How Gene Autry Spurred an Ohio Festival

The cowboy's influence on a small Ohio city's hopes is recalled at a celebration that salutes an era of struggle.

By Steven Rosen
(This ran in Los Angeles Times on June 30, 2009)

Reporting from Kenton, Ohio -- During last weekend's Gene Autry Days festival here, a prominently displayed photograph showed the singing-cowboy movie star standing outside a local factory, surrounded by the proud employees.

It was taken on Aug. 8, 1938 -- famously remembered by locals as the day Autry came to pay his respects to this small city in northwestern Ohio, about 75 miles south of Toledo. Kenton Hardware Co., a key employer that made cast-iron toys but was struggling to survive the Depression, had that year introduced the new Gene Autry Repeating Cap Pistol.

It was an immediate bestseller to young cowpokes worldwide at 50 cents per gun, and a million had already been manufactured by the time Autry arrived to visit. For licensing his name and allowing a mold to be made of his own gun, Autry became the hero who saved the town's main employer -- and yes, he also got a cut of the revenue.

That same day, Autry and his horse, Champion, did five performances at downtown's Kenton Theatre. Some 4,500 people attended, according to contemporary accounts.

Kenton Hardware is long gone, its factory having shut down in 1952 as America lost interest in cast-iron toys. But Autry's influence on the city of 8,300 lives on via the festival. It just concluded its 16th year at the Hardin County Fairgrounds -- not far from the still-standing but vacant factory. It's a salute not only to the Cowboy but to a slice of American history that seems both similar to our own age (tough economic times) and very different (making toys in a Midwest factory).

Among those the event attracted this year was 70-year-old Richard Dzwonkiewicz, from Grayslake, Ill., a retired military careerist dressed as a white-hatted cowboy Autry for the festival's look-alike contest.

"As you participate in this, that long-ago event becomes more meaningful," he explains, as visitors come over to take his picture. "It's still being remembered today, and all of us are part of that memory."

Autry-approved

The festival, run by the Hardin County Chamber & Business Alliance, started as a way to help pay for a new community building at the fairgrounds. Autry, still alive in 1994, approved it. (He died in 1998 at age 91.)

As a remembrance of him, Kenton's event certainly isn't as high profile as Los Angeles' Autry National Center of the American West. It is a relatively small, mostly indoor affair where visitors can buy Autry and other western movie-related collectibles and hear singers such as Paul Belanger (the Oklahoma Yodeling Cowboy) perform songs associated with Autry, like "That Silver-Haired Daddy of Mine" and "Back in the Saddle Again."

The festival also offers an opportunity to teach and celebrate the way Kenton's manufacturing past once intersected with pop culture. The history museum, for instance, had a booth with photos and other information about Autry's 1938 visit. One of the vendors and festival organizers, 77-year-old Bob Bailey, can recall meeting Autry in 1938.

For the many older attendees, Autry represents a vanished aspect of pop culture.

"His movies were wholesome and had moral values -- the bad guys didn't win," says 72-year-old Richard Gearhart of nearby Bucyrus. He had come to the festival and then went downtown to snap photos of the 5-year-old civic mural showing a waving Autry, on his rearing horse Champion, in front of a vibrantly red-brick Kenton Hardware Co.

Vendors at the festival were eager to show off and discuss the changes and additions that Kenton Hardware made over the years to its line of Autry repeating cap guns. For instance, Autry's signature initially was only on the frame, but it soon was added to the red or pearl grip. In 1951, after it lost the Autry contract, the company briefly made a non-endorsed cap gun known as the Lawmaker.

Today, some models can bring hundreds of dollars, although vendors say sales have slowed in this economy. Also of value -- and offered for sale at the festival -- were the cardboard boxes the guns came in. They had Autry's picture on them and noted that the gun was patterned after "the original six shooter of Public Cowboy No. 1."

