Happy sales

The auction of Roy Rogers' and Dale Evans' household belongings gives former little buckaroos and buckarettes a chance to purchase memories.

By PAUL WILBORN

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 2, 2001

APPLE VALLEY, CALIF. -- To get to the big house you cross Roy Rogers Road in Victorville, continue past Mohave Avenue, along Highway 18 and past the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum, finally turning right on Tomahawk Road. Here, California's high desert is stark and rocky, wrapped by snow-flecked mountains.

For more than 30 years, this Western movie backdrop was home to Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, a couple of singers and B-movie actors who came to symbolize the American West.

The museum is about 5 miles away. Two family ranches are nearby. So is the family grave site, the one Roy himself picked out, overlooking the valley.

This weekend, three years after the King of the Cowboys died and two months after the death of the Queen of the West, almost 1,000 pilgrims gathered. They showed up early outside the fenced compound, filled the seats, and brought their checkbooks.

For the past two days, fans and collectors have bid for everything from the white Stetson made especially for Rogers to a pair of bronzed praying hands. Dozens of bolo ties. A plastic replica of Rogers' horse Trigger. Even the Story and Clark piano Dale Evans played for her grandchildren.

The auction wraps up today.

Some of the stuff is glamorous -- like movie costumes from Nudie's, the Hollywood Western wear designer, who made many of Rogers' early outfits. They are mostly primary-color shirts and jackets, some with red fringe and stitched eyelets like Western racing stripes. Other auction items are a bit more down to earth: three boxes of nuts, bolts and nails; a Genie diaper dispenser system; Roy's Igloo ice chest.

In all, almost 2,000 numbered pieces fill the 4,900-square-foot house.

Most bidders are gray-haired and in their mid-50s to early 60s. People who grew up watching the movies, and later watching the television show. Who remember a jeep named Nelly Bell and a sidekick named Gabby Hayes. Many of the bidders, like Charlotte Curtis, came dressed for the occasion.

Curtis, 59, sounds like she's from Maine, but she looks like she stepped out of an old Republic Western. She arrived in blue jeans, silver belt buckle, bolo tie and white straw cowboy hat.

She came out for the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans film festival last weekend at the museum and stayed for the auction. What draws her, like so many here, is something more than memorabilia.

"They just had so much influence on people my age," Curtis says. "Just by being the kind of people they were. The values they had."

Outside, Curtis and the rest of the bidders, who each paid $100 for the privilege, sit on metal folding chairs. There's a small stage for the life-size stand-up cutouts of Roy, crouched with pearl-handled pistols drawn, and Dale, smiling a matinee idol smile beneath her cowboy hat.

Inside the stucco and wood-beamed house, Roy Rogers Jr. said selling off all this memorabilia just made sense for the couple's six surviving children.

"Mom said in December, when something happens to me, get rid of these things and sell the house. Get on with your lives."

So that's what they are doing. Selling the 27-foot travel trailer. The wagon wheel lamp from the Apple Valley Inn. The 1979 Lincoln Mark V Sedan that Rogers used for trips into the big city.

Rogers Jr., who goes by the nickname Dusty, is 54 and still travels with his own band, doing songs his father and mother made famous, along with some of his own. A tall man in blue jeans and denim shirt, Rogers stood in the living room, behind the well-worn La-Z-Boy recliners (Roy's was brown, Dale's was blue). The recliners face a large television, where a very young and handsome Roy Rogers is talking to his bearded sidekick, Gabby Hayes.

According to his children, the King of the Cowboys was also a major pack rat.

"Dad never threw anything away. When somebody gave him something, he kept it," said Rogers.

Over the years, Evans would throw things away while her husband was traveling. When he'd return, he would visit the dump and retrieve much of it. That was probably a smart move, says Palm Springs auctioneer Jack Pope, who is handling the estate sale.

"In his heyday, Roy Rogers collectibles sold at a rate second only to Disney," Pope said.

Thursday, at an auction preview, Pope walked through the big house, pointing out treasures.

"There's Roy's pool table, custom made for Roy, and back here," he walks into a large closet, "is Roy's Indian collection and down here, his fishing gear. I mean it's all here. Even his first desk and chair."

He moves into the bedroom, where the couple slept on matching adjustable beds. The closet doors are off and the closets are filled with clothes, most wrapped in plastic for the sale. In a second living room stands the grandfather clock Rogers gave his new bride as a wedding present.

"That should bring a lot," said Pope.

Even today, Rogers' fans don't mind spending money for a piece of the Western hero. Pope says he recently sold one of Rogers' famous white Stetson hats to a collector for $20,000.

Allan and Irene McTernhan, who flew in from Scotland, aren't prepared to pay that much for anything. "All we can take back is something small," said Allan.

David Timms wore his Happy Trails baseball cap and a tan shirt bearing a colorful likeness of Roy and Trigger. Timms says he has more than $100,000 worth of Roy and Dale collectibles at his San Diego home, and he's looking for more.

"I'm looking for things that personally belonged to Roy -- suits, pastels, plaques."

But he knew he wasn't going to get everything he came for. "You've got some high rollers here for this thing," he said.

Timms is a card-carrying member of the Roy Rogers Riders Club, a fan group first formed in the 1940s that still gets a monthly newsletter and holds regular pilgrimages to Apple Valley and Victorville, where the museum is located.

"The Riders Club is dedicated to following the rules of Roy Rogers," said Timms, who didn't list the rules but talked about Rogers as an easy-going family man who didn't forget anybody.

Evans' daughter, Cheryl Barnett, stood outside the house and spoke about how her parents, who had both had previous marriages, enjoyed each other.

"He was a horrible tease, and Mom always rose to the bait. But she said he was the funniest man she ever met, and they lived happily in this house for 20 years."

Barnett was sad about the sale, but she said the children and grandchildren had collected special pieces for themselves. Nothing expensive -- a plate, a plaid shirt, a bit of costume jewelry.

As bidders gathered at the gate, it seemed as if Roy and Dale might still be alive and making movies.

"I hear they're still working on a Roy Rogers cartoon series," said one man.

"I think they're going to move the museum to Branson," whispered another.

Inside the house, Roy Rogers Jr. isn't so sure the legend will live on indefinitely.

"Mom and Dad's fans are getting older. It depends on how much young people want to come and see it. I just don't know."

If the museum closes, there is still a back room containing thousands of other items. So if the legend doesn't continue, it's likely the auctions will.

Rogers looked around at his parents' possessions, all numbered, many items swathed in plastic wrappers.

"It is kind of a bittersweet thing, but I mean, what in the hell are we going to do with all of it?"

- Paul Wilborn, a former staff writer at the St. Petersburg Times, lives in Los Angeles.

Online roundup

If you didn't make it to the auction, the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum gift shop is on the Internet at http://www.royrogers.com/museum-index.html.

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