The festival also offers an opportunity to teach and celebrate the way Kenton's manufacturing past once intersected with pop culture. The history museum, for instance, had a booth with photos and other information about Autry's 1938 visit. One of the vendors and festival organizers, 77-year-old Bob Bailey, can recall meeting Autry in 1938.
For the many older attendees, Autry represents a vanished aspect of pop culture.
"His movies were wholesome and had moral values -- the bad guys didn't win," says 72-year-old Richard Gearhart of nearby Bucyrus. He had come to the festival and then went downtown to snap photos of the 5-year-old civic mural showing a waving Autry, on his rearing horse Champion, in front of a vibrantly red-brick Kenton Hardware Co.
Vendors at the festival were eager to show off and discuss the changes and additions that Kenton Hardware made over the years to its line of Autry repeating cap guns. For instance, Autry's signature initially was only on the frame, but it soon was added to the red or pearl grip. In 1951, after it lost the Autry contract, the company briefly made a non-endorsed cap gun known as the Lawmaker.
Today, some models can bring hundreds of dollars, although vendors say sales have slowed in this economy. Also of value -- and offered for sale at the festival -- were the cardboard boxes the guns came in. They had Autry's picture on them and noted that the gun was patterned after "the original six shooter of Public Cowboy No. 1."
"The price is going up on mint guns in the box," says vendor Joe Krock, 77, also a member of the Gene Autry Days Committee. "They're hard to find in a box. These were meant for kids to play with, not put away."
One vendor new to the festival, who was unaware of Gene Autry's connection to Kenton, was 29-year-old Derek Helmke of Sylvania, Ohio. He and his father, Thomas, had recently bought the inventory of Hollywood's Collectors Book Store at auction, and on this weekend he was displaying its western-related posters, press books and publicity material -- some going back to the silent era -- in Kenton while his father was selling the sci-fi and horror material at Monster Bash in Butler, Pa. He had learned about Gene Autry Days from a flier. At the end of the first day, Helmke had sold only a press book for a Randolph Scott movie and a copy of the first Roy Rogers comic books.
Enduring interest