"The price is going up on mint guns in the box," says vendor Joe Krock, 77, also a member of the Gene Autry Days Committee. "They're hard to find in a box. These were meant for kids to play with, not put away."

One vendor new to the festival, who was unaware of Gene Autry's connection to Kenton, was 29-year-old Derek Helmke of Sylvania, Ohio. He and his father, Thomas, had recently bought the inventory of Hollywood's Collectors Book Store at auction, and on this weekend he was displaying its western-related posters, press books and publicity material -- some going back to the silent era -- in Kenton while his father was selling the sci-fi and horror material at Monster Bash in Butler, Pa. He had learned about Gene Autry Days from a flier. At the end of the first day, Helmke had sold only a press book for a Randolph Scott movie and a copy of the first Roy Rogers comic books.

Enduring interest

"With pop-culture stuff, the majority of those interested lived through [that] era," he noted. "Then there are a few figures who reach a level where the next generation picks them as someone to follow," he said, adding that Autry, Rogers and Hopalong Cassidy (William Boyd) were the Depression-era Hollywood cowboys who had reached that level of ongoing interest.

Kenton isn't the only small American town still honoring Autry.

In September, there is a festival in Gene Autry, Okla., which changed its name from Berwyn after he purchased a ranch there at the height of his fame. He came to that town on Nov. 16, 1941, to celebrate the name change. But just three weeks later, World War II started and he enlisted. Afterward, he sold the ranch but the town kept the name.

Early fame

And also in September, the Walk of Fame Music Festival and Induction in Richmond, Ind., will be dedicated to Autry. Early in his career, he recorded for the city's Gennett Records, a now-defunct but historic record label whose heritage city leaders want to promote.

Born in rural Tioga, Texas, Autry first found fame as a singer and performer on Chicago's WLS "Barn Dance" radio show, branching out in the 1930s to movies while still keeping active in radio, recordings and personal appearances. He later became the owner of baseball's Angels.

"He always put across this man-of-the-people, everyman vibe that people picked up on," says Holly George-Warren, author of the Autry biography "Public Cowboy No. 1" and a past attendee at Kenton's festival, in a phone interview.

"And during the Great Depression, someone with that reassuring presence, who had become successful but still had a plain-spoken and conversant tone, really got to people."

They Go the Whole Wide World: Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby on Tour

THEY GO THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby

Both personally and professionally, the husband-wife duo make sweet music.

BY STEVEN ROSEN
From Blurt Magazine
July 7, 2009


Wreckless Eric, who starts his U.S. tour with mate Amy Rigby on Tuesday (July 7), has had some hard decades getting to the reasonably comfortable point he's out now in his career.

The longtime British singer-songwriter, whose 1977 hit on the legendary Stiff Records "(I'd Go The) Whole Wide World" has become a punk/garage classic, had to battle alcoholism in the 1980s to be sober and stable enough to make music now.

After years of having records barely released (or not released at all) in the U.S., he finally had a real success last year, Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby on a revived Stiff. The album, which mixes melodic and lyrically smart folk-rock with nostalgically evocative electronic effects and sampling, received 10 out of 10 stars from Blurt and placed on many Top 10 lists.

Catchy songs like "Astrovan," "Another Drive-In Saturday" and "The Downside of Being a Fuck-Up" seemed to combine autobiographical elements with evocatively poetic imagery to create universal appeal. Eric's voice still had its aggressive, confrontational bite, but also a nicely burnished sense of reflection and even regret. It was a triumph for him. For Rigby, it was her best-received work since 1996's Dairy of a Mod Housewife.

He's also written a well-regarded memoir, published in England in 2003, called A Dysfunctional Success: The Wreckless Eric Manual. It's a look back at his worst years, the 1980s. "I've been through a lot of stuff, bankruptcy, alcoholism, relationships that went south, and I've made it through this far," he says, by phone from his home in France. "So I looked back while writing this book. It's a good read - that's what everyone says. It's about dysfunction - I was a dysfunctional pop star and that carried into alcoholism and almost insanity at one point. But I came through."

