Freeways and Cowboys in California

...Dressed up in fancy gear made by Nudie, the famous old rodeo tailor, he twirled his lasso to admiring crowds of children...

...I have written in these pages about visiting Wild West theme parks, saloons, country music festivals, and other such venues in a number of European countries...

...Still, I confess that I rather reveled in the clichés of the road—and, indeed, of Southern California in general...

...Most Europeans (and American Easterners, too) got and still get their visual impression of the West from movies and television shows...

...Exhibitions range from displays on cowboy, pioneer and Native American life to extensive sections documenting the romance of the West and the promotion and merchandising of the "West of the imagination...

...in the latter part of the 1950s and has long been an American citizen...

...He served as a walkin', talkin', ridin', ropin' advertisement for the company's Lone Star brand of cap pistols, spurs, lariats, badges, holsters, hats, and other Western toys...

...A delight...

...more or less on the schedule of a "normal" American...

...I also quickly learned to appreciate the freeway signage system...

...The radio, I found, adds to the boiling...

...Green is nearly 80 now and frail, but he is still tall and lanky and has the wide grin of his youth...

...the winter sun here seems far brighter than even its summer counterpart in Italy...

...among other things, I felt as if I was turning into a couch potato...

...As I drove, my ear was always cocked to the traffic alerts on the car radio, which I usually kept tuned to the local NPR station...

...MY work at the Autry Center's Institute was related to the continuing research I am doing in Europe for a book on how Europeans embrace, enact and transform the American West...

...It lacks the element of antiquity which ruined castles give to the Rhine, but in all other respects it is the world's great picture gallery...

...The toy company sent him to Los Angeles to learn roping and to learn to speak with a Southwestern American drawl...

...The work produced here, both fictional and factual, has launched and continues to drive major migrations and national trends...

...Actually, 134 is simply a continuation of 101...

...The book, An Ambush of Ghosts, was published nearly 15 years ago and included pictures of Iverson's ranch as it was then: the site of a new housing development that reduced the iconic landmarks of collective imagination to a few decorative boulders...

...Fortunately, there is a classical music station, with no commercials...

...Another thing about driving here that I like is buying gas...

...As a cowboy he traveled all over England, performing at toy stores and other venues, either on his own or with a Wild West show he put together...

...Horsefeathers...

...Thus I had a 25-mile drive each way at rush hour...

...It was like Camelot," he told me...

...The local country music station featured a relentless stream of "country Christmas music" remarkable for its sheer quantity as well as its kitsch...

...A cousin of mine in San Diego refers to its perfect, almost unchanging weather as "depriving the people of environmental stimulus") In my research, I used the books in the Autry Center's library, but I examined as well caches of photographs, posters, pamphlets, early travelers' accounts, newspaper cuttings, and other ephemera...

...The Center was formed in 2003 when the Museum of the American West (formerly called the Autry Museum of Western Heritage), the Southwest Museum of the American Indian, and the Institute for the Study of the American West were merged...

...Steve Larrabee, the Lone Star Rider...

...Along the beaches and boulevards, the palm trees make such wonderful, angular statements...

...More than once, stewing in stalled traffic or slamming on the brakes when someone cut into my lane, I felt a particular bubbling swell of frustration that I recognized as an incipient form of road rage...

...On the other hand, as I inched forward in rush hour traffic, I often thought of the word "freeway" and how the concept of "the open road" has colored so many European fantasies...

...A book I found in the Autry library details the fate of the Iverson Ranch, where hundreds of movies and television shows were shot, starting in the early 1930s...

...Talk, talk, talk, it never stops...

...We are a hub of technology and the arts— film, media, music, architecture, and literature...

...He had been performing as a magician...

...The juxtaposition of traditional wintry Yuletide imagery with the Southern California climate is yet another of the clichés I have enjoyed here: houses aglitter with Christmas lights, snowmen and reindeer, not to mention Santas in what must be utterly stifling red woolly garb...

