Cowboys Taught Me A Lasting Lesson

 

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.