By JOEL SACHS

From time to time, I will be featuring the best student work from my essay class at Atlantic Cape Community College. This week’s column is by Joel Sachs, a graduate of Egg Harbor Township High School.
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Nearly every day I sit down in front of my television to watch 60-year-old TV shows. I watch westerns, and I may be one of the few people in my generation who knows the name Cheyenne Bodie.

Cheyenne was a character in a 1950’s black and white western TV show called “Cheyenne.” The actor behind the man was Clint Walker, and at six-feet six-inches he cast a big shadow not only literally, but also big enough to reach me many decades later.

While President Obama calls for a “Sputnik moment” to guide America, I am waiting for the cowboys of yore to come along and show us who we used to be. I am waiting for Cheyenne to come and save us from evil and confusion, maybe then we could finally ride into the sunset and know what a happy ending feels like.

A few years ago I found my cowboy when I least expected it. I was flipping through the channels getting disappointed with all the reruns and cookie cutter shows. I was used to skipping over any channel, which wasn’t showing a color picture.
I absent mindedly left the channel on Encore Westerns. On the screen stood Cheyenne Bodie. His booming voice and soft-spoken tone had my attention.

Every weekday when Cheyenne was on TV, I was there. I was baffled about how I had never heard of this before. I asked my father, born in 1949, if he had watched this show as a kid.

“I think it’s cool,” I told him. “I feel like I am watching a window into the past.”

“You are,” he said. “Stuff like that doesn’t sell anymore.”

It took me a while to figure out what he meant. Modern America doesn’t embrace the wholesome cowboy, and we only rarely tolerate a gritty one.

As I watched more “Cheyenne” and other westerns from the 1930’s-1970’s, I found several portals to generations long past. I was seeing America’s idea of the cowboy era in the late 1800’s, but I was also seeing the distinct imprints of what was at the time contemporary U.S culture.

The values, the beliefs, and the heroes were all there like wayward ghosts waiting for adoption.

I learned what a “maverick” was before John McCain stole the term. I imagined a time when “riding shotgun” meant the passenger was armed with the biggest gun he could carry because at any time their stagecoach could be attacked.

I was impressed with the fact that men were expected to behave like men. Hard work earned respect and lots of blisters, and that was a good thing.

Women in westerns impressed me too. They weren’t afraid to act like women, and often times they were much tougher than the men. They cared about beauty but not vanity, about family and not status, about loyalty and about embracing strength while respecting weakness.

I kept watching Cheyenne and kept absorbing the lessons he taught me about honor and manhood. We still need those values today.

Keith Forrest an assistant professor of communication at Atlantic Cape Community College. His late mother Libby Demp Forrest Moore wrote the Joyride column for this newspaper for 20 years.

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