the Angels when they came into being, remembered how Autry would tell the story of when President Richard Nixon came into Autry’s box and asked Autry “how’s your wife Dale and your horse Trigger?” mistaking Autry for Roy Rogers.

In this day of egos bigger than the wild, wild west that Autry had patrolled so nobly in his movies and TV show, great offense would have been taken at such a terrible mistake but Autry, Newhan said, would laugh and say that he never had the heart to correct the president.

A man was kind of dragging his teenaged son into the stadium about half an hour before the ceremony would begin. “The Old Prospector,” an episode of Autry’s TV show, was playing on the scoreboard and the father was trying to explain why he had brought the son.

“You won’t ever see a man like him in sports again,” the man said. “He believed in something other than money. Plus, he had a great, great voice.” The son looked puzzled. But Autry’s voice was booming over the speakers. “Back in the Saddle Again.”

What the father seemed to mean was this: that Autry owned the Angels because it was fun, because Autry loved baseball, loved the purity of the game, loved the camaraderie, loved his players and managers and the guy who ran the press box and the writers and the announcers and anybody who came through the gate. Autry didn’t own the Angels to go to the World Series.

Clyde Wright, who pitched a no-hitter for Autry’s Angels, said that “I don’t think I ever saw the man without a smile on his face. And the way we played sometimes, it must have taken an awful lot for that man not to get mad.”

But that’s the thing. It probably didn’t. Autry seemed truly to be in the game of baseball only because he loved the game of baseball.

For Autry had already earned himself great fame and fortune. As a singer. As a cowboy. As a movie star. From baseball, Autry was looking to receive nothing.

If he didn’t do it wisely all the time and if it never seemed to work out well, Autry was always willing to spend money. If Autry were the owner now, don’t you think that there’s a good chance Kevin Brown or Mo Vaughn or maybe both would be Angels next year?

But he’s not. Disney is. Now there is no chance that a sweet and generous owner will amble through the clubhouse saying hello to everyone by name and the Angels will probably never sign three free agents like Baylor, Grich and Rudi in one big spendfest again.

As Autry’s widow, Jackie, wiped away a tear and accepted a yellow rose from each of the speakers, it was time to push away the thoughts of free agents and long-term contracts, of World Series appearances and George Steinbrenner.

It was, instead, time to stand and smile while Autry’s voice came on again. “Back in the Saddle Again,” he sang. Let’s hope that unenthusiastic teenager had gotten the point. The Angels, Orange County, all of baseball, were lucky to have known Gene Autry.

A special Gene Autry section with audio highlights, photos and stories about his life and career is on The Times’ Web site: https://www.latimes.com/autry