Luck or Something Like It (3 page)

Youth only happens to you one time,

And so I’ve been told,

If you should miss it in your young time,

Have it when you’re old.

Papa wasn’t an overtly affectionate person, so it was hard to tell him just how much he meant to us. That tribute in the song was the only way I knew how to do it.

He was a true product of Depression-era America. He lived through it, and consequently was, let’s say, careful with his money.

When I was in my late twenties, playing music for a living and scouting opportunities in California, we decided to take Papa, who had never been out of the state of Texas, on a trip. We all piled in my 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air and drove for five days, taking our time because Papa Hester was thoroughly enjoying this bucket-list trip across the country. We stopped all along the way, filling the hours with diners and donuts, eating our way to L.A.

Once we got there, Papa Hester pulled me aside, as if to spare me any embarrassment in front of the rest of the family, and handed me $313.38 in small bills and a big pile of change, along with some grandfatherly advice: “Son, you’ll never have any money if you keep leaving it everywhere you go.”

Unbeknownst to the rest of us, Papa had been picking up all the tips I had left in diners and cafés along the road.

He smiled at me and said, “One day, boy, you’ll thank me for this.”

Chapter Three

Lovesick Blues

I started grade school
at Wharton Elementary School on West Gray Street with the hope of blending in with all the other guys. I didn’t want to stand out for any reason, good or bad; I just wanted to be accepted. My goal was anonymity. Being considered an average student was plenty good for me, and that’s what I was. I think I probably had a little attention deficit disorder, but of course there was no such diagnosis back then. I was just considered a hyper kid. I had a lot of energy and was a little scattered.

The problem that faced me early on was this: although I wanted to remain anonymous among the guys, I still wanted the girls to notice me. I was, from age six, girl crazy. The love of my life in elementary school was Colleen Mays. I thought she was the coolest girl I had ever seen. She didn’t live in the Courts, either, but in a very wealthy area near school. Colleen was really beautiful and pretty impressive in her brightly polished brown-and-white saddle shoes. I noticed them every morning as we sat in class. While all the other kids were doing their work, I was totally mesmerized by her shoes. They looked brand-new every morning! Maybe that’s why I was a C student.

If Colleen had agreed to be my girlfriend, it would have been a classic case of dating up. Her father was a federal judge. Their yard was huge and full of pecan trees. Every day on my way home, I would ask her parents if I could pick up pecans for my family and also a few for
her
family.

I also had a pal named Ronnie Harrod who was a real jock and played shortstop on the school softball team. Since Ronnie was on the team, I always came to the games, and it didn’t take me long to notice that Colleen was there, too. She never missed a game. So I started practicing fast-pitch softball with Ronnie. I worked and worked and finally got good enough to be the pitcher on the team. It got even better when we started winning.

One day after I had pitched a big win for the team, I swaggered over to where Colleen was standing. “Hi, Colleen!” I said, ready for her to tell me how great I was and start up the romance of my young life. At the very least I expected a hi or a giggle. Instead I got, “You are such a show-off!”

I was mortified.

It hurt so much because she was right. I had developed a big windmill pitch that helped get batters out but was really designed to impress Colleen. Obviously it didn’t.

I’ll let you in on a secret: entertainers—no matter how old they are—should never take themselves too seriously. Years later, in the early 1980s when I was at the peak of my success, I came to Houston for a show. You always want to look good for your hometown, so I was excited about playing before eighty thousand people at the Houston Astrodome. The show was great. The crowd cheered with every song and laughed at all my jokes. It couldn’t have gone better.

As I was leaving the building with my mother, it suddenly got a
lot
better. There she was . . . Colleen Mays! I recognized her immediately. I hadn’t seen her for years, not since we were kids. What a rush! She’d come to see her old friend, the boy with the razzle-dazzle windup who used to pick pecans in her yard.

I stopped the procession leaving the arena and went over to her, thinking,
This is so cool
.

“Hello, Colleen!” I said.

“Hello,” she said, with a completely blank look on her face.

“I’m Kenneth Rogers. We went to Wharton Elementary together. I used to pick pecans at your house.” I was feeling a little less cool. It appeared that Colleen had come to a Kenny Rogers concert, advertised as a show from a hometown boy, and never made the connection to the Kenneth Rogers she knew as a child. She really had no memory of that little awestruck boy from the projects.

“Remember, I pitched on the softball team?”

“Yeah, I kind of remember that.”

You bitch!
I thought.
You “kind of remember that”?
Come on!
Throw me a bone, Colleen. My mom is standing right here! You could at least
pretend
that you remember me!

I guess I had been more successful at being anonymous in grade school than I thought.

If a celebrity likes people to read about his successes, he should be willing to share his humiliations as well. In my life, more than a few have fit the pattern set by Colleen.

