Man & Wife

Two of the most active spokesmen for the Lord in the U.S. are a pretty, 42-year-old woman and her cinema-famed husband who rarely travel on their tours without a $50,000 wardrobe. Movie Cowboy Roy Rogers and his wife Dale Evans top the bill at rodeos and circus stops across the country, where they put across a spiritual appeal that sends pistol-packing eight-year-olds off to Sunday school and their moist-eyed parents off to church. With their famed palomino horse, Trigger, they turn out a half-hour television show each week into which they are injecting more and more of a Christian message for the televiewers of 80 stations. They help many religious causes, such as Billy Graham's evangelizing of Britain last spring. Dale's God-centered writings go over big; her Angel Unaware, published two years ago, has sold nearly 400,000 copies and is holding a level of almost 2,000 a week. Just published is her second, My Spiritual Diary (Revell; $2), with two printings before publication totaling 80,000 copies.

"God Is Always There." "I am resolved to keep a spiritual accounting, that I may check on my soul's progression or (may God forbid!) regression," Dale begins her new book. "Put your hand over mine, Lord God, that this writing may be honest and reverent." A day-to-day account of about eight months of 1954, Dale's Diary is a warmly written series of letters to God dealing with the minutiae of the half-enchanted, half-commercial public-private life personifying an American folk myth--the Cowboy. The six children have to be hustled off to school, the washing machine must be fixed, travel is an endless series of personal appearances, interviews, awards. Trigger walks four flights upstairs and shakes a bridle-full of daffodils over the ailing Roy to cheer him. And God is always there.

How did He get there? Dale told about it, sitting in her dressing room between film retakes for TV. "I joined the Baptist Church at the age of ten, but I gradually drifted away. I belonged to a family in Uvalde, Texas that never had anything to do with show business, but that was my goal. So I eloped at 14. Naturally, it was a failure, but I did get one wonderful thing out of it--my son Tom. And it was Tom who led me back to the church."

Dale finally made it into the big time, singing with name bands on network shows, but she was never happy. In 1947 she married Widower Roy Rogers, an ex-bandsman himself, who had three children by his first wife.

One day, Dale and her son Tom, then 20, were sitting in Hollywood's Fountain Avenue Baptist Church. "Mother, how is your soul?" the boy suddenly whispered. Recalls Dale: "I said it was all right, but I knew it wasn't. I knew I was groping." "Why don't you give yourself to Christ?" said Tom. Dale went home and decided to do just that.

"At My Post." Today, both Dale and Roy are members of the Protestant Episcopal Church, which they joined when they moved to a ranch outside Hollywood. They say grace at meals, and at night they pray around a family altar (made of one of Dale's old dressing tables). Sometimes Dale squeezes in her morning prayers while driving to work in her Dodge. "Then I read my Bible while I'm having my hair done on the set."

Roy's religion, like her own, was strengthened in the heartbreak of their having a mentally defective child who died after two years--the subject of Dale's previous book.

"I would love to be an evangelist," Dale Evans says. "I can't think of anything more thrilling. But I think God has revealed to me that I can serve Him best by just remaining at my post. So I'm just trying to serve Him from day to day."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.