A little trip out West

I was a bit under the weather last week, so I figured it might be a good time to make a sentimental journey back to my kindergarten and first grade days and catch up on all my old friends from the 1950s black and white TV cowboy shows. The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid, The Durango Kid, Tales of Wells Fargo, Zane Grey Theater, Roy Rogers, Gene Autry and of course, Rawhide and Gunsmoke. That’s just a drop in the horse trough and that doesn’t even scratch the surface, but all those fellas are still around on one screen or another and you can return to those “thrilling days of yesteryear” as they used to say and see all your old pals by way of your smart TV. That’s just what I did for, let’s just say, nigh on to sundown for a couple of days. Our childhood heroes haven’t changed a bit. Actually, they are better than ever. They can still shoot straight as a string, rope a runaway cow, break a wild horse, put the bad guys down, then wink at the lady choir director, or the new school Marm, or even the painted lady in the saloon and get a smile back. I guess if they were in the movies today, you would call them Superheroes. But unlike today, they never used four letter words, but if they said anything at all, you better listen, ‘cause they did not play around. They rode hard, they didn’t put up with any foolishness, and they believed right was right and wrong was bad, bad trouble. Back then, we would soak up every last second of those 30-minute black and white masterpieces, then head out into the neighborhood of our own world as big as our imagination, with no fences holding us in. If you could find an old worn-out broom in somebody’s trash, then that was your horse; if you had to cross the Rio Grande chasing bad guys down into Mexico, you headed out to that big ditch two houses down. If you had cattle rustlers around, you saddled up! Rover might look like a dog, but he’s really a mean, ornery steer, and you gotta wrestle that longhorn to the ground and get him back home. All of us had cowboy boots, and either a cap-gun pistol or a rifle. Some boys, (I mean cowboys), even had western shirts with a vest and a cowboy hat, and when the neighborhood posse galloped through everybody’s back yard on those broomstick horses, it was quite a show.

That brought back a lot of memories. It also brought home the impact that those weekly stories had on the evolving minds and developing characters of that young generation back in those early days of television. To us, that era was a time of adventure, and excitement created mostly from our own imagination but inspired by those weekly plots and characters of the old west that told stories of good over evil, right over wrong and respect for those things that this country had just fought a world war to protect. We were just boys having fun. But along with the fun, there were a lot of good lessons being taught by those characters streaking across the screen on horseback to catch a runaway stagecoach or running into a burning building to save a family or a thousand other heroic acts. Well, a lot of us watched them all and never could get enough. So now, here’s your chance to continue your viewing. There is unfortunately one drawback. If you’re like me, after watching a few great episodes of Jim Hardy (Dale Robertson) in Tales of Wells Fargo, or Rowdy Yates (Clint Eastwood) in Rawhide or any of your other favorites, you might just slide down in your favorite chair, shake your head and wonder what in the world has happened to this country in the last 70 years?