Gene Autry

"NOTHING seems as natural," Gene Autry once said, "as holding a guitar in my hand and having a tune to sing." The Singing Cowboy certainly spent a considerable amount of time hefting that instrument: The hundreds of songs he wrote and recorded not only made him a screen hero, they also established him as a musical and radio superstar.

IF you think of Gene Autry as just that guy on a horse playing guitar and singing, an impressive new exhibition at the Autry National Center's Museum of the American West is determined to change your mind. Imposingly titled "Gene Autry and the Twentieth-Century West: The Centennial Exhibition, 1907-2007," this show, which opens Friday in Griffith Park and runs through Jan. 13, reveals Autry as someone who accomplished so much in so many areas it practically makes your head spin.

What's a singing cowboy without a ridge to call his own? That question is pending before the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, a government agency that will almost certainly deem a hitherto nameless, chaparral-studded chunk of Los Angeles topography "Gene Autry Ridge."

During last weekend's Gene Autry Days festival here, a prominently displayed photograph showed the singing-cowboy movie star standing outside a local factory, surrounded by the proud employees. It was taken on Aug. 8, 1938 -- famously remembered by locals as the day Autry came to pay his respects to this small city in northwestern Ohio, about 75 miles south of Toledo. Kenton Hardware Co.

His buddies had taken over all the television sets. It was game day in the NFL, and Michael Turner was scrambling to keep up with his Angels. His only option was his computer. He was hunched over the screen, reading that Vladimir Guerrero had put the ball in play, watching an arc that represented the ball flying from home plate toward center field. "I started yelling, 'Drop, drop, drop!' " Turner said. "Finally, it did." Guerrero had gotten the game-winning hit. The Angels had vanquished the Boston Red Sox. Turner could go to sleep with a smile on his face.

If Dodgers owners Frank and Jamie McCourt were privately outraged at Arte Moreno's gall in renaming his Orange County team the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim and shoving it in their face with billboards far beyond the Orange curtain, the thread of disenchantment stretches back to the beginning of major league baseball in Southern California. According to newspaper and book accounts supported by personal recollections and interviews, the late Walter O'Malley, who moved his storied team from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1958, never wanted an American League team in what he regarded as his new, private and lucrative territory or believed the AL had legal rights to it. Peter O'Malley, Walter's son, denies those accounts, but there is no denying that Los Angeles fans also failed to show much interest in the new Los Angeles team, which retained the familiar name of the Pacific Coast League Angels but knew from the start it would have to find a home of its own. Born out of baseball's first expansion, the Angels moved from the minor league facility that was Wrigley Field in 1961 to the new Dodger Stadium as tenants in 1962 and ultimately to their own Anaheim park in 1966.

House Peters Jr., 92, a television actor who became the original Mr. Clean on Procter & Gamble's commercials for household cleaners, died Wednesday of pneumonia at the Motion Picture and Television Fund Hospital in Los Angeles, said his son, Jon Peters. The elder Peters' most memorable role came as Mr. Clean, a muscular man with a bald head, a hoop earring and a no-nonsense attitude toward dirt and grime. From the late 1950s and into the early '60s, Peters helped advertise the household cleaner with the trademark jingle "Mr. Clean, Mr. Clean."

Grammy nods: Brenda Lee, Tom Paxton, Hank Jones, the Blind Boys of Alabama, the Four Tops, Gene Autry and Dean Martin have been selected to receive lifetime achievement awards at the Grammy Awards in February.

Re: "Yoga mats in the outfield," Aug. 3: You brought back memories for me of days gone by, as the Angels and I back in the 1950s practiced yoga together at the request of Gene Autry and commissioned by the city of Palm Springs. The Angels and I were 50 years ahead of our time in the Asiatic studies of yoga. Many thanks for your interest. Jean Farrar Palm Springs