Roy Rogers Honored for Lifetime Work

Cowboy star Roy Rogers was honored by fellow Western movie actors at the Golden Boot Award dinner in Woodland Hills Friday night, and wife Dale Evans took the opportunity to give a boot of her own to modern Westerns.

In Roy and Dale’s pictures, the good guys were clean, wore white hats and always won by playing fair.

She doesn’t care much for today’s grittier Westerns, said Evans, who co-starred with Rogers in 35 films.

“Possibly they are more realistic about people,” she said. “But they don’t leave much for a young person to shoot for.”

Rogers said the audience that saw his first pictures are now “the grandmothers and grandfathers, and mothers and fathers, of today.”

“So I just feel like I’ve grown up with everybody. I feel right at home almost any place I go.”

Rogers was presented with the President Reagan Award at the Sixth Annual Golden Boot Awards ceremony by the Motion Picture and Television Fund, which attracted more than 900 guests to the Woodland Hills Marriott Hotel, including singer Willie Nelson, Ann Rutherford, Charlton Heston, Richard Farnsworth, Alan Hale Jr. and Ben Johnson.

Nelson, who was also honored, said he has been a Rogers fan “ever since he started making movies. I knew all the songs Roy Rogers and Gene Autry sang, and I sang them all the time. And I still love to sing them.”

The soft-spoken Rogers, who starred in more than 80 motion pictures, called the award “a great honor” and made his own contribution to the night, which was held to raise money for the Motion Picture and Television Country House and Hospital in Woodland Hills.

“Any cowboy worth his stuff owes half of what he gets to his horse,” Rogers once remarked. And so he contributed the great-grandson of Trigger, his famed trick-performing palomino, to be auctioned off. Trigger III went for $15,000.

Guests decked out in traditional Western garb paid more than $100 a plate to eat roast beef, mashed potatoes and broccoli. Country and Western singers alternated with mariachis in providing entertainment.

“This is like family night,” said Evans, who first starred as Rogers’ leading lady in the 1944 film “The Cowboy and Senorita.” They were married in 1947.

“I’m delighted,” Evans said of her husband’s award. “He deserves it.”