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A COLUMNISTS.COM SPECIAL SECTION |
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(The Kid) KLEMPNAUER |
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Rides Again! |
 SUNSET CARSON protects saloon girl Linda Stirling in "Santa Fe Saddlemates" (1945). Since Carson was 6 foot 6, she must have been standing on Alan Ladd's shoulders. |
How a small town lad got
hooked on 'B' westerns
of TheColumnists.com
"Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. From out of the past come the thundering hoof beats of the great horse Cactus . . ."
Cactus?
Whoa thar, podnuh. Shouldn’t that be "great horse SILVER," as in "The Lone Ranger rides again?"
Not if your B-Western movie idol as a kid in the 1940s was Sunset Carson, whose mount was called Cactus. And Oklahoma-born and Texas-raised Sunset was my favorite, although some 60 years later I haven't the faintest notion why.
Sunset stood tall in the saddle. Grounded, he stood even taller in his boots at 6-6. Despite his macho-deficient birth moniker (Winifred Maurice "Michael" Harrison), Sunset had been a real cowboy--a champion rodeo rider when purportedly discovered by another movie cowboy hero of a generation earlier, Tom Mix.
Back in the (G)olden Days, hundreds of youngsters in my hometown of Santa Cruz, Calif., would mosey down to the Santa Cruz Theater every Saturday afternoon to watch their favorite B-Western stars beat up the villains or send them to Boot Hill. Life was simpler then, at least as remembered in this child's eyes vintage 1946-48. A clear distinction existed between right and wrong. The good guys were never confused with the bad guys.
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defunct, where Lenny the Kid spent his Saturday matinees. At right, Lenny the Kid himself, armed with two cap guns. Didn't anybody tell him only dudes carried two guns? |
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There were no gray areas at the Saturday matinee.
Standing just about as tall in my memory were The Durango Kid (real name Charles Starrett) and Johnny Mack Brown (his real name), both former Saturday afternoon heroes of a different breed. Starrett played football at Dartmouth College and Brown at the University of Alabama. Starrett kicked off his movie career while still in college as an extra in a 1926 film, "The Quarterback." Brown played halfback on a University of Alabama team that became the 1926 NCAA Division I champ. An All-American, he was named Rose Bowl MVP after the Crimson Tide defeated the favored Washington Huskies. Hollywood roped him in after his picture appeared on a Wheaties "Breakfast of Champions" cereal box.
From gridiron star to B-Western movie star . . . Sound familiar, Pilgrim? Marion Michael Morrison, who played football at the University of Southern California until an injury shortened his career, first gained fame in B-Westerns and eventually graduated to grade A-Oaters. You all probably remember him as The Duke (aka John Wayne).
Before April 1946, when my parents pulled up stakes and headed West across the wide Missouri to Californy, I hadn't been much of an Ol' West movie fan. No theater was located near my Kansas City neighborhood. Besides, after I entered kindergarten in 1941 my early childhood fantasy life consisted of battling the Axis as an imaginary stand-in for Bucky, the teen-aged sidekick of comic book hero Captain America. But I do remember listening to Tom Mix on radio after school during the war years. Well, not the real Tom Mix. He was killed in 1940 in an auto accident. But his name and fame--he was the first real Western film star--outlived him.
We first settled in California's high desert country, more precisely in Herlong, about 50 miles from Reno. Every Saturday afternoon youngsters would catch the latest Oater at our lone movie house, and that's when I caught the cowboy bug. When I jauntily sauntered out the door after a Saturday matinee, with my holstered six-shooters (cap guns) slung low on my hips, I WAS Sunset or Durango or Johnny Mack, ready to slap leather with any low-down varmint that dared cross my trail.
It cost a dime for a kid to attend a Herlong matinee. With a quarter in my pocket I not only paid for my ticket but also bought a Coke, a Baby Ruth and Planters Peanuts. In terms of 2006 dollars, that was like holding up a stagecoach that had nobody riding shotgun. Ten cents then is equivalent to about $1.08 now. Try getting into a movie or buying a soft drink or a candy bar or a bag of nuts for a dollar and pennies today.
