Trivia: The product of a profoundly unhappy home life, Eric Fleming ran away at age 11 to live the life of a Depression-era hobo. Making his way from California to New York, he worked at a series of dead-end jobs, at one point sweeping the floors of a whorehouse. After a stint with the Merchant Marine, he joined the Seabees at the outbreak of WWII. While lifting a 200-pound iron block, he miscalculated and the block fell directly on his face. Forced to undergo extensive plastic surgery, Fleming left the hospital with the craggy, weathered facial features that would ensure him steady if not always lucrative employment as an actor. Making his debut in a 1944 training film, he did stage work in Chicago and New York, and in 1951 starred on a DuMont TV network kiddie series Major Dell Conway of the Flying Tigers. While his Hollywood film roles were largely confined to standard he-man heroics in such sci-fiers as Conquest of Space (1955) and Queen of Outer Space (1956), he was afforded a wider acting range on stage, exhibiting his singing and dancing skills in the 1955 Broadway musical Plain and Fancy. In 1959 he was cast as trail boss Gil Favor on Rawhide, one of the most popular TV Western series of the era. Feeling that he was being upstaged by younger co-star Clint Eastwood, Fleming left Rawhide in 1966 to seek out film work. After playing a secondary role in the Doris Day comedy The Glass Bottom Beat, he headed to Peru to film the pilot episode of a TV adventure series, High Jungle. While filming a canoeing scene in the turbulent Hullaga River, Eric Fleming fell into the surging rapids and drowned; his mutilated body was not recovered until four days later.

Trivia: Trained at Northwestern University's drama department, onetime salesman Claude Akins was a Broadway actor when he was selected by a Columbia talent scout for a small role in the Oscar-winning From Here to Eternity (1953). With a craggy face and blunt voice that evoked memories of Lon Chaney Jr., Akins was a "natural" for villainous or roughneck roles, but was versatile enough to play parts requiring compassion and humor. A television actor since the "live" days, Akins achieved stardom relatively late in life via such genial adventure series as Movin' On (1974), B.J. and the Bear (1979), The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo (1979) and Legmen (1984). In his last decade, Claude Akins was a busy-and most genial-commercial spokesperson.

Trivia: It was while attending Colorado College that American actor/singer Ken Curtis discovered his talent for writing music. After an artistic apprenticeship on the staff of the NBC radio network's music department in the early '30s, Curtis was hired as male vocalist for the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, then went on to work for bandleader Shep Fields. Preferring country-western to swing, Curtis joined the Sons of the Pioneers singing group in the 1940s, and in this capacity appeared in several western films. Columbia Pictures felt that Curtis had star potential, and gave the singer his own series of westerns in 1945, but Ken seemed better suited to supporting roles. He worked a lot for director John Ford in the '40s and '50s, as both singer and actor, before earning starring status again on the 1961 TV adventure series Ripcord. That was the last we saw of the handsome, clean-shaven Ken Curtis; the Ken Curtis that most western fans are familiar with is the scraggly rustic deputy Festus Haggen on the long-running TV Western Gunsmoke. Ken was hired to replace Dennis Weaver (who'd played deputy Chester Good) in 1964, and remained with Gunsmoke until the series ended its 20-year run in 1975. After that, Ken Curtis retired to his spread in Fresno, California, stepping back into the spotlight on occasion for guest appearances at western-movie conventions.