I’ve a favor to ask. It’s not for me, rather, our valley. I’m asking the city of Santa Clarita to make a permanent and appropriate gesture. Starting summer of 2027, on June 23 — every June 23 — I’m requesting that you dear public servants fly our flags at half-mast.
The 23rd of June was three days ago. As it’s been now for years, that day passes without much, if any, notice. It was a Sunday, 11:30 p.m., 1946, when one of American history’s most influential people died.
My own prejudice? Although we’re much better than most communities, we still do a pretty poor job of handing down our local cultural identity from one generation to the next. I’d bet most people in our valley couldn’t tell you who was William S. Hart. A few might offer that there’s a park, high school and district named after him and he was some sort of cowboy, possibly having something to do with real old corny black-and-white movies.
Funny the things you take for granted. I went to Hart High. Possibly, I may have graduated. I can’t recall a passing sentence from anyone in the faculty ever mentioning who this stern-looking thespian in the 90-gallon hat was or why they named a school after the guy.
The planet was still smoldering from World War II when the millionaire actor and cowboy who lived in that great mansion on the hill overlooking the valley took his final breath. Bedridden, he had left his hilltop retreat the Wednesday before and was transported to California Lutheran Hospital in Los Angeles. Mind you, this was long before our modern days of instant information. There was no TV to speak of, certainly no internet.
That Sunday afternoon, there was a major rodeo in Downtown Los Angeles. When the announcer reported a bulletin of Hart on his deathbed, there wasn’t a dry eye in the bleachers. The next day, a Monday, when word trickled out of his death, nearly every business in the entire Santa Clarita Valley closed its doors in his honor. Men and women were sobbing on the streets.
Hart was friends with The Signal’s editor and publisher, Fred Trueblood. Before his death, Hart stopped by the newspaper to leave a note he had written, recounting a particularly vivid dream. It was about joining his friend and American humorist, Will Rogers, in heaven, of being on a cattle drive, being young again, free of pain and filled with joy of being out in Nature.
What makes Hart so profoundly important in the scheme of world affairs? He certainly didn’t invent the cowboy, but, he invented the cinema Western hero that stars from John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Gary Cooper and an endless list credit as the original and unbreakable mold from whence they and every Western leading man emanates.
While Hart’s roots came from playing with reservation Indian kids as a child in Montana, he was later trained as an accomplished Shakespearean stage actor in London and New York City. William Shakespeare was the great moralist playwright who crafted some of the greatest works in literature and created the classic definition of a hero, that — doomed to failure, even death — he will ultimately do the right thing.
Most of us live our lives in the murky swamps of ambiguity. We worship the Least Effort Principle — choosing the easiest ethical path, certainly one that doesn’t make waves.
Hart had seen a penny-awful early Western on a kaleidoscope and was aghast at the characterization of the hero — a lout dressed more like “… a Gloucester fisherman” with comic rubber boots. He went to his friend, film producer Tom Ince, and begged Ince to hire him as a consultant, to show how cowboys actually acted and dressed. Ince did him one better and put him in the movies. Hart was in his early 50s when he made the transition from stage to film and soon became one of the biggest stars in the world. He brought a sense of realism and, radical thought, even looked good riding a horse.
But his lasting contribution?
Hart brought that foundation of spiritual morality to his stories. There was right. There was wrong. No matter how painful, the good cowboy did the right thing, no matter what the cost.
That uncompromising viewpoint and behavior defined the United States of America to the world for decades. Even today, often with disdain, people overseas view us as being naive. They still call America a bunch of cowboys, viewing the world through a black-and-white lens.
It can be argued that even more than a George Washington, Thomas Jefferson or Abraham Lincoln, William Surrey Hart defined the USA, that we will rush to defend those who need help, that we will rise to save the day. Do we? Not always. There are passages in our history where we’ve failed miserably and even have behaved more like the wretch. But. That doesn’t mean we lower the bar or even that we throw the bar away. A code of ethics, a Ten Commandments, a Bill of Rights — they are a goal of a life well lived and often, they are so difficult to achieve and come at great cost and sacrifice.
It’s no secret. America’s culture has been sliding. It’s not necessary to attach a specific religion to moral fiber. Practiced correctly, it certainly helps, and, ultimately, it’s where we’re all ultimately headed.
But, we have, right here, in our own back yard, the home of a man who created a shining beacon known the world over that defines this very country.
We’d do well to teach that lesson to our young.
City of Santa Clarita — next June 23rd? Lower the flags to half-mast to remember Bill Hart, but, more importantly, to remind us:
We need to be the hero in our own lives …
Pick up “Naked Came the Novelist,” John Boston’s long-awaited sequel to “Naked Came the Sasquatch,” at JohnBoston-Books.com. Also available is his two-part “SCV Monsters” series. A lifelong SCV resident with 119 major writing awards and nearly 12,000 columns, Boston is Earth history’s most prolific humorist and satirist.
