Cowboys Taught
Me A Lasting Lesson
By Jeffrey M.
Bowen
For
children of the 1950s, as for many earlier generations, cowboys were heroes. My boyhood memories overflow with television
characters who included Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, the Lone Ranger, Davy Crockett
(king of the wild frontier), Matt Dillon from Gunsmoke, and even horses and
dogs like Trigger, Silver and Rin Tin Tin.
Despite
grainy black and white screens, these icons loomed large in my imagination and throughout
the neighborhood. Play props included Stetson hats, spurs, boots, cap guns,
bows and arrows, and rubber knives. We built forts with Lincoln Logs and
maneuvered plastic figures around on horses, in covered wagons and stage coaches. The cavalry always arrived to dispatch cattle
rustlers, bank robbers, and war parties.
My
favorite was the buckskin-clad Range Rider.
My neighbors took their son and me to Boston to watch his tv persona
stage rodeo events and even a bar fight.
By the late 1950s, the western genre had become immensely popular. There were 26 different shows. Bonanza was the first one to be filmed in
color. It reached 480 million viewers in
97 countries.
Bonanza
is the apt term to describe the western’s durability as an economic, cultural,
stylistic, and musical treasure. From
John Ford’s classic movie Stagecoach (1939), to the droll personality of Will
Rogers; and from the Dallas Cowboys football team to thousands of country and
western tunes: the cowboy is quintessential Americana.
Why are cowboys so appealing? Their powerful character: apparent
independence, self-reliance, and rugged individualism enhanced by reputations
for hard work and horsemanship.
The
cowboys I admired also had style. As a
boy I wanted to dress like them. In
grade school, to mimic Walt Disney’s Davy Crockett, I wore a coonskin cap, glorified
the Alamo, and longed for a Bowie knife. As an adolescent, I dreamed of shooting
rattlers at a dude ranch and wheeling around on a horse as my Stetson hat flew
off. Annette Funicello and her girlfriends
sat on the corral fence and cheered me on.
Ironically,
in 1954 a cowboy who would later save my life first appeared. Soon his colorful magazine photos made him
known as the Marlboro Man. You could see
he was the epitome of chiseled sunburned masculinity with a bandana around his
neck and a lasso hanging from his saddle.
Ads showed him lighting cigarettes in full-page spreads for the next 50
years.
Philip
Morris Tobacco Company discovered the charismatic appeal of this commercial
cowboy when I was just a kid. In what is
said to be “one of the most brilliant ad campaigns of all time”, the Marlboro
Man transformed smoking filtered cigarettes, which were originally thought to
be feminine, into a macho invitation for us to “Come to Where the Flavor Is.
Come to Marlboro Country. Filter,
Flavor, Flip Top Box.”
Back
in the late 50’s, we seldom thought of tobacco as addictive. Nor did we connect it with lung cancer and
heart disease despite accumulating scientific evidence. In high school I took
up pipe smoking. Later on in the
military, I added the corps’ traditional reward of inhalable cigarettes.
One
evening in 1982 I happened to see a so-called “bootleg” documentary on PBS. Titled “Death in the West”, and based on
research originally funded by the tobacco industry, the film vividly documented
the sad fate of my cowboy heroes. Wheezing
from COPD and emphysema, and hooked to oxygen tanks, these shrunken bronco
busters were obviously dying.
Right
then and there, I stopped smoking. If I
had not, I would probably be dead. Imprinted
as they are in my childhood, the legendary culture and stories of the cowboy will
always impress me. But with an ironically twisted thanks to the Marlboro Man, I
am still around to enjoy them.
