Roy Rogers

Hello:

My brother and I used to go to Saturday afternoon movies in our little hometown up in Washington State where we watched cowboy heroes like Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Randolph Scott, Tarzan and many other wonderful, dignified and noble lawmen take down bad men and win the ladies. They were terrific role models for us!

I can still clearly remember how much I admired and respected those “good” guys like Roy and would sit there sadly wishing that my dad, who looked as good as those guys, was even a little bit like those loveable role models up on the screen. It actually HURT sitting there thinking of the sad and sorry difference between those movie heroes and my own way less than noble or respectable dad!

The movie men were: decent, kind, HONEST, respectful and respectable, able to show express love, lovable, treated women good, had excellent manners, didn’t drink (to excess), smoked a little but carried it well and had just plain good character! My dad was almost the dead opposite of those noble charcters even though he was a tough and capable man who could build houses from the ground up, fix any machine and had many other admirable traits BUT NOT the wonderful things my screen heroes possessed. It hurt a lot in those days to come home, look at my dad and just DIE inside knowing that he was never, ever going to be as wonderful, noble and decent as Randolph Scott or Ray Rogers! Somehow it hurts right now saying this here!

He just did not measure up to the classy standards of any of my movie heroes and I would leave the theater all worked up about going home and being just like those terrific film role models! I wanted to be: honest, kind, tough, good, just, sincere, loving, happy, take down bad guys, etc., etc. They were the best role models I ever had and I wanted ever so much to be like them – BUT NOT LIKE OUR DAD!

My brother and I would go home, make some wooden pistols and reenact the heroics that we had seen in the theater BUT within minutes of re-entering our family and neighborhood environment, I went right back to the dishonest, sneaky, thieving, lying, frightened, corrupt and BAD kid that I had been since about age 7 when all the terrible role modeling that we were getting at home and elsewhere would over take me and all of those wonderful movie heroes would somehow vanish from my mind. I couldn’t wait to get back to the theater on Saturday for more tastes of my beloved movie heroes and soak up all of that honor and dignity BUT it was all lost within minutes as soon as I stepped out of the show and back into the grim realities of my family and neighborhood life. I often wondered what happened to me and how I so quickly and easily LOST all the goodness that my heroes were demonstrating for us kids.

Thanks to therapy and psychological studies, I now understand why a few moments of good role modeling could not undo and replace years and years of bad and inadequate role modeling first from our very inadequate parents and then from inadequate others and it’s been a very difficult, uphill struggle to learn how to be: honest, dignified, trustworthy, fair, friendly, respectful and respectable, kind, loving & lovable, empathetic and a lot of other stuff that was demonstrated on the silver screen so long ago by people that I sorely wish had been my parents instead of the duds I had.


Actually there were a few good role models along the way so I’ve had access to some demonstrations of what a good and healthy person can be so, I believe that the Roy Rogers types in my life have been around just enough to give me hope as a child and later as a struggling adult. The mystery of all of this is that, when you study the private, off screen life of some of these amazing heroes, it often turns out that they too were pretty corrupt and messed up in real life. Go figure!

It's a shame that I can not think of one positive roll model in today's movies, an actor or actress may play an odd commendable roll but in the main stream there just is not one who is consistently a positive influence for today's children

Thanks for posting:
I think there are several good role models in films, etc. BUT, so long as kids have BAD role models at home, no "good" role model can have a positive impact on a child just as no good role model could undo the garbage my parents and others were pumping into me back then but I solute the film industry for at least trying!
It turned out that I had a few uncles and some school friends who supplied me with better role modeling than my inadequate parents ever did so, perhaps it all comes out in the wash for some of us.
Now, my hope is to be a decent role model for somebody else.
Wish me luck.

i came from a family of 'bad role models', some say i was a little wild, myself. i prefer to think of it as environmentally appropriate. when i got away from my family, my home town, and all the people who judged me one way or the other, i spent several years rebuilding my character. there were always good things about me that i liked, and the grief that i felt from the chronic betrayal and abuse by parents and other caregivers finally gave way to a fearless pathfinder.

it's never too late to start over. i've done it many times now, enough times, i think . but still i find room for improvement. as long as one is working on becoming a better person, it's easier to stop grieving and being angry for what came before; and eventually i came to see how strong those early years made me. i hope anyone who reads this can find a way to start changing into the person they wish they were~
best wishes~
Gus

Youre making me afraid to google Roy Rogers and Dale Evans comical sidekick, Pat Aloysius Brady!