Trivia: Redheaded leading man Robert Horton attended UCLA, served in the Coast Guard during World War II, and acted in California-based stage productions before making his entree into films in 1951. Horton's television career started off on a high note in 1955, when he was cast in the weekly-TV version of King's Row as Drake McHugh (the role essayed by Ronald Reagan in the 1942 film version). The series barely lasted three months, but better things were on the horizon: in 1957, Horton was hired to play frontier scout Flint McCullough in Wagon Train, which became the highest-rated western on TV. Horton remained with Wagon Train until 1962. He then did some more stage work before embarking on his third series, 1965's The Man Called Shenandoah. When this one-season wonder ran its course, Horton toured the dinner-theatre circuit, then in 1982 accepted a major role on the popular daytime soap opera As the World Turns. Horton continued acting until the late 1980s. He died in 2016, at age 91.

Trivia: Rough-edged character actor Morgan Woodward is the son of a Texas physician. Specializing in Westerns, the 6'3" Woodward has been seen in scores of big-screen oaters, and in 1956 held down the semi-regular role of Shotgun Gibbs in the TV series The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. He has also made quite a few non-Western appearances on such video weeklies as Star Trek and The A-Team. In his spare time, Morgan Woodward is a licensed pilot.

Trivia: Tough-talking American character actor Perry Lopez played "ethnic" roles from the time of his his stage debut in the early 1950s. Signed to a Warner Bros. contract in 1955, Lopez lent support to such studio projects as Mister Roberts (1955), The McConnell Story (1956) and The Violent Road (1958). He is best remembered as police officer Lou Escobar in Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974). Perry Lopez reprised this uniformed character (now promoted to captain) in the 1990 Chinatown sequel The Two Jakes. Lopez died of lung cancer in February 2008.

Trivia: Tall, stony-faced, white-maned Frank Gerstle is most familiar to the baby-boomer generation for his many TV commercial appearances. In films from 1949 through 1967, Gerstle was generally cast as military officers, no-nonsense doctors and plainclothes detectives. His screen roles include Dr. MacDonald in DOA (1949), "machine" politician Dave Dietz in Slightly Scarlet (1954) and the district attorney in I Mobster (1959). Some of his more sizeable film assignments could be found in the realm of science fiction, e.g. Killers From Space (1953), The Magnetic Monster (1953) and Wasp Woman (1960). A prolific voiceover artist, Frank Gerstle pitched dozens of products in hundreds of TV and radio ads, and was a semi-regular on the 1961 prime-time cartoon series Calvin and the Colonel.

Trivia: Wisconsin-born actor Willard Waterman moved to Chicago in 1936, where he became a busy freelance radio actor. In 1945, he played the lead in the radio sitcom Those Websters, which led to his resettling in Hollywood. Five years later, he was chosen to replace Harold Peary on the long-running comedy series The Great Gildersleeve, a character he carried over to television in 1955. He later played featured roles in a number of TV sitcoms including Dennis the Menace. Willard Waterman's film credits include the roles of pompous Claude Upson in Auntie Mame (1958) and philandering executive Vanderhoff in Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960).

Trivia: American actor Ward Bond was a football player at the University of Southern California when, together with teammate and lifelong chum John Wayne, he was hired for extra work in the silent film Salute (1928), directed by John Ford. Both Bond and Wayne continued in films, but it was Wayne who ascended to stardom, while Bond would have to be content with bit roles and character parts throughout the 1930s. Mostly playing traffic cops, bus drivers and western heavies, Bond began getting better breaks after a showy role as the murderous Cass in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Ford cast Bond in important roles all through the 1940s, usually contriving to include at least one scene per picture in which the camera would favor Bond's rather sizable posterior; it was an "inside" joke which delighted everyone on the set but Bond. A starring role in Ford's Wagonmaster (1950) led, somewhat indirectly, to Bond's most lasting professional achievement: His continuing part as trailmaster Seth Adams on the extremely popular NBC TV western, Wagon Train. No longer supporting anyone, Bond exerted considerable creative control over the series from its 1957 debut onward, even seeing to it that his old mentor John Ford would direct one episode in which John Wayne had a bit role, billed under his real name, Marion Michael Morrison. Finally achieving the wide popularity that had eluded him during his screen career, Bond stayed with Wagon Train for three years, during which time he became as famous for his offscreen clashes with his supporting cast and his ultra-conservative politics as he was for his acting. Wagon Train was still NBC's Number One series when, in November of 1960, Bond unexpectedly suffered a heart attack and died while taking a shower.

Trivia: Robert Fuller spent his first decade in show business trying his best to avoid performing. After his film debut in 1952's Above and Beyond, Fuller studied acting with Sanford Meisner at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse but never exhibited any real dedication. He tried to become a dancer but gave that up as well, determining that dancing was "sissified." Fuller rose to nominal stardom fairly rapidly in the role of Jess Harper on the popular TV western Laramie (1959-63). Once he found his niche in cowboy attire, he stuck at it in another series, Wagon Train, turning down virtually all offers for "contemporary" roles. When westerns began dying out on television in the late 1960s, Fuller worked as a voiceover actor in commercials, earning some $65,000 per year (a tidy sum in 1969). On the strength of his performance in the Burt Topper-directed motorcycle flick The Hard Ride, Fuller was cast by producer Jack Webb as chief paramedic Kelly Brackett on the weekly TVer Emergency, which ran from 1972 through 1977. In 1994, Robert Fuller was one of several former TV western stars who showed up in cameo roles in the Mel Gibson movie vehicle Maverick.