The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid_ A Memoir - Bill Bryson [28]
In similar fashion, the Lone Ranger, who was already not the kind of fellow you would want to share a pup tent with, was made odder still by the fact that the part was played on television by two different actors—by Clayton Moore from 1949 to 1951 and 1954 to 1957, and by John Hart during the years in between—but the programs were rerun randomly on local TV, giving the impression that the Lone Ranger not only wore a tiny mask that fooled no one, but changed bodies from time to time. He also had a catchphrase—“A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty ‘Hi-yo, Silver’: the Lone Ranger”—that made absolutely no sense. I used to spend half of every show trying to figure out what the catchphrase meant.
Roy Rogers, my first true hero, was in many ways the most bewildering of all. For one thing, he was strangely anachronistic. He lived in a western town, Mineral City, that seemed comfortably bedded in the nineteenth century. It had wooden sidewalks and hitching posts, the houses used oil lamps, everyone rode horses and carried six-shooters, the marshal dressed like a cowboy and wore a badge—but when people ordered coffee in Dale’s café it was brought to them in a glass pot off an electric hob. From time to time modern policemen or FBI men would turn up in cars or even light airplanes looking for fugitive Communists, and when this happened I can clearly remember thinking, “What the fuck?” or whatever was the equivalent expression for a five-year-old.
Except for Zorro—who really knew how to make a sword fly—the fights were always brief and bloodless, and never involved hospitalization, much less comas, extensive scarring, or death. Mostly they consisted of somebody jumping off a boulder onto somebody passing on a horse, followed by a good deal of speeded-up wrestling. Then the two fighters would stand up and the good guy would knock the bad guy down. Roy and Dale both carried guns—everybody carried guns, including Magnolia, their comical black servant, and Pat Brady, the cook—but never shot to kill. They just shot the pistols out of bad people’s hands and then knocked them down with a punch.
The other memorable thing about Roy Rogers—which I particularly recall because my father always remarked on it if he happened to be passing through the room—was that Roy’s horse, Trigger, got higher billing than Dale Evans, his wife.
“But then Trigger is more talented,” my father would always say.
“And better looking, too!” we would faithfully and in unison rejoin.
Goodness me, but we were happy people in those days.
Chapter 4
THE AGE OF EXCITEMENT
PRE-DINNER DRINKS WON’T
HARM HEART, STUDY SHOWS
PHILADELPHIA, PENN. (AP)—A couple of cocktails before dinner, and maybe a third for good measure, won’t do your heart any harm. In fact, they may even do some good. A research team at Lankenau Hospital reached this conclusion after a study supported in part by the Heart Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania.
—The Des Moines Register, August 12, 1958
I DON’T KNOW HOW THEY MANAGED IT, but the people responsible for the 1950s made a world in which pretty much everything was good for you. Drinks before dinner? The more the better! Smoke? You bet! Cigarettes actually made you healthier, by soothing jangly nerves and sharpening jaded minds, according to advertisements. “Just what the doctor ordered!” read ads for L&M cigarettes, some of them in The Journal of the American Medical Association where cigarette ads were gladly accepted right up to the 1960s. X-rays were so benign that shoe stores installed special machines that used them to measure foot sizes, sending