You have to have a little age on you to remember some of the sure enough old time movie cowboys . . . but I've got enough years behind me now to remember them.  By the time I came along as a movie watcher in the late 1940s, some of those silver screen cowboys had been around for quite a while.  I grew up in a mill village community back in South Carolina, and all us kids played cowboys and Indians a lot.  Finding an Indian back then was hard, so we always made the smaller kids do that.  Sometimes we rotated assignments between being a guy in the white hat or the guy in the black hat. 

My dad was from Oregon, and when I was about six years old we made a cross country trip by car from Duncan, South Carolina to Burns, Oregon.  That's where I met my uncle Dave for the first time, and he was a real cowboy.  And . . . he gave me my first authentic cowboy hat - no kiddie dime store hat, mind you . . . a real felt cowboy hat.  And it had a vest with it, and that made it extra cool for a six year old.  I have absolutely nothing from my childhood - no toys or anything like that.  But hanging on the walls of Campo Madrone are my son's cowboy stuff, things like chaps and two-gun holster outfits, and even a few of his old shirts.  Maybe it's not important to most folks, but having that stuff around is big with me.

My favorite old time movie cowboy was Ken Maynard.  I liked 'em all, but I really liked Maynard.  Cowboy singer Don Edwards is a big enthusiast of old time cowboy movies.  I visited in his home a week ago, got a kick out of all his pictures . . . and wouldn't you know, he had a big picture of my favorite - Ken Maynard.  And we talked about that for a while, compared notes on who we liked the best. 

Yeah, I know, movie cowboys weren't real cowboys, but they sure as helll were real movie cowboys.  Maybe we've lost something worth saving from that age, something important.  Are our modern movie hero types a good replacement for the Ken Maynard and Tom Mix hero characters of the past?  I don't think so.  The good guy always won back then, and bad guys were bad, if you get my drift.  White hats versus the black hats, good against evil . . . and the guy in the white hat was always equal to the task of whipping the bad guy.  And, they could get in a tough fist fight and never get that white hat knocked off.  They didn't bleed either.  Nah, these modern movie guys are weaklings compared to Ken Maynard.

Sometimes I wonder, though, how Ken or Tom or Gene or Roy or Lash would've done against the predator.  I'm pretty sure, though, that Ken couldn've kicked Rocky's butt in a fist fight.  He might've had his hat knocked off, but I still think he could take him.

Wanna Bet?

PMC, 4/29/08