And best of all, he's recently married and happy about it - to Rigby, after a middle-aged musical courtship worthy of a movie.

So why, then, would the duo want to leave France and start this year's U.S. tour in the Rust Belt? In the middle of a deep, scary recession, yet? It begins in Pittsburgh, then moves on to Newport, Ky. (Cincinnati) on Wednesday and down to Knoxville. The mostly Midwest/East Coast tour has 13 dates, including the XpoNential Music Festival in Camden, N.J. and a final scheduled stop in Cleveland on July 28.

One would think, at this point, Eric deserves to relax and enjoy his spoils, have a triumphant swing through California coastal towns and relax between gigs in the Esalen pools at Big Sur. Not be driving between Cleveland, Pittsburgh and northern Kentucky on hot summer days.

"Pittsburgh is where Amy comes from and we will see family there before we start," explains Eric, 55, born Eric Goulden. "And we have a storage space in Cleveland. For a short time, Amy lived in Cleveland before she left. It has a lot of furniture, stuff you don't want to get rid of. We keep our equipment in it. So we pick everything up and then drive through America and wind up back in Cleveland at the end of it."

Actually, the witty and articulate Eric says, he looks forward to his Cleveland gig in an odd way. "When I first went there, I was almost murdered," he says. "We opened up for [Irish blues-rock guitarist] Rory Gallagher. There were a lot of lunkheads in checked shirts and they threw bottles, glasses and ashtrays, then they graduated to tables and chairs," Eric recalls, laughing. "There was so much debris on stage there wasn't room to play. They didn't like us -they didn't like me particularly. We only did one show with Rory there. He offered us a tour and I said, ‘We've taken enough punishment.'" British punk and New Wave hadn't yet made inroads in Middle America at the time.

In his years out of the American market, Eric has made some good records - 2004's Bungalow Hi in particular is noteworthy for a great song about what remains when a relationship ends, "33s and 45s." But his enduring anthem "Whole Wide World" is the key reason for his current good luck.

It is how he connected with Rigby. Several years before their 2008 marriage, earlier, they met at Hull, England. "That's a remarkable story and I still marvel at it," he says. "I wrote ‘Whole Wide World' when I was an art student in Hull - I was 19 and it was 1974. Years and years later, I was going to play in Hull and the promoter said to come up a day early because Amy Rigby is playing and she does ‘Whole Wide World.' And the gig she did was in the same room where I first ever played [it]. So we played it together and then I didn't see her for a while."

Time passed and they became reacquainted at the 2004 edition of Yo La Tengo's famous Hanukah concerts in Hoboken. Rigby had reunited with her early band The Shams, and Eric was also there to do a short set. So the Shams backed him up on a version of Neil Diamond's "The Boat I Row." Magic was in the air.

"I was very nervous," Eric says. "I couldn't look at them. I thought, ‘My God, they're professionals!' I'm always in awe of other musicians, thinking, ‘Oh dear, what will they think of me?' I was pretty shy."

But slowly, they got together - in 2005, he supported Rigby and Marti Jones on their Cynical Girls tour. They inched forward toward becoming a professional duo known as Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby just as they slowly moved toward marriage.

"The first song we ever did, apart from [the others], was a cover of ‘Red Rubber Ball' with Yo La Tengo and it was a disaster," Eric says. "It was the first time we appeared as Wreckless Eric & Amy Rigby together and it was a low point of our careers. We turned it into an upbeat, laughing arrangement and they were playing it slower. No one knew what key it was in; we left the stage to complete silence. Now when we see Georgia and Ira [of Yo La Tengo] we say, ‘Wish you'd come see us. We've got that song down now."

The more the duo tour, as their profile and popularity increase, the more people will get to hear how true that is.


[For a complete list of tour dates, go to the duo's MySpace page: www.myspace.com/wrecklessericamyrigby]