My Old West

In about a month or so I’ll be flying to Las Vegas. I’m starting to make reservations and so forth. I’ll spend a day or two in Vegas and then travel around that general region of the country for about a week. I’ll go to Death Valley, which is great in the wintertime, and visit other assorted sites in the region. Other than an evening or so of gambling in Vegas, I would be uninterested in going out west if I had not grown up on various TV Westerns.

As a kid I watched all the TV western shows, and there were a lot of them; The Cisco Kid, Hopalong Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, and Maverick to name just a few. I watched The Roy Rogers Show too, but I did not enjoy that program as much as some of the others. First, I did not like the way Roy dressed. He was just too immaculate to be a real cowboy. He wore those beautiful, fancy, unscuffed boots. Tucked into the boots were the leg bottoms of a pair of somewhat effeminate, tight, stretch pants. His shirts would make Liberace proud. They were way too colorful and fancy, and they were often adored with this girly leather fringe. Around Roy’s neck could be found a kerchief. Although I was watching Roy in black and white, I had this strange feeling that the kerchief was some shade of lavender. His hat was painfully impeccable.

I remember one early episode where in the finale Roy rode his “golden palomino” Trigger across the countryside in pursuit of a horseback bank robber. When Roy finally captured and subdued the robber after firing a couple of shots from his way-too-shiny sixgun, the town sheriff arrived driving something like a ’52 Dodge DeSoto. Up to the moment the sheriff came on the scene there was nary an indication that the story was taking place in the mid-20^th Century, if it in fact was. I mean, maybe it was a sci-fi episode with the sheriff and his automobile arriving from the future via a time machine. When these inconsistencies happened -and I was to learn that they often did on that show- I always assumed that Roy was simply way behind the times and had refused to mess with automobile technology, opting instead for the old-fashion horse. Thirty years later my father unknowingly supported this theory with his refusal to acknowledge the advent of the computer.

Anyway, despite my opinion of Roy, I’m going to be heading to the West, if not exactly the Old West. In order to follow the correct trail, I’ll be hooking up my GPS to a rented car with heated seats and cruise control. I’m sure that all these highfalutin gizmos will have Roy turning over in his grave. Okay Roy, I might be a tenderfoot, but at least I’m not afraid of get a little dirt on my pants. And by the way, those will be men's pants.