Trivia: Born Leonard Slye, Rogers moved to California as a migratory fruit picker in 1929. He formed a singing duo with a cousin, later changing his name to Dick Weston and forming a singing group, the Sons of the Pioneers; the group became successful, and appeared on Los Angeles radio and later in films. In 1935 he began appearing in bit roles in Westerns onscreen; by the early '40s Rogers had succeeded Gene Autry as "King of the Cowboys." His success was aided by the fact that Autry went to war and Rogers didn't; he also copied Autry's singing cowboy formula and wore clothes that went one better than Autry's ostentatiously fancy duds. Through the early '50s he starred in dozens of Westerns, often accompanied by his horse, Trigger (billed "the smartest horse in the movies"), and his sidekick, Gabby Hayes; his female lead was often Dale Evans, whom he married in 1947. From 1951-57 he starred in the TV series "The Roy Rogers Show." Meanwhile, he formed a chain of enterprises in the '50s; eventually this combination (a TV production company, Western products distributor/manufacturers, real estate interests, cattle, thoroughbred horses, rodeo shows, and a restaurant chain) was worth over $100 million.

Trivia: Virtually the prototype of all grizzled old-codger western sidekicks, George "Gabby" Hayes professed in real life to hate westerns, complaining that they all looked and sounded alike. For his first few decades in show business, he appeared in everything but westerns, including travelling stock companies, vaudeville, and musical comedy. He began appearing in films in 1928, just in time to benefit from the talkie explosion. In contrast to his later unshaven, toothless screen persona, George Hayes (not yet Gabby) frequently showed up in clean-faced, well groomed articulate characterizations, sometimes as the villain. In 1933 he appeared in several of the Lone Star westerns featuring young John Wayne, alternating between heavies and comedy roles. Wayne is among the many cowboy stars who has credited Hayes with giving them valuable acting tips in their formative days. In 1935, Hayes replaced an ailing Al St. John in a supporting role in the first Hopalong Cassidy film, costarring with William Boyd; Hayes' character died halfway through this film, but audience response was so strong that he was later brought back into the Hoppy series as a regular. It was while sidekicking for Roy Rogers at Republic that Hayes, who by now never appeared in pictures with his store-bought teeth, earned the soubriquet "Gabby", peppering the soundtrack with such slurred epithets as "Why, you goldurned whipersnapper" and "Consarn it!" He would occasionally enjoy an A-picture assignment in films like Dark Command (1940) and Tall in the Saddle (1944), but from the moment he became "Gabby", Hayes was more or less consigned exclusively to "B"s. After making his last film appearance in 1952, Hayes turned his attentions to television, where he starred in the popular Saturday-morning Gabby Hayes Show ("Hullo out thar in televisium land!") and for a while was the corporate spokesman for Popsicles. Retiring after a round of personal appearance tours, Hayes settled down on his Nevada ranch, overseeing his many business holdings until his death at age 83.

Trivia: While still a high schooler in her Texas home town, Josephine Cottle won a "Gateway to Hollywood" contest sponsored by film producer Jesse Lasky. Cottle was rechristened "Gale Storm" at the suggestion of a movie-magazine fan, and was promptly cast in 1940's Tom Brown's School Days. A brief RKO contract led nowhere, and soon Gale Storm was the sweetheart of Monogram Pictures, starring in several of that low-budget studio's musical "specials." Towards the end of the 1940s, Gale appeared in a number of Republic westerns opposite Roy Rogers. When actress Wanda Hendrix turned down the opportunity to star in the upcoming TV sitcom My Little Margie in 1951, Gale Storm jumped at the chance; like Hendrix, Gale didn't think much of the project at first, but was convinced that it could only get better. Whether or not My Little Margie ever truly evinced signs of improvement is a moot point: Storm became a bonafide star in the role of spunky 21-year-old Margie Belmont. The series' popularity increased tenfold when it left prime time in 1954 and entered the syndicated-rerun market. Capitalizing on her new-found celebrity, she pursued a successful nightclub career, and in 1955 cut a pair of Top Ten record singles, "Teenage Prayer" and "I Hear You Knocking." One year later, she launched a second successful TV series, Oh, Susanna (aka The Gale Storm Show) in which, for four seasons, she filled the role of Susanna Pomeroy, scatterbrained social director on the luxury liner S.S. Ocean Queen. Following her series' cancellation in 1960, Storm returned to nightclubs and played the straw-hat circuit in such musicals as Annie Get Your Gun and then went into semi-retirement, devoting her time to her husband Lee Bonnell (a fellow "Gateway to Hollywood" winner who had long since abandoned acting for the insurance business) and her children. In the late 1970s, Storm re-emerged in the public's consciousness when she announced that she'd been an alcoholic for several years; this was followed by a return to TV as spokesperson for a substance-abuse rehabilitation center in the Northwest. In 1981, Gale Storm published her biography, I Ain't Down Yet.

