"I thought I'd gone to heaven, because I grew up watching Roy and Gene Autry"
About this Quote
The name-drop is doing real work. Roy Rogers and Gene Autry weren’t just stars; they were a factory of American innocence, the clean-cut, morally legible West packaged for postwar TV. By invoking them, Majors anchors himself in a lineage of uncomplicated heroism - the kind he’d later embody in roles like The Six Million Dollar Man. It’s also a quiet generational flag: he’s telling you he came up when mass media still felt communal, when the boundary between living room and studio lot seemed magical rather than transactional.
Subtext: proximity to idols is the currency of legitimacy. Majors positions his own arrival in the industry as a kind of pilgrimage, a moment where the distance between spectator and spectacle collapses. The “heaven” line isn’t theology; it’s brand language for a time when Hollywood sold not just stories but an imagined America, and being allowed inside the machine felt like entering the promised land.
Quote Details
| Topic | Nostalgia |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Majors, Lee. (2026, January 15). I thought I'd gone to heaven, because I grew up watching Roy and Gene Autry. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-thought-id-gone-to-heaven-because-i-grew-up-104632/
Chicago Style
Majors, Lee. "I thought I'd gone to heaven, because I grew up watching Roy and Gene Autry." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-thought-id-gone-to-heaven-because-i-grew-up-104632/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I thought I'd gone to heaven, because I grew up watching Roy and Gene Autry." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-thought-id-gone-to-heaven-because-i-grew-up-104632/. Accessed 19 Feb. 2026.