...I felt like a "real Angelino" when I found myself engaging in passionate traffic and route discussions with friends and relatives and the people at the Institute...

...A souvenir photograph of Bridal Veil Falls on the Columbia River in Oregon made the comparison explicit: "The scenery of the Columbia River is not surpassed for natural grandeur anywhere in the world," stated the caption on the back of the photo...

...But there is a sing-songiness to some of the reporting, a rather smug mellowness to some of the commentators, and an overblown narcissism to some of the essayists that, in the words of the immortal song, "makes me want to shout...

...it gives you literally miles of warning about upcoming intersections, enabling you to thread through multiple lanes of traffic in order to merge or exit...

...Above and beyond the specific research I carried out in the Autry's library, my experience in California has proved an interesting plunge into all sorts of Americana, as well as into many hitherto (to me) unknown facets of America...

...Although I feel a profound sense of being American—and make sure to cast an absentee ballot in each election—I get my day-to-day information about the United States from the media, tempered only somewhat by calls and e-mails from friends and family...

...Gene Autry, the "singing cowboy" actor, songwriter, producer, and businessman who died in 1998, at the age of 91, was the driving force behind the foundation of the Museum of Western Heritage, which opened 10 years before his death...

...It was worse, though, if I changed the station—on most of the others bellowing seemed to be the norm...

...The 25 miles I covered were well over the distance separating Todi and Orvieto, the two principal towns near the converted barn that is my house...

...So my seven weeks in California this trip mark the longest period I have been in the States for nearly a decade...

...I read Hinton's famous judgment in an original copy of his work that I examined while spending most of December on a fellowship as a Visiting Scholar at the Autry National Center's Institute for the Study of the American West in Los Angeles...

...Green was then in his 20s, tall and lanky, with a wide smile...

...The Autry Center is in the San Fernando Valley, at the edge of Griffith Park—just across the street from the Los Angeles Zoo...

...Let's face it, I have lived in Europe all of my adult life and view my native country from afar...

...Steve Larrabee spinoffs included a Lone Star Rider monthly magazine, a Lone Star Rider annual, and a Lone Star Rider club that had about 20,000 members at its peak...

...His polemical account of a three-year stay in San Francisco during the Gold Rush further declares, "it is my unbiased opinion that California can and does furnish the best bad things that are obtainable in America...

...But I found it impossible to imagine the open countryside between the two—the olive groves and vineyards and forest and pasture dotted with farmsteads and towers and medieval hilltop villages—built up the way it is in L.A...

...In the weeks prior to Christmas, a CD of Autry's Christmas songs provided a constant soundtrack to the comings and goings in the courtyard and museum entryway...

...But many Western movies, and most Western TV shows, were shot at far less remote and dramatic locations, and they, too, have helped form the image of the wide open West...

...One of the things I looked at was how the wide, rugged landscape of the American West has both triggered yearning and become iconic...

...Larrabee appeared in a comic strip (the graphic character was based on Green), in radio and TV advertisements, and even an advertising tie-in on the back of Kellogg's Rice Krispies boxes...

...His jolly seasonal references sounded rather bizarre, given the sunny, bright blue skies and temperatures that peaked into the 80s...

...Comingback home, the trip could take an hour and a half or more...

...And my stint at the Institute was the first time ever that, as an adult, I lived in the U.S...

...True, some of the key landmark formations are still there, but now civilization has encroached on all sides...

...My route (suggested by a search on Mapquest.com, my new cyberspace transportation bible) took me on four freeways: the 10, the 405...

...Besides library research, I interviewed personalities who have been involved in fashioning or promoting the image of the West as perceived outside the United States...

...borders (Bonanza reportedly was seen in 97 countries...

...Old postcards and souvenir photographs often compared the Western landscape to great (European) works ofart...

...During my commute to the Autry, I often thought along those lines and attempted to transpose the Los Angeles landscape of highways and housing developments onto the area of Italy where I live...

