Rhymin’ Rex rides into the sunset

By Brian Ojanpa
The Free Press

MANKATO Sat, May 17 2008

— Even back in 1987, when he was 53, Mankato tire dealer-turned-sage Rex Macbeth was drawing a bead on his own mortality.
“You wonder how people will remember you after you croak,” he said to a visitor one day. “I think of myself as a philosopher. I think I have the ability to sift through the garbage, to separate the wheat from the trash.”
Pithy aphorisms and homespun poetry were his fortes, and Rhymin’ Rex, the bard of the steel-belted radial, cranked out radio and TV ads that became mythic.
He also harbored a passion for the Old West, it’s history and firearms in particular. So it’s only fitting his funeral Monday will include guys in cowboy garb firing a 40-round salute.
Macbeth, who died Friday at 71 of a rare blood disorder that developed into leukemia, wanted to go out with guns blazing.
“It was his wish,” friend Arlen Skorr said. “He told me, ‘This will be my last performance.’”
Macbeth and his wife, Rosie, operated R&R Tire Shop until turning it over to their children several years ago.
That gave Macbeth more rein to pursue his Old West gun passion. He opened a vintage gun shop several years ago on North Mankato’s main drag and built sales through his Web site.
“Rex didn’t want to die right now,” Skorr says. “He said, ‘I’ve got everything running just right now on the Internet.’”
Skorr says a direly ill Macbeth called last week to talk guns. When Skorr registered his surprise, the droll Macbeth set him straight.
“I was scheduled to die this week,” Macbeth said. “But it’s been rescheduled until next week.”
Macbeth painstakingly planned his funeral.
“Right down to the dress I’d wear,” says his wife, who acknowledges that her husband’s emotions ran the gamut after he was diagnosed in January.
Fear? Rage? Resignation?
“All of the above,” she says.
Not to mention suicide. She says that’s the tack he planned to take, even deciding upon the gun to use, then decided against it in deference to the feelings of others.
Macbeth was head honcho for a local group of cowboy vintage gun-shooting enthusiasts, but was more interested in the guns’ history and lore than the firearms themselves.
“He had a lot of different interests,” says fellow Old West aficionado Ross Arneson, who received a phone call from Macbeth two weeks ago.
“He wanted to talk about his funeral,” Arneson says. “It’s kind of uncomfortable talking to a guy about that sort of thing, but that’s Rex. That’s what he wanted to do.”
Friend Ron Geppert says Macbeth reminded him of cowboy philosopher Will Rogers.
“He always had a good wit that made sense about mankind. He’d say something and you’d think, ‘Yeah. That makes sense. That’s the way it is,’” Geppert says.
“And that voice. I don’t think anyone in Mankato doesn’t recognize that voice.”
In the 1980s, Macbeth tire shop ads were ubiquitous on local radio and TV. They always featured him dishing out a riff — sometimes in rhyme, sometimes not — that typically had nothing to do with tires, but everything to do with turning him into a Mankato icon.
One ad:
“Most bosses figure that without them, employees would be on welfare. Most employees figure that without them, their bosses would be on Jim Beam.”
If he had a signature ad, it might have been the one that showed him introducing each employee in his family-affair tire store (“... and this is my young’un Jessica. She’s real good at ciphering’ and arithmetic.”)
The ad ended with Macbeth looking out the door.
“I gotta leave ya now cuz I see a customer headed this way ...”
Pause. Stare into camera.
“... or maybe it’s just another relative lookin’ for work.”
Last spring, Macbeth wrote a poem for a friend’s birthday gathering in St. Peter. The time came for Macbeth to recite it, but he was nowhere to be found.
Geppert says Macbeth, weakened by his disease, was napping in his van.
“He came in, read the poem, and went right back to his nap. He just wasn’t feeling well,” Geppert says.
Macbeth, at his children’s request, did his final radio ad in June. To honor their father, they’re planning to start rebroadcasting his old ads in the near future.
Geppert says Macbeth made one thing clear: His funeral was going to be decidedly short on solemnity.
“He said, ‘We’re gonna have a real good time at my funeral,’ so that’s what were going to do. We’re going to celebrate his life.
“I have the utmost respect for that man. I want to be just like him when I grow up.”

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