Roy Rogers

From Wikipedia:
“Roy Rogers (born Leonard Franklin Slye) (November 5, 1911 – July 6, 1998), was a singer and cowboy actor, as well as the namesake of the famous Roy Rogers Restaurants chain. He and his second wife Dale Evans, his golden palomino Trigger, and his German Shepherd Dog, Bullet, were featured in over one hundred movies and The Roy Rogers Show. The show ran on radio for nine years before moving to television from 1951 through 1957. His productions usually featured a sidekick, often either Pat Brady, (who drove a jeep called “Nellybelle”) or the crotchety Gabby Hayes. Roy’s nickname was “King of the Cowboys”. Dale’s nickname was “Queen of the West.” For many Americans (and non-Americans), he was the embodiment of a cowboy.”

Roy was born in Ohio (have you ever noticed how many movie star cowboys were born in Ohio?) and his family struggled in poverty most of his youth. He never finished high school and eventually with the family moved to California where he began a small time singing career.

After four years of little success, he formed Sons of the Pioneers, a western cowboy music group, in 1934. A year later he had his first movie role and the press began a “competition” between Roy and Gene Autry as to which one was the real singing cowboy. Rogers became a major box office attraction, and future wife Dale Evans was cast in a movie with him in 1945. Roy proposed to her during a rodeo at Chicago Stadium. They married on New Year’s Eve in 1947.

Rogers and Evans were also well known as advocates for adoption and as founders and operators of childrens charities. They adopted several children.

From the official Roy Rogers-Dale Evans website:
“At the peak of his career, from the early 1940s to the mid-1950s, he made as many as six pictures a year, which were seen annually by more than 80 million Americans – over half the population of the country. In 1950 there were more than two thousand Roy Rogers fan clubs around the globe; the one in London had fifty thousand members – the biggest such club then for anyone, anywhere on earth. In 1951 Roy Rogers moved to television and starred for six years on “The Roy Rogers Show” along with his wife, Dale Evans. They also created several long-running radio series that featured their singing duets and dramatic sketches, and they regularly rode in all the biggest parades and performed at all the grandest rodeos throughout the nation. Roy Rogers and Dale Evans were simply the most popular cowboy and cowgirl the world has ever known. ”

Roy and Dale were inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, in 1976 and Roy was inducted again as a member of the Sons of the Pioneers in 1995. Roy was also twice elected to the Country Music Hall of Fame, first as a member of The Sons of the Pioneers in 1980 and as a soloist in 1988. He died at his home in Apple Valley, California in 1998. Evans died of congestive heart failure, two and a half years after the death of her husband Roy.

You can learn more at the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Website.