...Morning Edition and All Things Considered are both geared to commuters, and I realize they must inform and entertain in a way that will not make drivers lose concentration...

...Urban sprawl has already swallowed some of the areas, especially those around Los Angeles...

...But looking back, Green recalls his years as a "rhinestone cowboy" with intense nostalgia: a faraway era when fantasy and reality collided, merged and melded—just as it did in the movies...

...In an interview published last year the Center's president and CEO, John L. Gray, observed: "The American West has had an enormous impact on our society...

...I think Mapquest estimates this should take 29 minutes...

...Yes, I know prices are high for the U. S., yet once I finally figured out the prepaying and self-pumping protocol, I found I could fill the tank of my rental car for $20...

...We are viewed internationally as a hotbed of innovation, a place of wide open spaces of the mind as well as a physical expanse...

...When 1 visit, I tend always to be on the move—seeing people, attending conferences, making contacts, reporting stories, or lecturing...

...Sunglasses are de rigueur...

...Her newest book is Virtually Jewish: Reinventing Jewish Culture in Europe...

...I'm staying at my brother's home in Santa Monica...

...Since I had never driven on a California freeway before, my first trip was a baptism of fire...

...I mused about how the reality of the daily grind somehow stands the fantasies on their head...

...He moved to L.A...

...Born in England, Green spent five years in the 1950s impersonating a fictional cowboy character—Steve Larrabee—for a London toy manufacturer...

...He has had little to do with his Wild West alter ego for decades, and said he long ago lost the ability to put on a Western twang...

...Before meeting Green, I read through his scrapbooks and photo albums, which he had donated to the Autry Center...

...it costs me two and a half times that amount to fill the tank of the subcompact car I drive in Europe...

...I'm rarely in any one place more than a few days...

...There was a Lone Star Rider song, too, beginning, "Lone Star high above the prairie/ Tall grass rustlin' in the breezes...

...Perhaps one could make that time in the middle of the night, or on a quiet weekend, but not on an ordinary day...

...Monument Valley has become a particularly potent icon, reproduced endlessly in advertisements, album covers, T-shirts, and other media since John Ford made it famous as a location backdrop for Stagecoach in 1939...

...the 101, and the 134...

...I got up early, skimmed the newspapers over breakfast, and ended up sitting—in the car or at the Institute—for 10 or 11 hours a day...

...In California, I looked at the creation and marketing of the Western myth...

...That is, putting in a full day at a workplace, commuting there and back, and enjoying the weekend as a real break and change of pace...

...Prominent among them were some of the creators of the old television Western series that were popular far outside U.S...

...the magic of the past lies exposed to the modern-day world," wrote the author, David Rothel...

...One of its most famous points was the so-called Lone Ranger's rock, a jutting formation where the television Lone Ranger (a particular childhood favorite of mine) reared up on his horse Silver at the start of each episode and rode off on a new adventure...

...Letter from Santa Monica Freeways and Cowboys in California By Ruth Ellen Gruber Santa Monica "I will say that I have seen purer liquors, better segars, finertobacco,truergunsand pistols, largerdirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtezans there, than in any otherplace I have ever visited," wrote Hinton R. Helper in his 1855 book The Land of Gold: Reality versus Fiction...

...A big bronze statue of Gene, guitar in hand, and his horse Champion dominates the Center's entrance courtyard...

...At night, the lights of the incessant streams of freeway traffic, coming and going, merge into sparkling white and red rivers, flowing, flowing, flowing...

...Ruth Ellen Gruber is a regular NL contributor...

...One of my interviewees was a remarkable man named Roy Green—a.k.a...

...They were a compendium of clippings, show programs, and PR stills of Green in his Larrabee persona...

...My record time was 50 minutes, in the morning, if I left at 7:30...

...They course along the three, four, five, sometimes six lanes each way, and shoot across the numerous over- and underpasses that braid the freeways into a linked series of complex concrete sculptures...