Museum May Be at End of Trail

By PATRICIA WARD BIEDERMAN

July 22, 2001 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

The couple leaned close to the glass to examine the biggest draw at the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum--the mounted remains of Trigger, up on his hind legs, just as he was back when he was the Smartest Horse in the Movies.

Former Maumee, Ohio, Police Chief Robert Bunce, 60, and his wife, Shelley, 52, were mesmerized by the famous palomino. As the couple studied the exhibit case Trigger shares with Dale’s docile mount, Buttermilk, and the German shepherd, Bullet, they were unaware that the museum’s days in Victorville may be coming to an end.

“We’re doing the Route 66 tour,” said Bunce, who was one of Roy and Dale’s millions of young fans during their heyday in the 1950s. “We started in Ohio and I told Shelley we had to stop here.”

Like many of his generation, Bunce was smitten as a child with Roy and the idealized West he and Dale represented. Little Bobby would buckle on his tooled imitation leather holster, grab his pair of Roy Rogers cap pistols and assume the persona of his hero. His mother would oblige by playing Roy’s grizzled sidekick, gravelly voice and all.

“I always had to be Roy Rogers and she had to be Gabby Hayes,” Bunce recalled with a nostalgic smile. “She would work in the kitchen and I would come in and we’d start doing our act.”

Built to look like an old Western fort, the Victorville museum has none of the cultural clout of the Smithsonian Institution or the Getty Center. Because of its limited appeal--its graying visitors and Victorville’s isolation on the edge of the Mojave Desert--the museum is on the brink of relocation, if not extinction.

“Nobody really knows about it unless you’re a die-hard Western fan or a Roy Rogers buff or a Dale Evans buff,” said Western history writer Richard Carleton Hacker of Sherman Oaks. “It’s not in a lot of guidebooks.”

Packed with thousands of artifacts documenting every aspect of the lives of the once wildly popular King of the Cowboys and his songwriting Queen of the West, the museum houses Roy’s bronzed boots and the couple’s fringed and sequined costumes by Nudie and other cowboy couturiers. Roy’s cars, guns and watches are here, along with his rock collection, scripts, bottle caps, signed baseballs, evidence of the couple’s strong Christian faith and countless family photographs.

“Roy never threw anything away,” said Hacker, a friend of Rogers who has visited the facility many times. “This is a very personal museum. It’s like a big closet, with all their stuff on display.”

The curator is 55-year-old Roy Rogers Jr., or Dusty, who grew up on the family’s ranch in Chatsworth and now lives in nearby Apple Valley.

Fifty thousand people visited the museum last year, Dusty Rogers says. That was down from a high of 75,000 in the days when visitors might be greeted in person by Roy, who died in 1998 at age 86, or Dale, who died in February at 88. Attendance continues to slip month by month, Rogers said.

The decline is one reason Rogers announced this month that he may pack up the family memorabilia, including Trigger, and move the museum to a proven tourist destination elsewhere. The most likely candidate is Branson, Mo. That entertainment-oriented city draws about 7 million visitors a year, Rogers said. He said it would be an ideal home for the museum because “they still believe in God and country, and the median age of visitors is 55 and up.”

“We need more [visitors],” said Rogers in his museum office, decorated with a tusked boar’s head and a bearskin rug. “If the numbers keep dropping, unless something drastic happens, [relocation is] almost inevitable.”

The most urgent threat to the museum is a pending tax bill. The facility operates in the black, Rogers said, but at $8 a ticket it has to worry about rising energy costs and other expenses. And although the museum is nonprofit, its contents are subject to inheritance taxes that came due in the wake of Evans’ death.

“All the artifacts in the museum belonged to Mom and Dad,” Rogers said. “We have to pay half of their value if we want to keep them.”

The museum’s appraisers are still determining the value of the eclectic collection.

Evans transferred the most precious artifacts--Trigger, Buttermilk, Trigger Jr. and Bullet--into a trust before she died, so the family will not owe anything on Trigger’s assessed value of $400,000.

