ROY ROGERS

Roy Rogers

     The summer when I was eight, and Darrell turned six, Mom took the us on a train trip to visit her sister and brother-in-law, our Aunt Bessie and Uncle Lank Hickman, near where they'd all grown up in the Ozarks of southwestern Missouri.

     When we got back to our apartment at 32C Navy Homes, our dad had moved out. There was no sign of him except two or three empty brown beer bottles. For some time Mom had been telling Darrell and me that Dad was worthless, and she pointed out the beer bottles as proof. I didn't know what was going on between them at the time, but after I was grown I figured that she had told him to be gone by the time we got back.

     Mom had custody of us, and Darrell and I got letters from our dad from Darrington, the little logging town he'd moved to in the opposite corner of the state. He was working there as a millwright in a sawmill.

     Later that year Dad asked in one of his letters what Darrell and I wanted for Christmas. He said we should pick something pretty good. He seemed to want to make up for not being with us. We got out the "wish book," the Sears, Roebuck catalog. 

     Mom, always trying to make ends meet, said we should ask for something practical, like school clothes. We of course went straight to the toy section, and were soon hunched over the open catalogue (as it was spelled in those days), excitedly speculating about which of the cowboy toys we thought Dad could afford. 

     There they were, the cowboy sets. Boy, were they something. There was Gene Autry stuff and Roy Rogers stuff. We discussed the merits. Gene Autry was good, all right. But Roy Rogers... well. Two guns.

     That was it, of course. We had to have the guns. You could play cowboys without the rest of the stuff, but the guns were the heart of the matter. We wouldn't have to hold sticks in our hands and pretend any more. We'd have real toy guns. 

     We wrote Dad a letter. We made sure to thank him for such a nice offer, and said we were glad he had a good job where he was living now. We hoped it wouldn't be too much to ask, but we'd each like a gun set - Gene Autry for Darrell, Roy Rogers for me. I explained to Darrell that that was because I was older. Besides, I was writing the letter. I also wrote that we didn't really need all that other stuff-  the incredibly beautiful singing cowboy outfits like Roy wore in the pictures right there in the catalogue. It would be nice, of course. But we understood that they cost a lot. So we didn't really need them. Honest, Dad.      

     We waited, a child's eternity. Our hopes waned. Maybe there'd be one cap pistol, anyway. We'd have to take turns. We'd stick it in our belts, maybe get a holster later.

     The box came. It was so big Darrell and I both could have crawled into it. It was all there: the onegun holster set, the twogun holster set, two cowboy hats with strings so your hat could get knocked off your head by the wind, or by cowboy scuffles, and you wouldn't lose it. There were fringed cowboy shirts with the yokes a contrasting color. There were cowboy pants - kinda dressy for real cowboys, we thought - and vinyl gauntlets that we soon discarded because we couldn't see what they were for and because we didn't see even Roy wearing them in the pictures. There was a dressy cowboy belt to hold up the dressy cowboy pants. There were no cowboy boots, but there were "leggings" you could stuff your pantlegs into that sort of looked like the top of a cowboy boot.

     The costume stuff from that giant Christmas box - the dressy pants, the fringed shirts - was soon left behind when we went out to play. The other boys had looked at us funny when we showed up in them. Pretty soon, we'd just grab the guns and holsters and go.