As early as grade
school, I began to see music and singing as a respite from all the awkwardness and embarrassment of growing up poor, shy, and often an outsider. Developing a little confidence from singing and playing around the house, I entered my first talent show in Houston. It was 1949, and I was ten years old. The event was sponsored by Foremost Dairy and held just prior to a big Eddy Arnold appearance at the Texan Theatre, where I later worked. Eddy was a big country star at the time, at one point that year having five hits on the charts at the same time. The grand prize of the competition was a half gallon of vanilla ice cream, quite the prize for a ten-year-old from the projects. And the grand
grand
prize was that the winner would get to meet Eddy in person.

I marched out on that stage and sang and yodeled a song called “Lovesick Blues.” Originally a show tune from the 1920s, this song had been released by the great Hank Williams and became his first No. 1 hit. I heard it on the radio and figured that if Hank had hit the jackpot with it, maybe I would, too. I threw myself into the performance, even the yodeling parts, and ended up winning first prize. Either I was better than I thought or the other kids were awful. In any case, that half gallon of Foremost Dairy’s finest ice cream was mine. Plus a face-to-face meeting with Eddy Arnold! It would take another thirty years or so for me to become a true country singer, but I sure felt like a country star that day.

I was ushered backstage to meet Eddy, and he let me play his big blond Gibson L5. I got a chance to talk about how much I loved his No. 1 hit ballads like “What Is Life Without Love” and “It’s a Sin,” and he said something nice about my yodeling. What a night.

That contest was one of the first times I felt the thrill of performing, but it also produced, years later, another one of those don’t-take-yourself-too-seriously moments. I was in Knoxville to receive a career achievement award, “The Froggy,” from radio station WIVK, and as fate would have it, Eddy Arnold was the presenter. By this time he was a legend, having spent more than 145 weeks in the top spot on the country charts, a record at the time. This was the second high honor Eddy had presented me in my life. His speech started off on a high note: “I like this guy. He’s had so many big hits. He’s done so many good things for country music.” He kept going on and on about how I so richly deserved this award, until he finally said, “I really do like this guy, but for the life of me, I can’t remember his name!”

That line took me right back to grade school.

Chapter Four

Moving On Up

None of the Rogers
family minded hard work, including me. I’m still a hard worker, though it’s not the hard physical kind these days. My seven sisters and brothers were all workers, too. Before my older brother, Lelan, got involved in the music business, kind of leading the way for me, he worked at Wormser Hat Store in downtown Houston, selling hats. When I was eleven, he got me a job down there sweeping the floor and squeegeeing windows. At a dollar and a half a day, six afternoons a week, I brought home a weekly paycheck of $9, money my mom used to help keep the family afloat.

Every day, right after school, I’d catch the bus downtown for a nickel, put in my hours, then ride it back home for another nickel. One payday before I caught the bus home, I decided to stop in at the penny arcade down the street. Just this once, I told myself, I deserved it. I walked in planning to spend a dollar, tops—and walked out penniless. I had blown my entire $9 pay. This presented two problems: How was I going to face my mom? And how was I going to get home?

I started panhandling on the street, and in an hour collected about fourteen dollars. In a very short time I had gone from “
just this once
” to “
boy, I have blown it
” to “
look at all this money
!” The last guy who stopped was my bus driver. He looked at me with a stern face, and said, “I won’t give you any money, but I’ll give you a transfer pass. Use it to get home.”

It was a humiliating end to my short career as a panhandler.

I started hitchhiking to school every day once I entered junior high school at George Washington Junior High on Shepherd Drive, something no one would do today. If that makes me sound like a tough, daring kid, I wasn’t. In fact, I was still afraid of the dark. As shy and self-conscious as I was, though, I realized by junior high that the only real way to attract girls, my continuing passion, was either to be a star athlete or to play in a band. I had loved music since I first saw my dad play the fiddle on Grandpa Rogers’s front porch, but I thought sports would be a faster way to gain recognition, so I went out for football. I was excited about being a player because I was particularly interested in a gorgeous cheerleader named Leah Ray Bloecher and being a jock seemed like the path to her heart.

Late summer in Houston was hot and humid, the pads and helmet were heavy, and sweat was running off my face in sheets. Convinced I was ready for the punishment, I went out on the field and started running laps with the rest of the guys. Ten minutes later I was passed out cold on the ground. The next thing I knew, I woke up on a bench in the dressing room, with a doctor telling me to lie still. To me that was a signal from on high that maybe football wasn’t my destiny. I called it quits. As I realized very quickly, there’s a big difference between being athletic, which I was, and being an athlete, which I wasn’t.

