Love, Faith & FAMILY

THE DAUGHTER AND GRANDDAUGHTER OF THE ICONIC COUPLE SHARE SWEET MEMORIES WITH CLOSER

- LOUISE A. BARILE

Julie Rogers Pomilia didn’t realize her grandfather was famous until her second-grade teacher called her up to her desk. “Do you know who that is?” the teacher asked, pointing to a stack of magazines with Roy Rogers’ face on them. “I said, ‘Yeah, that’s my grandpa,” Julie recalls to Closer. “She made a big deal out of it in front of the class, [but] I just figured everybody’s grandpahad a TV show.”

On The Roy Rogers Show, which ran from 1951 to 1957, Roy and his wife, Dale Evans, swept viewers away into a world of heroic cowboys and cowgirls protecting good, honest people from bad guys. They lived those values of truth, faith, bravery and kindness in their private lives too. “They were who you hoped they would be off-screen,” says Julie, who is the author of the memoir Your Heroes, My Grandparents: A Grand-daughter’s Love.

The pair teamed up for the first time in 1944’s Cowboy and the Senorita. By that time, Roy, who had begun singing professionally at age 19, had become one of the country’s most bankable western stars. Dale, meanwhile, was a spitfire who sang, danced, played piano and wrote songs. “Happy Trails,” the theme song that ended episodes of their western show, was one of her compositions.

It was a case of opposites attracting. “They were very good for each other,” their daughter Mary Little Doe Rogers, aka Dodie, tells Closer. “Dad tended to be on the quiet side, but he had an inner strength. Mom was very social. She loved being around people and she fit in everywhere she went.”