Gene Autry, OK

Gene Autry, Okla.: Riders on the Range

The singing cowboy lived in the town that bears his name for only two years, but Gene Autry, Okla., pays daily homage to the matinee idol. The town not only changed its name to Gene Autry, the café where townsfolk gather most mornings to hash out the day’s undertakings is named the Tumbleweed Café, after one of Autry’s hit songs.

And the centerpiece of the town of 99 people is a museum honoring the cowboy.

The former Depression-era schoolhouse where generations learned to read and write—and then graduated from high school—is now home to one of the largest collections of singing cowboy memorabilia in the world. And while the museum features such Western matinee stars as Rex Allen, Tex Ritter, and Roy Rogers, Autry gets top billing as the “World’s Greatest Singing Cowboy.”

And so he should; without Autry, there would be no museum, and the town would still be named Berwyn.

When Autry moved here in 1939, his 1,200-acre Flying A Ranch became home base for the biggest rodeo road show ever organized. A year later, his troop of riders was performing for New York’s Madison Square Garden.

In 1941, a grateful Berwyn petitioned to have its name changed in honor of its new patron. That same year, Autry left to serve in the Army Air Corps. After the war, he went back to making movies and never returned to the Oklahoma town.

Still, Autry’s distinctive twang—piped in over the museum’s public address system—is the first voice heard inside the town’s shrine. The recorded croon echoes down hallways. A chorus of I wish I had never met Sunshine and that Sunshine had never met me ... two-steps into tracks of Tumbling Tumbleweeds, You are My Sunshine, and Mexicali Rose.

Glass cases that once displayed student trophies overflow with movie posters, comic books, and long-playing records. The school’s old basketball court and assembly hall—now a theater—screens Autry classics like Gaucho Serenade, Bells of Capistrano, Sioux City Sue, and Back in the Saddle. And a former classroom looks like an idle bunkhouse waiting for the yodeling cowboy to return from chores, kick off his boots, and pick up a guitar.

Items ranging from a signature-embroidered chenille bedspread (mass-produced in the 1940s) to specially designed Stetsons, chaps, and boots share wall space with museum documents chronicling Autry’s meteoric rise during the singing cowboy’s golden age. The man responsible for the collection is also its curator, Elvin Sweeten, a retired high school teacher.

Sweeten convinced the city council in 1989 to keep the memory of the old Western movies alive with a museum honoring Autry after the school closed. “My wife Flora graduated from this school,” Sweeten notes, as if that were reason enough for him to single-handedly corral hundreds of Autry collectibles.

Sweeten, in fact, tracked down 90 percent of the museum’s holdings. “Hitting every flea market from the East to the Midwest,” he says, he added to the collection “one poster at a time.”

“Elvin saved the old school buildings,’’ retired postmaster Glen Payne muses over a cup of coffee at the Tumbleweed. Payne—like Sweeten’s wife—also graduated from Gene Autry.

Payne’s friend, F.W. Conway—a former mayor of Gene Autry—agrees. “The museum has done a great, great job of keeping the town alive,” Conway says. He means literally, as well as figuratively, adding that area residents recently sought shelter in the cellar of the solid brick building during a 100-mile-per-hour windstorm.

When the museum opened in 1999, Sweeten had enough posters to fill one room of the schoolhouse. Today, the museum contains seven (large) rooms of singing cowboy paraphernalia. “All kinds of people come in here,” says Sweeten, “from Africa, Venezuela, England, Mexico.”

The museum’s Gene Autry Film & Music Festival, now in its 10th year, attracts even more fans—about 15,000 each September—to celebrate Gene Autry ... the man and the town.

Margaret Dornaus is a frequent contributor to American Profile.

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