Trivia: With his slight built, narrow face and pencil-thin mustache, I. Stanford Jolley did not exactly look trustworthy, and a great many of his screen roles (more than 500) were indeed to be found on the wrong side of the law. Isaac Stanford Jolley had toured as a child with his father's traveling circus and later worked in stock and vaudeville, prior to making his Broadway debut opposite Charles Trowbridge in Sweet Seventeen (1924). Radio work followed and he arrived in Hollywood in 1935. Pegged early on as a gangster or Western outlaw, Jolley graduated to playing lead henchman or the boss villain in the '40s, mostly appearing for such poverty-row companies as Monogram and PRC. Although Jolley is often mentioned as a regular member of the Republic Pictures' stock company, he was never under contract to that legendary studio and only appeared in 25 films for them between 1936 and 1954. From 1950 on, Jolley worked frequently on television and remained a busy performer until at least 1976. According to his widow, the actor, who died of emphysema at the Motion Picture Country Hospital, never earned more than 100 dollars on any given movie assignment. He was the father of art director Stan Jolley.

Trivia: With his penetrating eyes, trademark pencil-thin mustache, and stocky build, Missouri-born Karl Hackett appeared in scores of low-budget Westerns from 1935 to 1948, usually playing characters with untrustworthy names like Wolf Hines (Colorado Kid [1937]), Slaughter (Utah Trail [1938]), or Three-Fingers Rogel (Where the Buffalo Roam [1938]). Once in a while he wore a badge (The Lion's Den [1936], Wild Horse Rustler [1943]), but was still highly suspicious. On his few excursions away from the range, Hackett played thugs in the 1939 serials The Green Hornet and its sequel The Green Hornet Strikes Again (1940) and was Councillor Krenko in Buck Rogers (1940).

Trivia: Steely-eyed, mustachioed Edward Cassidy (or plain Ed Cassidy) bore a striking resemblance to Theodore Roosevelt, whom he played three times onscreen, including a brief appearance in the MGM musical Take Me out to the Ball Game (1949). But the McGill University graduate was more at home in B-Westerns and serials, of which he did an impressive total of 218. Cassidy could occasionally be found on the wrong side of the law, but more often than not, he would portray the heroine's (or hero's) beleaguered father, the stern sheriff, or a troubled rancher. Retiring after his 1957 appearance in the television series Circus Boy, the veteran supporting player died from undisclosed causes at the Motion Picture House and Hospital in Woodland Hills, CA.

Trivia: A WWI veteran who later studied law at the University of Texas, tough-looking Jack Ingram began his long show business career as a minstrel player and later reportedly toured with Mae West. He began turning up playing scruffy henchmen and assorted other B-Western villains in the mid-'30s and was later the featured heavy in Columbia serials. Ingram would go on to appear in a total of 200 Westerns and approximately 50 serials in a career that later included appearances on such television programs as The Cisco Kid and The Lone Ranger. Many of his later films and almost all his television Westerns, including the Roy Rogers and Gene Autry shows, were filmed on Ingram's own 200-acre ranch on Mulholland Drive in the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking Woodland Hills, which he had purchased from Charles Chaplin in 1944 and which remains a wilderness today.

Trivia: Veteran movie villain Kenne Duncan began plying his wicked trade in 1933. He hit his stride in the 1940s, when he was under contract to Republic Pictures. Duncan sneered and skulked his way through scores of westerns and serials, usually as the raffish aide-de-camp of the principal heavy (as in the 1941 serial The Adventures of Captain Marvel). When Republic slowed down production in the mid-1950s, Duncan reluctantly found himself in the circle of Hollywood "fringies" who populated the films of immortal bad-movie maven Ed Wood Jr. One of Kenne Duncan's final screen appearances was as phony mystic and erstwhile vampire Dr. Acula in Wood's Night of the Ghouls

Trivia: Perennial western supporting actor Budd Buster acted under his own, somewhat show-bizzy given name, and briefly under the "nom de stage" of George Selk. His earliest recorded screen credits occur in 1935. Buster continued laboring in B westerns for the next quarter century, spending a great deal of his time at such Poverty Row concerns as Grand National and PRC (where he showed up in 44 oaters over an eight-year period). Budd Buster's final appearance was a bit in the Alan Ladd big-budgeter Guns of the Timberland (1960).

