Trivia: An authentic cowboy from the age of 15, Timothy McCoy moved to a large Wyoming ranch next to a Sioux Indian reservation after some college studies; he became an authority on Indian languages, customs, and folk history, and mastered Indian sign language. He served in World War I, and was then appointed Indian Agent for his territory. In 1922, he was employed as a technical advisor and co-ordinator of Indian extras for the film The Covered Wagon (1923); McCoy may also have done some trick riding for the film. He later he resigned his government post, having been offered a key supporting role in the western The Thundering Herd (1925). MGM signed him to a film contract in 1925; he was to star in westerns and action movies based on historical anecdotes of the American frontier. By the early '30s he was among the most popular western stars; he always appeared dresed in black, with an oversized white Stetson hat and a pearl-handled gun. McCoy interrupted his screen career in 1935 to travel with the Ringling Brothers circus. In 1938 he started his own Wild West show, but it was unsuccessful. He returned to the screen in 1940, and for two years he co-starred in the low-budget Rough Rider western series; the series ended when Buck Jones, another of its stars, died in a fire. He served in World War II (in which he was awarded the Bronze Star), then retired to his ranch; from 1949, however, he worked on TV and in occasional film cameo roles. He won an Emmy for his TV program The Tim McCoy Show. Until 1976 McCoy continued working 300 days a year as the headliner of Tommy Scott's Country Music Circus. In 1974 he was inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame. He authored an autobiography (assisted by his son Ronald), Tim McCoy Remembers the West (1977).

Trivia: A pretty brunette ingénue from Philadelphia, Dorothy Short came to Hollywood in 1934 with an MGM contract. That studio, however, wasted her in minor assignments and she was soon a regular in Poverty Row Westerns, of which she did 11, ranging from Tom Tyler's Brothers of the West (1937) to the William Elliott-Tex Ritter vehicle Bullets for Bandits (1942). But Short is perhaps best remembered for playing the hard-luck heroine in the cult phenomenon Reefer Madness (1938), one of 19 films, including short subjects and the serial Captain Midnight (1942), she would do with her husband -- action and comedy star Dave O'Brien -- beginning in 1936. Their 1953 divorce created a flurry of highly imaginative headlines, after which the actress disappeared from show business.

Trivia: A diminutive, pot-bellied supporting player in B-Westerns, Ben Corbett had enjoyed some success at the famous rodeo at Pendleton, OR, and at New York's Madison Square Garden, where his roping and "Roman" riding skills reportedly won him several trophies. Entering films as a riding double for William Desmond and Antonio Moreno in Vitagraph Westerns and action melodramas in the 1910s, Corbett later became a member of Western star Hoot Gibson's stock company at Universal. That studio saw enough comedic potential in the former stunt man to team him with the equally diminutive Gilbert "Pee Wee" Holmes as Magpie and Dirtshirt in a series of rural comedy shorts set in the fictive community of Piperock. The series, which was released on Universal's "Mustang Brand" in the mid-'20s, counted among its leading ladies such future stars as Janet Gaynor and Fay Wray. In the 1930s, Corbett's character of Magpie returned in several independently produced "Bud 'n Ben" western shorts and the now veteran supporting player later became Tim McCoy's sidekick at low-budget Victory Pictures. He seems to have popped up in every other low-budget Western thereafter, usually appearing unbilled. B-Western compiler Les Adams has verified Corbett's presence in about 185 Westerns and half a dozen serials between 1930 and the actor's retirement in the early '50s, but there may actually have been many more. History, alas, has not been kind to the rustic B-Western perennial, whose arcane comedy relief, most fans of the genre agree, often seems more a hindrance than a help in keeping a plot moving.

