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My name is Raymond Phipps. I am sixty-two years old and retired after thirty-four years climbing telephone poles, first in southern Ohio and then out here in the California desert. My wife Linda and I live in Victorville, a few miles from the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum, which I have visited more times than Linda thinks is strictly necessary. I was born and raised in Portsmouth, in Scioto County, Ohio, which is the same county where a boy named Leonard Slye grew up on a little farm on Duck Run, some twenty-five years before me. Every boy in our county knew that. On Saturday afternoons my older brother Larry and I would walk downtown with a dime apiece and sit through the cartoon, the newsreel, the serial and the Roy Rogers picture twice, and walk home in the dark arguing about whether Trigger was smarter than Bullet. We never did settle it. I began this page on July 6, 1999, one year to the day after Roy passed away. I am not a writer and I am new at the computer, and I ask your patience with both. But I wanted to set down what that man meant to one ordinary fellow, because I suspect I speak for a great many of us. Leonard Slye. Roy Rogers was born Leonard Franklin Slye on November 5, 1911, in Cincinnati, Ohio, in a building that stood about where Riverfront Stadium stands today. His family lived for a time on a houseboat his father built, and moved up the Ohio River to Portsmouth, and when Leonard was a boy they bought a farm on Duck Run, near Lucasville, north of town. His father worked in a shoe factory and came home on the weekends. Out on that farm Leonard learned to ride, to yodel, to play the guitar and to call a square dance, and the neighbors in our part of the county still told about him when I was young. California. In 1930, in the hard times, the family went west to California. Leonard drove a truck and picked fruit, the same as many thousands of others in those years, and played and sang wherever anybody would let him. The Sons of the Pioneers. In the early 1930s he and two other young singers, Bob Nolan and Tim Spencer, put together a trio. Before long they were the Sons of the Pioneers, and there has never been a sweeter sound in Western music. If you have heard "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" or "Cool Water," you have heard them. The Pioneers went on to sing in many of Roy's pictures, and they are still my favorite records. Roy Rogers. In 1938 Republic Pictures put him in his first starring picture, Under Western Stars, and gave him the name Roy Rogers, and he kept it the rest of his life. From then on he made Western pictures by the dozen, and for a dozen years running, from the middle of the war into the fifties, he was the top Western star at the box office. They called him the King of the Cowboys after one of those pictures, and it fit. Trigger. Roy's golden palomino, "the smartest horse in the movies," was in nearly every picture Roy made. Trigger knew more tricks than any horse I ever heard of, and he did them as if he enjoyed it. Before he was Roy's, he carried Olivia de Havilland in The Adventures of Robin Hood. Trigger lived to be thirty-three years old. Dale. Dale Evans came out of Texas as a singer and first rode alongside Roy in The Cowboy and the Senorita in 1944. Roy had lost his first wife, Arline, in 1946, shortly after their son was born. On New Year's Eve 1947, Roy and Dale were married at a ranch in Oklahoma, and they were married fifty years after that. Dale wrote "Happy Trails," which became their theme. Together they raised a big family, by birth and by adoption, and they knew great sorrow: they buried three of their children, among them their little Robin, who was born with Down syndrome and lived not quite two years. Dale wrote a book about Robin, Angel Unaware, that helped a great many families with children like her, at a time when people did not speak of such things. Bullet. Then there was Bullet, the German shepherd, the Wonder Dog, who joined the family in the pictures and on television, and who settled my brother's argument for him, as far as Larry was concerned. Television. From 1951 to 1957 The Roy Rogers Show came into our living rooms every week, with Roy and Dale and Trigger and Bullet, and Pat Brady and his jeep, Nellybelle, that would never start. By then I was a teenager and too old for it, I told everybody. I watched every one. The man. What I want to say most about Roy Rogers is this: he was the same man off the screen as on it. He visited sick children in hospitals all over the country, he kept faith with the little fellows who joined his Riders Club, and in all those years I never heard a mean word said about him. He was elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame twice, once with the Sons of the Pioneers and once on his own. That was nice. But I believe the honor he would have cared about most is that two or three generations of American boys tried to be a little more like him. Roy and Dale opened their museum in Apple Valley in 1967 and moved it to Victorville in 1976, the year after Linda and I settled here. It is off the interstate and easy to find. Inside are Roy's saddles and guns and boots and costumes, Dale's dresses, the family's photographs and letters, his cars, a great many things from the pictures and the television show, and things sent to him by fans all over the world. And there is Trigger. When Trigger died in 1965, Roy could not bear to bury him, and so he was preserved and stands in the museum, rearing up on his hind legs, as handsome as ever. Buttermilk, Dale's horse, and Bullet are there too. Some folks find that peculiar. I understand them, but I do not agree. The first time I walked in and saw Trigger, I was thirty-eight years old, and I stood there a good while with my hat in my hand, and I was nine again. For many years Roy would sometimes stop in at the museum, unannounced, and visitors would turn around and find the King of the Cowboys standing behind them. It happened to me once, on a Saturday in the spring of 1988. I had brought my old Roy Rogers Riders Club card from 1949, that I'd carried in my wallet through two marriages and the Army, and I asked him if he would sign it, and he did, and he shook my hand. I told him I was from Scioto County, too. I do not remember a word I said after that, and Linda says that is just as well. I have that card in a frame by my chair. If you are ever out this way on Interstate 15, between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, stop in. You will be glad you did. On the morning of Monday, July 6, 1998, I was out early watering the tomatoes, before the heat came up, when Linda came to the back door with the telephone. It was Larry, calling from Ohio. He said, "Ray, Roy's gone." That was all he said, and that was all he needed to. Roy Rogers had died that morning at his home in Apple Valley, of heart failure, at the age of eighty-six, with his family around him. Larry and I stayed on the telephone a long while that morning and did not say much. That afternoon I drove over to the museum. People had already begun to come. They brought flowers and laid them by the door, and cowboy hats, and handwritten notes, and children's drawings of Trigger. There were old men there my age and older, standing quietly, some in their good boots, some with their grandchildren. Nobody had to explain to anybody why they had come. I left a note of my own. It said thank you, and it was signed by both of us boys from Scioto County. Dale Evans is still with us, out in Apple Valley, at eighty-six. Linda and I pray for her every night. I hope she knows how many people do. Thank you, Roy. Happy trails. I have put together a list of ten of his pictures that I love best, with a word about each. |
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