After 80 Years, Stuart Hamblen’s Luck Is Still Holding : Songwriter Fulfilled Early Dream--and More

Call it impulse, call it inspiration. Whatever the word, Stuart Hamblen has relied on the magical property throughout his 80 years.

It struck in 1932 in Hollywood when Hamblen, a cowboy singer new to town, fell for a woman he watched step off a bus. Hamblen swore he’d marry her and, although she refused for almost a year to date him, last April Stuart and Suzy Hamblen celebrated 55 years of marriage.

It struck again in 1945 when Hamblen put one of his racehorses on a plane and flew him to Bay Meadows in Northern California for a stakes race. El Lobo, the first racehorse to be shipped by air, won and paid $38 for each $2 bet.

Inspiration worked in a big way in the Christmas season of 1954, when Hamblen recorded and speeded up a song to give the illusion that elves were singing. The result, “Open Up Your Heart and Let the Sunshine In,” spent 21 weeks on Billboard’s Top-40 chart, rising as high as No. 8.

It struck again in 1955 when, on a hunting trip, he came across a dead miner in a shack. Deeply moved, Hamblen sat on a log and wrote “This Ole House,” which became a hit for Rosemary Clooney that year and later a music industry standard.

Hamblen, who lives in Canyon Country, has moved back and forth between careers as a singer, songwriter, movie stunt man, radio personality and trainer and breeder of horses. But the years are taking their toll, forcing him to give up a cherished tradition.

For the past 9 years Hamblen and his family have ridden their Peruvian paso horses in the Hollywood Christmas Parade and the Rose Parade. Viewers will remember the horses by their unusual pace, or paso . But Monday’s Rose Parade will be Hamblen’s last. In December he rode in his final Hollywood Christmas Parade.

“Just gettin’ too old for it,” he said.

Hamblen’s family--there are two daughters, seven grandchildren and two great-grandchildren--will continue the parade tradition.

Stuart and Suzy first heard of the Peruvians while on their honeymoon in 1933.

“We went to New Mexico and rounded up 28 wild horses,” remembers Suzy, also 80.

They were impressed by the exceptionally level gait of one of the ponies.

“You could hold a cocktail glass in your hand and ride 20 miles an hour and not spill a drop,” Stuart said.

He learned that the horse was descended from a breed in Peru but did not pursue his interest. Instead, Hamblen went on to breed and train thoroughbreds for 30 years.

“Then my eyes went bad,” he said. “I couldn’t see my horses clear enough when they ran.”

Suzy wanted to take up the breeding of Peruvian pasos , and Stuart said they should go to the source for stock. The couple traveled to Peru in 1975, buying two mares and a colt.

“I must have looked at 400 or 500 horses,” Hamblen said. “That clumsy colt was the best of the bunch.”

He paid $5,000 for AEV Oro Negro, plus $2,500 to ship him to California. The AEV stands for the breeder, Alfredo E. Vargas. AEV Oro Negro became one of the breed’s most decorated U.S. champion show horses, and is bred to 12 to 15 mares a year at $3,000 apiece.

Despite Hamblen’s successes with horses, his great love is songwriting. He said he was introduced to music as a child by black farmhands in the cotton fields of Texas. His father was a preacher whose six children worked summers on farms.

“I never will forget this one singer,” Hamblen said. “He was a bass. He used to pick half my row and leave it there for me so I could keep up and listen to them sing.”

Many of Hamblen’s songs reflect the gospel influence of his youth. He cannot write music, but Suzy can. She transcribes the songs as he sings them. His best known song, perhaps, is about a man facing death. It begins:

This ole house once knew my children

This ole house once knew my wife

This old house was home and comfort as we fought the storms of life.

Although the subject is mortality, the spirit of the refrain is jaunty:

Ain’t gonna need this house no longer,

Ain’t gonna need this house no more,

Ain’t got time to fix the shingles,

Ain’t got time to fix the floor.