Trivia: Almost reptilian in appearance and disposition, B-Western heavy Ted Adams came out of a show business family and was reportedly born in the proverbial trunk. On-stage from childhood, Adams segued into films soon after the transition to sound, using several variations of his real name, Richard Theodore Adams. By the mid-'30s, he chose the friendlier Ted but there was nothing friendly about the characters he was given to play: He was sometimes the lead villain and often scruffy-looking so-called "dog heavies," the kind the audience could easily imagine kicking a dog. A constant presence in the low-budget Johnny Mack Brown and Bob Steele Westerns from producer A.W. Hackel, he later worked mainly for PRC and Monogram, the nether regions of sagebrush moviemaking. By the time of his retirement in the early '50s, Adams had added such television Westerns as The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid, and Cowboy G-Men to his lengthy resumé.

Trivia: A longtime character actor/stuntman/leading man/director, Dave O'Brien (born David Barclay) was born in Big Springs, Texas, and entered movies in the early '30s as a stuntman and occasional character actor -- he is probably best remembered by college students of the late '60s and early '70s for his portrayal of the crazed marijuana smoker in the exploitation film Reefer Madness. During the late '30s and early '40s, O'Brien also played the title role in the serial Captain Midnight, and was the responsible adult in the East Side Kids series, but it was as the lead in MGM's Pete Smith Specialty comedy shorts -- which O'Brien also directed, under his real name David Barclay -- that he was best known to '40s moviegoers. The Pete Smith shorts, which were basically comedic looks at human foibles, took full advantage of O'Brien's background in stunt work, and hold up extremely well today. O'Brien still played occasional lead roles, especially in B-pictures such as The Man Who Walks Alone (1946), an unusual comedy with serious overtones about a veteran returning home from World War II, but by the early '50s had moved into supporting parts, such as that of the stage manager in Kiss Me Kate (1953), directed by his fellow Pete Smith alumnus George Sidney. O'Brien later became a writer for Red Skelton on television.

Trivia: Veteran American character actor Forrest Taylor is reputed to have launched his film career in 1915. His screen roles in both the silent and sound era seldom had any consistency of size; he was apt to show up in a meaty character part one week, a seconds-lasting bit part the next. With his banker's moustache and brusque attitude, Taylor was most often cast as a businessman or a lawyer, sometimes on the shadier side of the law. Throughout his 40 year film career, Taylor was perhaps most active in westerns, appearing in such programmers as Headin' For the Rio Grande and Painted Trail. From 1952 through 1954, Forrest Taylor costarred as Grandpa Fisher on the religious TV series This is the Life.

Trivia: A cowboy troubadour who had recorded for both Victor and Columbia, rotund Art Davis appeared as a musician in a few B-Westerns before supporting one-time-only cowboy star Monte Rawlins (aka Dean Spencer) in the bizarre The Adventures of the Masked Phantom (1939). Davis billed himself as Larry Mason for the occasion, perhaps hoping that no one would notice his participation in this, one of the decade's more ridiculous (albeit entertaining) low-budget ventures. He was Art Davis again when signed by poverty row newcomer PRC in 1942, as one of the Frontier Marshals. The ramshackle studio's bid to compete with rival Republic Pictures' popular Three Mesquiteers Westerns, the Frontier Marshal vehicles co-starred Davis with screen newcomer and fellow troubadour Bill "Cowboy Rambler" Boyd and Lee Powell. The latter, who took care of most of the action, suffered the indignity of being billed below his two sidekicks but that was truly the sole remarkable feature of this wretched series. The demise of Frontier Marshals after only six installments came as a relief to everyone concerned and Davis returned to performing with his hillbilly singing group Art Davis and his Rhythm Rangers. The Art Davis of B-Westerns should not be confused with the animator of the same name.