Trivia: A pretty brunette, Sally Payne was something as unusual in B-Westerns as the heroine's comic sidekick. Payne had the field virtually to herself in the early '40s and she made the most of it, whether exchanging verbal blows with George "Gabby" Hayes or flirting with him. She had made her screen debut in a Western, the 1936 Gene Autry vehicle The Big Show, and horse operas would remain her bread and butter. But Payne also showed her versatility in comedy shorts at RKO (replacing Florence Lake as the wife in the Edgar Kennedy two-reelers) and MGM. In the end, she earned her greatest popularity opposite Roy Rogers at Republic Pictures, playing Calamity Jane to Roger's Young Bill Hickock (1940) in the first of ten Westerns they made together. Despite her growing popularity, Payne retired in 1942 to marry an airline executive. In her later years, she ran a bookstore in Bel Air, CA.

Trivia: American actor Trevor Bardette could truly say that he died for a living. In the course of a film career spanning three decades, the mustachioed, granite-featured Bardette was "killed off" over 40 times as a screen villain. Entering movies in 1936 after abandoning a planned mechanical engineering career for the Broadway stage, Bardette was most often seen as a rustler, gangster, wartime collaborator and murderous backwoodsman. His screen skullduggery carried over into TV; one of Bardette's best remembered video performances was as a "human bomb" on an early episode of Superman. Perhaps being something of a reprobate came naturally to Trevor Bardette -- or so he himself would claim in later years when relating a story of how, as a child, he'd won ten dollars writing an essay on "the evils of tobacco," only to be caught smoking behind the barn shortly afterward.

Trivia: Bob Nolan spent his earliest professional years as a singer on the Chatauqua tent-show circuit. In 1933, Nolan teamed up with Roy Rogers and Tim Spencer to form a country-western harmony group known as the Pioneer Trio. Matriculating into the Sons of the Pioneers, the group rose to fame thanks to Rogers' effortless charisma and Nolan's songwriting prowess. One of Nolan's tunes, "Tumblin' Tumbleweeds," was a bonafide "crossover" hit, enchanting even non-C&W fans. In films from 1935, Nolan invariably appeared on screen with the Sons of the Pioneers, though many felt that he could have been just as big a solo western star as his old pal Roy. Nolan scored another hit-parade success in 1941 with "Cool Water." Bob Nolan continued in films until 1948, thereafter confining his appearances to live programs.

Trivia: Actor Robert Emmett Homans seemingly had the map of Ireland stamped on his craggy face. As a result, Homans spent the better part of his film career playing law enforcement officers of all varieties, from humble patrolmen to detective chiefs. After a lengthy stage career, Homans entered films in 1923. A break from his usual microscopic film assignments occured in Public Enemy (1931), where Homans is given an opportunity to deliver reams of exposition (with a pronounced brogue) during a funeral sequence. And in the 1942 Universal horror programmer Night Monster, Robert Emmett Homans is alotted a sizeable role as the ulcerated detective investigating the supernatural goings-on at the home of seemingly helpless invalid Ralph Morgan.

