What made Roy Rogers ‘King of the Cowboys’

SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — Things were simpler when there was one hero on TV and in the movies, one TV in the house — and just one TV station in the state.

Roy Rogers was the king of cowboys, defying all dangers in his action-packed Western films. Every kid in the 50s had his back.

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People would eat his cookies out of their Roy Rogers lunchbox and drink hot chocolate out of Roy’s thermos. They would leave for school when Roy’s clock said it was time and do their school work out of his pencil case. They would play with Roy’s trick lasso and record everything on his cameras.

And, of course, people would be glued to their screens to watch Roy Rogers and Dale Evans on TV.

Every Saturday, people would watch one of his 100 movies at the theater.

His “San Fernando Valley” was playing at the Murray, “The Yellow Rose of Texas” in Bountiful, while “Rainbow over Texas” was at the Uinta.

“Along the Navajo Trail” played in Holladay, “My Pal Trigger” followed in Bountiful and the Tower was playing “Utah” — which was a fan favorite in the state.

Roy Rogers was so big that it made news when a kid from Lehi actually got to meet him. And another Utah kid named Craig Wirth actually got to meet him, too.

Even though Wirth and Rogers looked different than they did in the 50s, Roger’s horse Trigger looked the same. According to legend, Trigger was stuffed.

“He was something else and I was so lucky,” Rogers said of Trigger in a 1990 interview. “I guess the luckiest cowboy.”

And the king of the cowboys, of course, needed a car for him and his horse. It was what they needed on the ranch. As a kid of the 50s, Craig Wirth was able to touch Roy’s car.

“Well in that flashy era of the television cowboy, it just didn’t get any better than this,” Wirth said in 1990, while leaning up against Roy Rogers’s car.

Even though the West outside the windows in Utah didn’t look like the West in the movies, everyone lived on ranches and sang songs in the TV West. But not all was swell in the West — there was always a bad guy or two who wanted to take on the king of cowboys.

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“We had good fights in ’em,” Rogers said in 1990. “The thing is, I wouldn’t even want Trigger to watch.”

There was just something about Roy. Kids of the 50s would flock to Apple Valley to see Roy Rogers long into the 1980s — and to look at his life. It was an unbelievable story about the old shoemaker from Ohio who grew up with the name Leonard Slye and became Roy Rogers.

“We got up one morning and Dad says, ‘Son, let’s quit our jobs and go to California,'” Rogers told Wirth in 1990.

And, from California came the movies — even the one called “Utah,” which was, of course, shot in California.

If you didn’t grow up in the 50s or carry a Roy Rogers flashlight, or if you didn’t know who was the king of cowboys, just ask your parents or grandparents about it. Even if it was just during a Saturday matinee, you had to come West.

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