Trivia: The brother of western star Ken Maynard, Kermit Maynard was a star halfback on the Indiana University college team. He began his career as a circus performer, billed as "The World's Champion Trick and Fancy Rider." He entered films in 1926 as a stunt man (using the stage name Tex Maynard), often doubling for his brother Ken. In 1927, Kermit starred in a series for Rayart Films, the ancestor of Monogram Pictures, then descended into minor roles upon the advent of talking pictures, taking rodeo jobs when things were slow in Hollywood. Independent producer Maurice Conn tried to build Kermit into a talkie western star between 1931 and 1933, and in 1934 launched a B-series based on the works of James Oliver Curwood, in which the six-foot Maynard played a Canadian mountie. The series was popular with fans and exhibitors alike, but Conn decided to switch back to straight westerns in 1935, robbing Maynard of his attention-getting gimmick. Kermit drifted back into supporting roles and bits, though unlike his bibulous, self-indulgent brother Ken, Kermit retained his muscular physique and square-jawed good looks throughout his career. After his retirement from acting in 1962, Kermit Maynard remained an active representative of the Screen Actors Guild, lobbying for better treatment and safer working conditions for stuntpersons and extras.

Trivia: If a B-Western needed a bartender -- any B-Western between the early 1920s and the late 1930s -- chances were good that Clyde McClary would be the actor hired. In fact, Clyde was found behind the bar in more than two-thirds of his 80 or so sound Westerns, serving everybody from Buck Jones in the early talkie The Dawn Trail (1930) to Tim McCoy in the ultra low-budget Code of the Cactus (1939). In films from at least 1922, McClary had often played rather unsympathetic characters, i.e., a nasty rustler terrorizing the local settlers in The Lone Rider (1922) and one of the smugglers in Twin Triggers (1926).

Trivia: Often sporting a pencil-thin mustache, Carl Sepulveda was one of the many anonymous stunt riders found in the background of countless B-Westerns and serials. Having made a couple of screen appearances in the late silent era, Sepulveda returned to films full time in 1939, appearing mostly unbilled in more than 50 Westerns and at least eight serials until 1951. He also worked on the first season of television's Gene Autry Show (1950-1956).

Trivia: Someone once called American supporting actor Charles "Slim" Whitaker a "no good yellow-bellied polecat," and that is as good a description as any for this paunchy, mustachioed gent, a former stage manager and stock company actor from Kansas City, MO. Whitaker's screen career was spent almost entirely in B-Westerns, where he would skulk around as lazy ranch hands, tobacco-chewing henchmen, Mexican "half-breeds," and even the occasional corrupt lawman. More versatile than most Western supporting players, Whitaker was adept at comedy as well, and was humorously billed "Slender" Whitaker in 1925's Border Intrigue, in which he played a comedic Mexican bandito. Whitaker, who made his screen bow around 1925, was busiest in the 1930s, appearing in over 25 films in 1935 alone! He continued in pictures through the late '40s, but spent his final years working as a short-order cook in a Hollywood coffee shop.

Trivia: One of the many unheralded stuntmen of the 1930s, '40s, and '50s, Carl Mathews (born Carl Davis Mathews) doubled cowboy crooner Fred Scott at Spectrum and Ray "Crash" Corrigan at Republic. Nicknamed "Cherokee" and of Native American heritage, the burly Mathews later supported Al "Lash" LaRue at PRC, usually playing henchmen. His career lasted well into the television era.

Trivia: Diminutive British knockabout comedian Jimmy Aubrey got his start with the legendary Fred Karno troupe, working alongside such budding stars as Charlie Chaplin and Stan Laurel. Like Charley and Stan, Aubrey flourished as a silent screen comic. He headlined a series of Vitagraph two-reelers in 1919 and 1920, with a young Oliver Hardy lending support. In the mid-1920s, he starred in another comedy series for producer Joe Rock. By 1927, Aubrey's stardom was a thing of the past, and he found himself virtually unemployable. His old colleagues Laurel and Hardy cast Aubrey in supporting roles in three of their starring vehicles, most memorably as the flirtatious drunk in the 1929 2-reeler That's My Wife. Jimmy Aubrey continued taking movie jobs until his retirement in 1952, playing bits and featured roles as drunken sailors, hoboes, store clerks and cowboy sidekicks.