My family went thataway that September to homestead permanently in Santa Cruz, and I turned into an all-around cowboy buff. The most popular B-Western movie heroes also starred in other media: radio, comic books and/or newspaper comic strips, and, later, TV. My radio favorite was The Lone Ranger, followed by The Cisco Kid; my comics favorite was Red Ryder. I was never much of a fan of the leading cowboy stars of the day: Gene Autry, William Boyd (Hopalong Cassidy), and Roy "King of the Cowboys" Rogers, whatever their milieu.
In 1947, The Lone Ranger radio show, sponsored by Cheerios, ran a contest for kids to guess the name of a real Old West town. As I recall, a kid mailed in his name and phone number, probably accompanied by a cereal box top, to get on the call list. I knew right off that the city was Cheyenne, Wyo. One guess per week was allowed, and the sponsors telephoned house to house until someone answered. But nobody had the answer; this is, nobody had the answer until my family journeyed back to Kansas City that fall for a visit. Ironically--or coincidentally--our train made a stopover in Cheyenne, and I knew my guess was right. As I was sitting in my grandparents' house listening to The Lone Ranger, some kid guessed Cheyenne. I just knew our phone in California had been ringing off the hook, but no one was at home to pick it up. So they called the kid who won. (Yeah, right, and guess the name of the dreamer who plays the California lottery every week.)
About that same time, Cheerios also sponsored a premium on the back of its boxes: little cut-out cardboard buildings to set up on a four-section paper layout of the Lone Ranger’s "Frontier Town." I got all four sections--you had to send in for them for a dime or a quarter and a Cheerios box top. But I never ate enough Cheerios to get all the buildings. (I liked Kix better.) A couple of years ago, a completed Frontier Town sold for about $3,000.
What I remember most about The Cisco Kid, "the Robin Hood of the Old West," was sidekick Pancho (most Western stars had a sidekick) warning, if I remember it correctly, "Cisco, the sheriff, he is getting closer." And Cisco urging, "Ride, Pancho, ride, vamanos!"
I think it was the BB gun that drew me to Red Ryder. My dad would never get me one, but when my son was about 10, I bought one of the Daisy-manufactured guns for him at Christmas. That was about 25 years ago, and I filled a lot more targets with lead poisoning in our backyard than my son ever did. Cowboys didn’t stand so tall in popularity in the early 1980s as they did in the ‘40s. We still have the BB gun.
As for comic books, I restarted the collection that I left in Kansas City when we first went West. I’d go downtown to the United Cigar Store, which offered the biggest comics selection in Santa Cruz, and buy as many as my allowance would allow. But the number of B-Western cowboys now featured in comic books outgrew my weekly allowance, and I finally gave up in having them all.
By the time TV arrived in Santa Cruz in the spring of 1953, I was 16 and a junior in high school and B-Western cowboys had long been playing second fiddle to sports. But I do maintain an affinity for TV’s Range Rider (Jock Mahoney), probably because he was so athletic.
A couple of weeks ago I rented the last picture made by Sunset Carson, "Sunset Carson Rides Again," from NetFlix. Filmed in 16mm in 1947 and released theatrically in 35mm Cinecolor, it was blurry and the color was so faded it looked like a 50-year-old color photograph taken by a Brownie camera. Moreover, Sunset, whose screen career was short-lived, was a bad actor. A really bad actor, literally and, allegedly, figuratively.
I only watched Sunset talk through his lines about 20 minutes before turning off the DVD player and switching on the TV to baseball. If I had learned a lesson, it was to let childhood memories lie undisturbed. They may not be so sweet as you remember them.
In signing off this column, I should like to join Roy Rogers (real name Leonard Slye) in wishing "Happy trails to you, until we meet again" . . . as TheColumnists.com rides off into the sunset for vacation. But as that other singing cowboy, Gene Autry, might add, "We'll be back in the saddle again come May 14."
Y'all come back and see us, hear!
©2007 by Len Klempnauer. The photo from "Santa Fe Saddlemates" is courtesy of Republic Pictures. The photo of the Santa Cruz Theater is courtesy of the author. The photo of Lenny the Kid is courtesy of the Santa Cruz County Sheriff's Office, who loaned us the wanted poster where it originally appeared. The logo cartoon for Lenny the Kid is an altered version of a cartoon from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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