Trivia: A dignified-looking young character actor, Lynton Brent began his career on the stage, appearing in plays such as The Student Prince, Paid in Full, and as Laertes in Hamlet before entering films in 1930. Handsome enough in an average kind of way, Brent played such supporting roles as reporters (King Kong [1933]), radio operators (Streamline Express [1935]), and again Laertes, in the play-within-the-film I'll Love You Always ([1935], Garbo's interpreter Sven Hugo Borg was Hamlet!). Today, however, Brent is mainly remembered for his many roles in Columbia short subjects opposite the Three Stooges. His dignity always in shambles by the denouement, Brent was a welcome addition to the stock company, which at the time also included such comparative (and battle scarred) veterans as Bud Jamison and Vernon Dent. Leaving the short subject department in the early '40s, Brent played everyone from henchmen to lawmen in scores of B-Westerns and action melodramas, more often than not unbilled. He worked well into the television era, retiring in the late '60s. Offscreen, Brent was an accomplished architect and painter.

Trivia: Best known as cowboy Roy Rogers' comical sidekick, Pat Brady was the son of traveling performers, and first set foot on-stage at the age of four. From the moment he was featured in a road-show production of Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, he was hooked on showbiz for life. While appearing as a bass guitarist in California in 1935, Pat struck up a friendship with a young country & western singer named Leonard Slye, a member of the popular Sons of the Pioneers. When Len Slye was elevated to screen stardom as Roy Rogers, he recommended Brady as his replacement in the Sons aggregation. Making the transition to films himself in 1937, Brady played comedy relief in several of the Charles Starrett Westerns at Columbia. In the early '40s, he moved to Republic, where he played zany camp cook Sparrow Biffle in the Roy Rogers vehicles. When Rogers moved to television in 1951, he took Brady with him. Now billed as "himself," Brady enlivened well over 100 episodes of The Roy Rogers Show, happily (and anachronistically) tooling about the sagebrush at the wheel of his faithful jeep "Nellie-Belle." Long after the cancellation of the weekly series, Brady continued his association with Rogers on TV and in personal appearances; he also rejoined the Sons of the Pioneers in 1959, as a replacement for the defecting Shug Fisher. By the mid-'60s, Brady's acting career began to decline. His last professional engagement was as advance man for a Colorado retail furniture store. In February of 1972, Pat Brady checked himself into the Ark, an alcoholic rehabilitation center in Green Mountain Falls, CO; one day later, Brady was dead at the age of 58.

Trivia: Enjoying a screen career that began in 1908 and lasted until the early '50s, Edward Peil Sr. remains one of those faces every lover of classic Hollywood movies knows so well but just cannot quite place. A barnstormer of the old school, Peil supported legendary stage diva Helena Modjeska in road companies of such theatrical classics as The Witching Hour and Brewster's Millions. Although he had dabbled in motion picture acting as early as 1908 (probably with the Philadelphia-based Lubin company), Peil came into his own with D.W. Griffith, who cast him as Evil Eye in Broken Blossoms (1919) and Swan Way in Dream Street (1921), not exactly characterizations that will endear him to modern, more politically correct moviegoers. Peil, whose last name was often misspelled "Piel," performed more evil-doing later in the decade, although age had a mellowing effect and he increasingly began playing gentleman ranchers, the heroine's father/uncle, decent lawmen, and the like, carving out a whole new career for himself in the field of B-Westerns. According to genre expert Les Adams, Peil made a total of 104 sound Westerns and 11 serials, adding the "Sr." to his name when his namesake son dropped his previous moniker of Johnny Jones. Father and son made one film together: the 1941 aviation drama I Wanted Wings. Edward Peil Sr. died in 1958 at the age of 76.

