Roy Rogers wasn’t his real name, that name was given to him by someone in a Hollywood studio. It doesn’t matter, that’s just for historical clarity. What matters is who he really was.
He started out by moving to California from the Midwest in the 1940s and put a band together called the Sons of the Pioneers. He sang and played guitar and the band became very popular, making a number of hit records. It wasn’t long before Hollywood gave him a tryout in a western movie and he was again a hit. He soon was a famous “cowboy” movie star and was cranking out the Oaters, which is what we called cowboy movies, because the horses were fed oats with their hay.
These movies were popular at theater matinees, movies that started at noon on Saturdays that were attended entirely by kids. Boys, mostly, who all saw Roy Rogers as their idol.
At the time, most of his movies were being made at ranches out in the Mohave Desert, and I lived in Palmdale at the time, right in the heart of that desert. One day the school got us kids all together and took us out to a ranch where Roy Rogers and his wife, Dale Evans, were making a movie, and we were brought up outside of the outdoor set, told to be quiet and watch.
We were quiet, we understood this was serious business, and we were all in awe because there right in front of us was our hero, Roy Rogers himself.
Well, Roy looked at us, turned to someone else there, and said loudly and clearly, “Get those kids out of here”. I saw the way his wife looked at us, too, very coldly. We were thus promptly herded out of the area and over to the buses and it wasn’t long before we were on our way back to the school and never got to watch him make his movie.
What a huge letdown for us all, and a lesson I never forgot, that what people seem to be on the movie screen is not what they’re really like. That was the end of my childhood hero worship of Roy Rogers and the last time I went to a movie matinee featuring one of his. We kids are what made him rich. Adults didn’t go see his movies, they were made for boys, not grown ups. It was our allowance money that paid his bills.
Roy Rogers was an asshole.