Location Is Crucial to Small Museums

A small, personal museum of this type can survive if it is in a busy enough locale and reaches out to a wider audience, as the Liberace Museum in Las Vegas has done.

That facility draws more than 100,000 visitors a year and is one of Las Vegas’ most popular attractions outside of the casinos, says collections manager Brian Paco Alvarez.

Dusty Rogers said he has no plans to move to Las Vegas. “I don’t want to be just another bean in the can over there,” he said.

But even if the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum does relocate, Rogers predicts it will probably last only another 20 years. By then, most of the “little buckaroos,” as Roy and Dale called their fans, will be in their 80s and 90s.

The prospect of the museum’s demise saddens those who remember how important the couple once were to American pop culture. It also troubles those who see the museum as an example of the idiosyncratic, personal or vanity museums that make the American cultural scene so rich.

Museums like Roy and Dale’s are eccentric monuments to one person’s, or one couple’s, ardor. And every time one of these quirky institutions fails, observers say, the museum world tilts further in the direction of focus-group blandness and predictability.

Writer Michael Stern said he would hate to see the museum go under. With his wife, Jane, Stern helped Roy and Dale write their 1994 memoir, “Happy Trails”--the title taken from the couple’s theme song, which Dale Evans wrote.

Based in Connecticut, the Sterns are also the authors of “Amazing America,” a guide to odd attractions in the United States.

Stern said he believes Roy Rogers and Dale Evans are of great historic significance.

“They were hugely important in mid-century American popular culture, and I think they represented the best in mid-century American popular culture,” he said.

In Stern’s view, Roy and Dale had moral authority that transcended their roles as a singing cowboy and cowgirl in the Hollywood West.

“They provided us Americans with a very moral universe in which to live,” Stern said. “If he was fighting three guys, and they were three guys who fought dirty, he fought clean. He was a moral compass.”

Stern thinks unique museums like the one in Victorville still make an important cultural contribution.

“To me, a museum like the Roy Rogers museum, and the even zanier ones that express someone’s passion for collecting gas-station oil rags, are refreshing balm to the scourge of roadside culture in America, which is sameness,” he said. “When you travel around this country, one of the things that is most disturbing is the homogenization of American culture.”

Zany Collections Represent Passion

Among Stern’s favorite zany attractions is the Nut Museum in Old Lyme, Conn., founded and operated, he said, “by a woman who is crazy about nuts. It has big nuts, little nuts, nuts that look like Richard Nixon. It’s totally monomaniacal. . . .

“[The Roy Rogers and other eccentric museums] don’t have a lot of corporate backing. They don’t represent profits to anybody. They represent passion. And when the person who has that passion passes on, there’s often no one to continue the museum.”

Dusty Rogers said he fears the only way he will be able to raise the money the family owes the IRS is by holding a “fire sale” on property his parents accumulated, including 50 acres next to the museum along Interstate 15.

His parents never had a lot of money, Rogers said. His father used to say, “I never got off my horse long enough to learn the business end.”

The Victorville museum was “a dream of my father’s since the 1930s,” Rogers said. Roy admired cowboy philosopher Will Rogers but was disappointed when he visited his museum in Oklahoma and found few artifacts.

The Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum was never intended to be a major Western research center in the style of the Autry Museum of Western Heritage in Los Angeles, Rogers said, if only because his family never had the kind of money that astute cowboy singer-actor Gene Autry amassed.

“We’re not the history of the West. We’re not the settlers and all that stuff. We’re just Roy and Dale--period,” said Rogers.

Whether or not the museum relocates, Rogers said, the family has already decided where Trigger and the other animals will ultimately go. They are slated for the Smithsonian or a Los Angeles-area museum devoted to Hollywood history. Rogers said he couldn’t face his parents in heaven if he allowed the animals to fall into indifferent hands.

“Those are the tools that mom and dad plied their trade on,” Rogers said. “Trigger and Buttermilk have to go somewhere where they’re treasured.”