Trivia: American actor Dick Wessel had a face like a Mack Truck bulldog and a screen personality to match. After several years on stage, Wessel began showing up in Hollywood extra roles around 1933; he is fleetingly visible in the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup (1933), Laurel and Hardy's Bonnie Scotland (1935), and the Columbia "screwball" comedy She Couldn't Take It (1935). The size of his roles increased in the '40s; perhaps his best feature-film showing was as the eponymous bald-domed master criminal in Dick Tracy vs. Cueball (1946). He was a valuable member of Columbia Pictures' short subject stock company, playing a variety of bank robbers, wrestlers, jealous husbands and lazy brother-in-laws. Among his more memorable 2-reel appearances were as lovestruck boxer "Chopper" in The Three Stooges' Fright Night (1947), Andy Clyde's invention-happy brother-in-law in Eight Ball Andy (1948), and Hugh Herbert's overly sensitive strongman neighbor in Hot Heir (1947). Wessel was shown to good (if unbilled) advantage as a handlebar-mustached railroad engineer in the superspectacular Around the World in 80 Days (1956), and had a regular role as Carney on the 1959 TV adventure series Riverboat. Dick Wessel's farewell screen appearance was as a harried delivery man in Disney's The Ugly Dachshund (1965).

Trivia: The quintessential B-movie lawman, granite-faced, mustachioed Jack Rockwell began turning up in low-budget oaters in the late 1920s and went on to amass an impressive array of film credits that included 225 Westerns and two dozen serials, working mostly for Republic Pictures and Columbia although he was never contracted by either. The Jack Rockwell that most fans remember is a stolid, unsmiling sheriff or marshal but he could also pop up as ranchers, homesteaders, stage drivers, and the occasional henchman, always recognizable even if unbilled and awarded only a couple of words of dialogue. Born John Trowbridge, Rockwell was the brother of another busy Hollywood supporting player, Charles Trowbridge (1982-1967).

Trivia: In time-honored Hollywood tradition, cowboy star Roy Rogers' golden palomino Trigger underwent a name change when he ascended to stardom. Sired from a racehorse, the flaxen-maned stallion was born Golden Cloud, making his film debut as Olivia De Havilland's horse in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). Purchased by Rogers in 1938, the palomino was renamed Trigger by Rogers's movie sidekick, Pat Buttram. Trigger's first appearance with Rogers was in Under Western Skies, the first of his 87 starring appearances. In his last theatrical feature, the Bob Hope vehicle Son of Paleface (1952), Trigger was billed as "The Smartest Horse in the Movies," proving the veracity of that statement by sharing a sidesplitting hotel room scene with Hope. Trigger's career was far from over when he left films: he went on to co-star in four seasons of TV's The Roy Rogers Show and continued to make personal appearances with Roy Evans and Dale Evans into the late '50s. He also enjoyed the attentions of a worldwide fan club, affixing his "autograph" to many an 8 X 10 glossy.

Trivia: Ted Mapes grew up on his father's wheat ranch in Nebraska. Upon attaining adulthood, Mapes took on a variety of manual-labor jobs, ending up as a furniture hauler in Los Angeles. Through a movie-studio connection, he landed a job as a grip on the 1929 Doug Fairbanks-Mary Pickford talkie Taming of the Shrew. By the mid-1930s, he'd moved away from the technical side of the business and was working as a stunt man and supporting actor. Mapes performed stunts for such major action stars as John Wayne, Charles Starrett, Joel McCrea and James Stewart. He also doubled for Gary Cooper (whom he closely resembled) in 17 different films, and essayed speaking roles in 13 Republic serials. After retiring from the stunt game, he kept active in Hollywood as an advisor for the American Humane Association, seeing to it that movie animals were properly trained and cared for on the set. In 1978, Ted Mapes was elected to the Stuntman Hall of Fame.

Trivia: Lanky, Montana-born Fred Burns, a former bronco-buster for the Buffalo Bill and Miller 101 Wild West shows, played Western leads opposite Lillian Gish at Biograph in the very early 1910s and later rode in The Birth of a Nation (1915). Like brother Bob Burns, the distinguished-looking, gray-haired Fred eventually drifted into supporting and bit roles, almost always portraying a sheriff or deputy. He seems to have retired after Gene Autry's Barbed Wire (1952), in which, unbilled as usual, he played a rancher.