Cowboying

My first inclination as a lad was to follow the cowboy profession. I discovered cowboying through Saturday double-feature matinees. In those pre-television days, it was customary for parents to deliver their children to the local movie theater on Saturday with a quarter to cover the price of admission and refreshments, and a promise to pick them up three hours hence. It was the high point of the week for the children and the parents, although, I suspect, for slightly different reasons. The only ones who failed to enjoy these weekly rites were the theater employees, who were usually high-school kids working their first jobs to earn money for dates or college or a car. They all aged noticeably by the end of the second feature, and, as a result, the turnover in these jobs was fairly brisk.

There were two distinct and antithetic schools of cowboy thought in those days, each based on the work of one of the two foremost practitioners of the cowboy art: Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. We kids were about evenly divided between those who maintained that Roy could out-shoot, out-ride, out-fight, and out-sing Gene, and those who swore that the opposite was true. Arguments raged frequently between the two constituencies, and friendships sometimes ended abruptly in fisticuffs.

I was a staunch admirer and defender of Rogers--until, that is, one Saturday when he committed the unforgivable sin: he kissed a girl. Sounds of shock, disgust, embarrassment, and derision filled the theater. The Autry admirers hooted and taunted, and we in the Rogers crowd could only sit and take it. Some, unable to bear the humiliation, got up and left the theater. I hunkered down there in the dark and stayed to the end of the picture, but I vowed on the spot to have nothing more to do with The King of the Cowboys.

For a time I threw my allegiance to the Autry camp, but the kissing incident had so tarnished my concept of cowboy life that it was never the same for me again. If there was the remotest possibility that one would have to kiss girls in the course of cowboy work, I wanted no part of it. Of course this attitude soon began to change, but by then it was too late--the time for cowboying had passed and I was never able to get the excitement back.

I've never forgiven Roy for that.