I came up with a better Plan B: I would be a cheerleader. That way I got to be at every game, right next to Leah Ray, and never had to risk passing out on the field. I practiced hard but really paid more attention to Leah Ray than I did to the finer points of cheerleading. During our practice sessions, we worked up a cheer with a big ending, where I threw Leah Ray up in the air, then caught her. On the night we rolled this trick out for the football fans, my brother Lelan showed up to watch me cheer. I threw Leah Ray into the air as planned, turned to give a proud look at Lelan, and promptly dropped her on the ground. After that, she kept her distance from me, in every way.

If you come from
a family of eight kids, many of them older than you, then there are always people around to show the way. At sixteen, like all red-blooded American boys, I was itching to drive. My sister Geraldine’s husband, Eddie Houston, one of the best guys in the world and the rock of Geraldine’s life, agreed to teach me. Eddie had a stiff leg from childhood polio, but that never kept him from living his life. The first time we went out in traffic in his old Model T Ford, I turned too quickly, hopped a curb, and busted the right front tire, a disaster in those hard times. Eddie, with no money for a new tire, said, “Don’t worry, we’ll fix the thing.” Which is exactly what we did, with a tire-patching kit. To this day, when someone on the crew has an accident, I can hear Eddie’s voice saying “Don’t worry, we’ll fix the thing.”

A few years down the road, I sent Eddie a couple of hundred bucks with a note attached. “Hey, Eddie, this is for that tire I busted when I was a kid.” He got a big kick out of that.

As a complete aside—it’s a habit of mine—Eddie worked as an accountant for a box company called Gaylord Containers and said he had a gift for numbers. I was instantly impressed. One day, hanging with him at his office, he challenged me to give him some numbers to add in his head. I started reeling them off.

“$6,241.”

“Okay.” Eddie closed his eyes as if he were The Amazing Kreskin.

“$4,911.”

“Okay.”

“$16,221.”

“Okay.”

And the last one,” I said, “is $18,000.”

“Got it.” Short beat. “$62,535 is the total.”

I was so amazed. It was so cool that he could just add a group of numbers in his head like that without even writing them down. Just to make sure, I re-added the numbers on his calculator while he was doing something else.

He wasn’t even close.

When I confronted him, he smiled and said, “I told you I had a gift. I never said it was a good gift.”

That’s what I loved about him—an accountant with a sense of humor, and boy, are those hard to find. My first professional accountant/business manager, Michael Gesas, also had a droll sense of humor. As we became close friends, he and his wife, Helene, would come and visit me when I had my farm in Georgia, Beaver Dam Farms. He always had this dream of riding horses. Now there’s a great picture, an accountant cowboy from Beverly Hills on a horse. Far be it from me to deny him his dream. In the stable was a big black thoroughbred named Mikey. It was his choice to ride Mikey.

It all started as planned. We mounted up like cowboys and hit the dusty trail. As we were riding, the path took us down by the creek. Michael had no sooner said, “I feel like John Wayne today,” when Mikey decided he had had enough. He headed to a sand bed alongside the creek and politely lay down on his side with Mike’s leg underneath him. We were all laughing so hard, we didn’t even realize he might have been hurt when he asked, “What’s the signal for get up?” So we all answered, “How about ‘get up’! See if that works.” All we heard was the meek voice of what sounded like a seven-year-old saying, “Get up, horsey, get up,” but Mikey just lay there. It was a perfect match. Mikey the accountant and Mikey the horse. We all chose to ride off and leave him, knowing Mikey the horse would get up and follow us. When Mike caught up with us, he kept saying unconvincingly, “Boy, that was really fun. It doesn’t get any better than this.” That’s as close to a sense of humor as a business manager/accountant is allowed to have.

Another in-law, my sister Barbara’s first husband, Sonny Gibbs (who is not to be confused with the NFL player of the same name), had a big role in at least two experiences that changed my life. Sonny was, in his time, a legendary high school athlete in Houston, and Barbara was crazy about him. When I was twelve, the two of them got roped into babysitting for me on a night they were to attend a really special concert. Having no other choice, they dragged me along to the concert. The main attraction: Ray Charles. I was both wowed by the stage performance and stunned by the love and admiration the audience showed him. They applauded his music and laughed at his jokes. I left that place that night wanting very much to do the same thing.

I also realized for the first time that night something essential to being a performer. People will sometimes clap to be nice, but no one ever laughs to be nice. They laugh when they think something is funny. It’s either there or it’s not.

My brother-in-law Sonny was a great athlete, but he was also something else: a drug addict. Everyone, including Barbara, knew this, but no one talked about it. One day, out of the blue, he asked me to sit on the front porch and talk for a few minutes. I had no idea what he wanted to talk about, but it soon became apparent. He wanted me to promise him that I wouldn’t make the same mistakes that he had made that had sidetracked his whole life. He wanted something good to come from his life, and warning me off drugs was, in his mind, a good start. He asked for a solemn pledge to avoid drugs and I gave it to him. And, with a few infractions along the way, I have largely kept that pledge.