Ain’t got time to oil the hinges,

Or mend the window panes,

Ain’t gonna need this house no longer,

I’m gettin’ ready to meet the saints.

“See that Cadillac out there,” Hamblen said on recent afternoon. “ ‘This Ole House’ was a hit again in England last year. We got a $25,000 royalty check and bought a Cadillac.”

Another of his popular songs was the hymn-like “It Is No Secret What God Can Do.” Hamblen also has dozens of homespun stories about faith and the evidence of God’s hand in the lives of common folk. He combined the songs and stories into “Cowboy Church of the Air,” a syndicated radio show that was broadcast locally on KLAC-AM for 15 years. Although the show has been off the air for several years, syndicator Charles Michelson plans to revive it.

“We’ve been putting episodes together from the old tapes, and we hope to market it early in 1989,” said Michelson, whose syndicated “Drama Hour” show airs locally at 9 p.m 7 days a weeks on KNX-AM.

Hamblen said he pursued a career in music at the suggestion of Jimmie Rodgers, the early cowboy singer who introduced yodeling to popular country music.

“He heard me sing in Abilene,” Hamblen said. “He told me to go to the Victor Talking Machine Co. in Camden, New Jersey, and get them to record me, because you couldn’t make a living singing in Texas. So I bought a Model T--it cost me $36--and drove there. That car had one tire that the tube in it was nothing but a patch.”

The year was 1928. Hamblen cut four songs for the forerunner of RCA records and earned $600. He used the money to travel to Los Angeles, where he got a job on a radio show called “The Beverly Hillbillies.”

“They were a bunch of people who were supposed to come down at night out of the hills above Beverly Hills to sing, and people believed it, too,” Hamblen said. “It was in front of a live audience. We put on hillbilly clothes and had bare feet. I was called Dave Donner, a survivor of the Donner Party.”

Over the years there were other radio shows, “Stuart Hamblen’s Lucky Stars” and “King Cowboy” among them. He also worked as a heavy and stunt rider in Westerns and trained his own thoroughbreds. In the 1940s, Hamblen hit pay dirt when El Lobo became a multiple stakes winner. But he says money ran through his hands like water.

“I had prayed for Stuart for years because he was a hard-drinking, hard-gambling playboy,” Suzy said.

She recounted the time her husband came home drunk and she went through his pockets while he slept it off.

“There was $10,000 in there,” she said. “I took it and spent it on a piano and furniture because I knew he wouldn’t be able to hang onto it.”

Suzy had been attending revival meetings run by a young evangelist named Billy Graham. She persuaded Stuart to come.

“A lot of these other guys are phony as $3 bills, but Billy Graham is for real,” Stuart said. “He was preaching and I was sitting in the front row. He said, ‘Unless you stop sinning and accept Jesus Christ into your life, you’re going to die,’ and he was looking straight at me. The next night I went back and sat on the other side of the audience and he did the same thing.”

Hamblen said he became a born-again Christian and gave up those hard-drinking, hard-gambling, playboy ways. He ran as the Prohibition Party’s candidate for president in 1952 and was fired from a radio show for refusing to read a beer commercial.

A large, unhurried man with a deadpan manner, Hamblen said the abrupt turnaround was no big deal.

“You leave one thing and go on to something else,” he said.

A lifetime hunter, Hamblen made headlines in 1963 when he and his bloodhounds tracked a panther that had escaped from the Jungleland amusement park in Thousand Oaks. Hamblen found the animal in a crawl space underneath a building and shot it as it charged.

In 1976 he received a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame.

The couple moved from the Hollywood Hills to Canyon Country 9 years ago, selling the 7 1/2-acre former Errol Flynn estate where they had lived for 21 years. Their living room wall is covered with mementos such as gold records and the paper bag on which Hamblen wrote the lyrics of “This Ole House.”

“I’ve been lucky,” he said. “I decided when I was a kid I wanted to be a songwriter. I’ve done that and a lot more.”