Roy Rogers (1911-1998)
Filed under the name Roy · February 13, 2026
Roy Rogers was known as the King of the Cowboys, a singing cowboy and film star who charmed generations of families with wholesome Western films and music, and I'll tell you, my own kids grew up on his kind of picture on a Saturday afternoon television set, back before everything got so complicated on the screen. There's something to be said for entertainment that a whole family could sit down and watch together without anybody having to leave the room during the good parts. I had students over the years whose grandparents grew up idolizing him, and by the time I was teaching, their own grandbabies were still humming some of those old cowboy tunes without knowing quite where they came from. That's a kind of legacy that doesn't announce itself loudly, it just keeps quietly getting passed down at kitchen tables. Wholesome isn't a word people use much anymore, like it's an insult, but I think Rogers proved it can be a whole career.