Back
in the Saddle Again
Marcy
O’Brien
There
are no more cowboys in our lives.
No, I’m
not talking about the Dallas football team. Real cowboys, the he-men of my childhood, have
gone the way of buggy whips and Burma Shave signs.
When I
was a kid, Gene Autry, the Singing Cowboy, was one of my heroes. I don’t know why he was my favorite except
that he might have been a good father figure in my single parent
household. After all, Roy Rogers had
Dale, Trigger and Bullet while Gene had only his sidekick, Champion the Wonderhorse. I sat in the dark theater mesmerized by his
songs, his manly looks and kind smile. He was honest, good-hearted and stood
for all that was right. Plus he was
sturdy. I guess I was a teenager before
I realized he was getting fat.
I realized recently that my grandchildren know
nothing about the whole cowboy schtick, but then again, I’m not sure my
children did either. We’ve abandoned the
gunfighters and trail riders as heroes.
They’re hopelessly old-fashioned given the competition for a child’s
imagination these days and frankly, we have politically corrected them out of
our everyday society.
Depending
on your age, think about Tom Mix, Hopalong Cassidy, the Cisco Kid, Zorro, Roy
Rogers and my Gene. Then came Maverick, Wyatt Earp, Clint Walker and a whole
rodeo-full of more names in the early 60’s. By the time Bonanza and finally Gunsmoke wrapped
up, the TV cowboys were all over but the shootin’. I still remember a
grizzled John Wayne riding the trail in True Grit.
And yet,
there have been occasional western flicks such as Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves and Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven that have meritoriously shown
us the more serious side of the western frontier. I find the newer “cowboy” films are more steeped
in history and more apt to be psychodramas.
But Gene
Autry reigned supreme in my childhood.
Although I was a girl with the usual dolls and dollhouse, being a tomboy
meant I also had a fielder’s mitt and the most coveted toys of all – a holster
and gun set. I remember receiving the
imitation pearl-handled cap guns for my autumn birthday. I was probably 7 or 8. My mother was progressive – and she listened
to my pleas.
That
Christmas, Santa brought red cowboy boots . . . be still my heart. Very pointy,
they were also a little big which presented a challenge - trying not to kill
myself heading down our apartment stairway.
Santa knew they would need to fit for a while and the snows of winter
gave me some growing time before I headed out to the O.K. Corral.
The
cowboy hat, fringed vest and chaps came later.
If you were going to face off against another buckaroo, it was more
impressive to be fully rigged out, or so I thought. The boys laughed at me. They simply wore
their holsters over their jeans or corduroys and most didn’t even have hats. The rottenest kid in the neighborhood did
have a hat – a black one. I knew from
Gene’s movies that the black hats were the bad guys so it was easy to hate the
creep even more after he showed up in that hat.
He teased me about my beloved complete outfit. “None of that’s going to do you any good
because girls can’t be real cowboys. You can’t shoot and when the Indians come,
they go after the weak ones first and that’ll be you.”
The
Indians never came. And when I think
about it, no one ever played the Indian role in the schoolyard or the backyard
– only at Thanksgiving pageants.
I don’t
know what triggered the first generational push away from playing cowboys. Was it our growing sensitivity to guns? That was certainly a factor. World War II or Korea might have been an
influence as boys who grew up playing with guns then had to use them for real. And as a culture we began to realize the
injustices committed against the native tribes in our earlier history.
As a
child, all I wanted to do with my matching six-guns was shoot my rolls of caps,
make as much noise as possible and show the boys that I could hold my own in
their cowboy world. We were not, of
course, socially conscious.
And then
came the space age. Star Wars launched different toys for my
children. It took me a while to figure
out that the games were the same – just the equipment and the language
changed. Space exploration replaced the
Wild West, Transformers replaced the horses and wagons and light sabers
replaced the cap guns.
Jump
forward a quarter century and the Star
Wars resurgence dominates video games.
I think Gene Autry would be upset to think that young kids are sitting
in their houses with their noses pressed to their cell phone or their trigger
fingers moving rapidly over their Xbox controls.
I
think he wanted us out on the plains, pretending to save the world from the bad
guys and getting to know each other cowpoke to cowpoke, kid to kid.
His
theme song still echoes in my mind some days:
“Back
in the Saddle again.
Out
where a friend is a friend.
Where
the longhorn cattle feed
On the
lowly gypsum weed
Back
in the saddle again.”
It
was a simpler time. Sigh.