Loveland itself felt like a little covered wagon encampment made suburbia. At the edge of town were the Rockies, purple and huge and intimidating.
Johnny returned to his story. He took me back, not just to the day in 1984 when he saw Dean on TV, but to the 1950s when they first met. Memories just flooded back to him. Suddenly, it was 1959 and ,he was a kid with an idea, as he put it, about playing some music.
In 1959, Johnny had had his spinal operation and his folks bought him a cheap guitar to help him pass the time while he was getting better. He always had a desire to get into the music business and he discovered he could pick out a few chords and had the ability to take what was in his mind, as he said, and put it into words and music. The first two songs he wrote were "Lynda Lea" and "Gonna Find a Girl." Eventually, "Lynda Lea" did pretty well in Japan, Johnny said.
Johnny hooked up with another kid, a guy from his home state of Nebraska named Ted Lummus. Ted was a drummer. They got to jamming together and they got a big old bulky tape recorder and went down in the washroom of Ted's parents' motel and laid two songs down on tape. You got a good echo effect down in the washroom and Ted's parents were OK about them doing it.
Around that time Johnny read in the Recorder Herald that there was a Capitol recording artist vacationing at Estes Park, at the Harmony Guest Ranch.
"Let's take these two songs up to him and see what he thinks," he said to Ted.
"We won't get near him."
"Well, we never will know 'less we try," Johnny said.
Johnny and Ted loaded up the old tape recorder and drove up to the Harmony Guest Ranch, where they saw Dean out by the pool with a couple of ladies. So Johnny walked right up to him and told him who he was.
"I've got a couple of songs here. Would you listen to them?" Johnny asked Dean, bold as brass.
Johnny figured at that point Dean would say get lost. But Dean just told one of the girls to go get an extension cord for the tape recorder.
After listening, Dean said, "I like those songs. I'd like to maybe record one."
Jesus, Johnny thought to himself. I don't want to be a song-writer. I want to sing my own songs. I want some of that spotlight. But what could he say?
"Well, yeah, sure," Johnny said to Dean.
On Dean's advice, Johnny and Ted cut a demo. Dean said he would take it out to his manager in Hollywood, and a few weeks later, Johnny got a call from Dean; he was back in Estes Park and he had good news. Johnny went up, Dean grabbed him by the hand and smiled.
"Johnny, I want you to know you're going to be recording for Capitol and you're going to have the same manager I've got."
Ted got dumped, but, well, that was the way these things went.
Needless to say, a young kid like Johnny from nowhere, he was out-of-his-mind excited. Soon after, Roy Eberharder, Dean's manager, flew in to meet with John and his folks and he signed John up. That was October. In November, Johnny went on out to California and signed with Capitol.
Dean was living out in Canoga Park with Roy Eberharder and Mrs. Eberharder and their son, Dale. It was one of Shirley Temple's older houses that she rented out and it was on a hillside overlooking Canoga. Johnny shared Dean's room with him.
Sometimes Johnny found himself alone in the evenings. Other times he'd be gone on the road and Dean'd be there by himself. Most of the time, though, they were both there together.
They never went around as a pair. The only time they were together was at the house, in the evenings mostly. They'd just lounge around, go out to play badminton, go down to Canoga Park, kick some dust. There wasn't much to do.
Out in California, as Johnny recalled, things were going pretty well for both of them, though they never really discussed each other's careers. One evening, Dean and Johnny were at the house. Johnny was thinking about his work, figuring he was getting on OK. He didn't think it was a bad life. Dean was crazy upset, though.
"I'm never going to get any work if I keep this guy as manager. I don't know about you, but I'm getting out on my own." he said.
Johnny told Dean he was nuts. Almost the next day, Dean disappeared. Johnny, who sometimes didn't see him for days anyway, didn't give it much thought for a while. Then he began to wonder. He went and found Roy Eberharder.
"Where's Dean?" Johnny asked.
"The SOB thinks he can do better for himself," said Roy.
Johnny let it drop. He was busy trying to keep his own head above water, tryiug to do his own thing.
It was the latter part of 1960 when Dean just disappeared. He wasn't a hundred percent sure of the date. Most records showed that Dean actually left around 1962.
In the house in Loveland, Johnny broke off his story. He was a self-possessed man, damaged by disappointment and lost chances, maybe, but with a humorous, long-suffering look and a great talent for storytelling. From the time I met Johnny Rosenburg and heard his stories about how he met up with Dean Reed after a quarter of a century and how Dean came home again to Colorado, I could never get the rhythms of Johnny's speech out of my head.
"This is Mona," Johnny said, as a handsome woman in jeans came through the screen door carrying a brown paper bag full of groceries.
She had a steady blue gaze and a face out of a Dorothea Lange photograph. Mona was one of twelve children. She had worked three jobs since Johnny's illness and now their eldest girl, Pamela, was in college. You knew that at the Rosenburg house Mona ran things even if she always deferred to her husband. We shook hands and Mona went to put up some coffee in what she and Johnny referred to as the 'world's loudest coffee pot'. Mona usually called him John, which was his true Christian name. When the coffee was ready, John took a cup from Mona and returned to the story of his time in Hollywood.
He crossed his foot over his leg and rested a scrapbook on it. He opened the brittle pages. There were some publicity stills of Johnny Rose, which had been his professional name. He had been as handsome as Dean in his way; Johnny had looked like a young Steve McQueen. But after Dean left Hollywood for Chile, things didn't go right for Johnny. He had just signed the seven-year contract with Capitol and was back in Loveland on a visit to his folks, when Roy Eberharder called him on the phone.
"Johnny, I got bad news for you. Capitol dropped you," Roy said.
"What?!" Johnny couldn't believe his ears.
"Well, they've got a new policy. If you don't make it big in the first record, that's it."
Johnny stopped his story to take some coffee from Mona. Then he shrugged some and said there was nothing to explain why he was dropped so suddenly from the music business in the early 1960s. He'd been doing OK; he'd won a big talent contest in New Orleans; he had even played Ocean City Park in California, where he did a show with Dirty Stevens.
"She had a big hit out at that time called 'Tan Shoes and Pink Shoelaces'. Do you remember her?" Johnny asked.
I tried very hard to remember because it seemed so important to him.
"I can't understand why things turned out for Dean and me the way they did," he said.
I asked what he thought the reason was.
"You know, it's really hard to say. I don't know. I don't understand that anymore than I understand why I was treated the way I was," Johnny said. "You know, the people that were judges on that panel for that contest, people who are supposed to be able to identify talent when they see it, they picked me and then they didn't want to work with me. There I was on Capitol along with Dean, I had songs that were doing quite well. I don't know why, all of a sudden, I was no longer around."
I said, "Maybe the business was too mean for you."
"Maybe," he said. "Maybe you had to be mean. Or very sold on yourself, because that's what Dean was. He wasn't doing that great back then. He had to pay his own way to South America, where he heard he had a hit with 'Our Summer Romance'. But nobody was sold on Dean more than Dean himself. You know that was it. I mean Dean knew some day, some way, he was going to be a hit. He knew he was going to be a hit one way or the other. I hoped I would be a hit," Johnny said, "but hope wasn't enough."