I now had the example of my dad to keep me away from alcohol and that promise to Sonny to stay away from the very drugs that had consumed so many musicians and entertainers over the years. Once again, someone had taken the time to care about me enough to change my life.

In 1954, a good
thing happened. With my mom working extra jobs and with Lelan, Geraldine, Barbara, and me all contributing to the family income, the Rogers clan was no longer poor enough to qualify for public housing. We had moved up a notch on the economic scale. We moved out of San Felipe Courts and over to the north side of Houston, right across the street from Jefferson Davis High School, just as I was starting high school. I was coming up in the world.

My paperwork to transfer from my old neighborhood high school, San Jacinto, to Jeff Davis hadn’t come through by the first day of school, so when I showed up at San Jacinto, I knew I was in for a wasted day. Rule follower that I was, I had never before had the audacity to skip school, but now was my big chance. Some friends and I decided to drive to a place called Spring Creek, about twenty miles north of Houston.

What a day! We had borrowed a brand-new red Mercury convertible from my brother Lelan’s friend Frank, just back from a tour of duty in the military, swam in the creek, and then headed home at sundown. We all went back to San Jacinto the next day, where we were politely greeted by four city detectives and promptly arrested and taken to jail in handcuffs. That was a shocker, to say the least.

As it turned out, a delivery truck from Ben Wolfman’s Furs had been robbed the day before in the same area and someone had reported the license number of our flashy red convertible as the getaway vehicle. That was the bad news. The good news was that we were cleared right away. The best news was that when I got back to San Jacinto High, you would have thought I was a convicted felon and hardened criminal in the eyes of the other students. Though all we really did was lounge by a creek all day, we had been arrested, and we deserved respect.

When I then showed up for my first day at Jefferson Davis, my tough-guy reputation, despite my soft-guy nature, had preceded me. That was good, because the Jeff Davis crowd was all new to me, and it was better to be seen as a tough guy than just another nervous teen. But the moment of truth came when the resident bully, Wallace Connor, chose me as his next victim. For whatever reason, he thought that I needed to be taught a lesson. I was sitting on a stool at Dube’s drugstore one afternoon with none of my backup crew when Wallace accosted me. He punched me in the back of the head with his fist, snarling, “Hey, tough guy, I want you outside. I’m gonna whip your ass.”

“Well,” I said, “now is as good a time as any,” shaking like a leaf but seeing no way out of it. “Let’s get it on.”

That appeared to shock Wallace, and he hesitated a moment before he said anything else. Finally he shrugged and said, “I guess we don’t need to do this. I just wanted to see what you were made of.”

Standing up to Wallace Connor was a big accomplishment at Jeff Davis, and no one bothered me again, with or without my tough-guy reputation. I don’t know if Wallace was really the badass he made himself to be when I first met him, but a few months after he got out of high school, someone shot him through the screen window of his home, thinking he was a drug dealer. He died instantly.

I ended up buying
my first guitar with money I earned while working as a busboy at the Rice Hotel in downtown Houston. Throughout high school, I continued to take as many part-time jobs as possible, including working as an usher at the Metropolitan Theater and rebuilding Coca-Cola boxes. Finally, after I’d been at the Rice Hotel for a bit, I’d saved enough to actually buy an instrument.

At the local H&H music store, a salesman named Red Novak had set up a kind of “pickers’ corner” in the store where you could go in and play one of their instruments. He’d let you pick out a guitar and try it out as long as you were responsible. Red’s rule was “You Break It, You Own It!”—but he at least gave you the chance to play really good instruments without having to buy them. There were other pickers who hung around the store. We all learned chords and technique from each other. There was a great camaraderie at those guitar pulls.

The guitar I loved was a Les Paul L5, the same guitar Eddy Arnold had let me play years earlier. It cost $500. I ended up putting it on layaway and paying for it, bit by bit, with money I earned working my part-time jobs. But I practiced on it, learning the chords, in Red’s pickers’ corner.

I guess you could say that from a professional standpoint, it all started for me when I went to a talent contest at Jeff Davis and saw a really bad band get up onstage and play. Once I saw how little it took to be in a “talent contest,” I figured I could do better. I had learned a lot from all those sessions at the music store, and I believed I could put together a band that
could
be professional.

One of the greatest things for me at Jeff Davis was singing in the glee club, where Mrs. Leifesti encouraged my singing and gave me a lot of solo parts in school performances. By this time, some friends and I had formed a vocal group called the Scholars, an interesting name for four C students. Nevertheless, we were serious. As a cover band, we sang whatever was popular on the radio, like songs of the Penguins (“Earth Angel”) or the multihit group the Drifters, or anything else that sounded good with four-part harmony. I played my Les Paul guitar for that group. The four of us went to the First Baptist Church together and joined the Texas National Guard at the same time. We were having fun making music and getting better at it. We were a group. That’s where I felt most comfortable.