I’m a Tina Turner fan, but she got it wrong in her hit a few years back called “We don’t need another Hero.” The song goes on to say: We don’t need to know the way home, ooh All we want is life beyond Thunderdome. A full life needs more than this; hope, inspiration, an understanding of the value of charity, and a following of the precepts of what is honorable. So yes Tina. We do need more heroes.
I found my first hero when I was eleven. We visited, my hero and I, as a Saturday morning ritual would leave my house at 8:30 a.m., mount my prize possession: a Red & Black Schwinn Deluxe Hornet Bicycle. Then it was a five-block ride to the local Sears store. My mother, bless her soul, had given me a nickel to buy a bag of popcorn on the first floor of the store. Then it was up the stairs to the TV department where all the new TV sets were on display.
No, we didn’t have our own TV at home. None of the kids in my neighborhood did. So when I arrived at the displays of new black and white TVs, I plopped down in a corner to watch my hero, the king of the cowboys, Roy Rogers. He fought the bad guys in each episode, riding the western plains on his golden palomino horse, Trigger.