Trivia: The brother of Buck Bucko, American screen actor Roy Bucko usually played ranch hands or rustlers in "B"-westerns. The Bucko brothers almost always appeared together in their films, including The Man from Black Hills (1952), their final (credited) work.

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: Livingston was born Robert Randall. Raised in California, he began his professionl life as a reporter. In the late '20s he began performing onstage and in film shorts. By 1934 he had become an actor in feature films, and in 1936 he began a long stretch as a cowboy star: alongside costars Crash Corrigan and Max Terhune, he appeared as Stony Brooke in the Three Mesquiteers series of Westerns, going on to play the character 29 times; the Mesquiteers were among the Top Ten Western Box-Office attractions in every year from 1937-43. In 1939 he portrayed the Lone Ranger in a serial, then in the early '40s he remained popular as the costar of the Lone Rider series with sidekick Fuzzy St. John; meanwhile, he also played romantic leads in a number of B-movies. Later he appeared in occasional character roles. He was briefly married to starlet Margaret Roach, daughter of film pioneer Hal Roach. His brother was minor actor and singing cowboy Jack Randall.

Trivia: Gawky, loose-limbed Al St. John performed from childhood with his family in vaudeville and burlesque around his home state of California, perfecting an athletic bicycle act that would stand him in good stead for the remainder of his career. Despite his parents' misgivings about "the flickers," St. John was persuaded to enter films by the success of his uncle, Mack Sennett star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle. St. John became a "Keystone Kop" in that famous congregation's very first film, The Bangville Police (1913), supported Charles Chaplin and Marie Dressler in the feature comedy Tillie's Punctured Romance (1914), and then followed Arbuckle to Comique, where he and the young Buster Keaton functioned as "second bananas" to the hefty star. On his own, St. John starred in Educational comedies (one, The Iron Mule [1925], directed by his now disgraced uncle under the pseudonym of William Goodrich), all along developing his patented rube personality complete with oversized overalls and porkpie hat.St. John himself later claimed that a deal with the Fox company went sour and that he suddenly found himself more or less blacklisted by the major studios. He did appear in one of Roscoe Arbuckle's comeback shorts, Buzzin' Around (1933), but by the mid-'30s he seemed all washed up. To keep food (and, it was rumored, quite a bit of spirits) on the table, St. John switched gears and began pursuing a career in independently produced B-Westerns. He played a variety of characters, both major and minor, before almost accidentally stumbling over the particular role that would sustain him for the rest of his career and make him perhaps the favorite sidekick among kids -- that of the limber, baggy-pants braggart Fuzzy Q. Jones.Poverty Row company Spectrum had originally intended for Melody of the Plains (1937) to co-star singer Fred Scott with Fuzzy Knight but he proved unavailable and the script was simply never changed. St. John became so popular in the role that, by 1940, he was playing Fuzzy in no less than three Western series simultaneously, PRC's Billy the Kid and Lone Rider programmers and Republic Pictures' Don "Red" Barry vehicles. He remained with the Billy the Kid/Billy Carson Westerns when star Bob Steele was replaced by Larry "Buster" Crabbe and was still Fuzzy Q. Jones in 1947 when Crabbe left in favor of Humphrey Bogart-lookalike Al "Lash" LaRue. In quite a few of these downright poverty-stricken potboilers, St. John provided the only glimmer of entertainment. As LaRue often remarked, "Fuzzy could stumble over a match stick and spend 15 exciting minutes looking for the match." In other words, kids didn't really go to see a Buster Crabbe or Lash LaRue Western, they went to see Fuzzy.Al St. John was unique among B-Western sidekicks in that he actually carried his films rather than the easily disposable leading men. Both Crabbe and LaRue were well aware of that and remained steadfast in their praise for the diminutive performer. When the LaRue era finally ended with a short-lived television series, Lash of the West (1953), St. John returned to the boards and continued making personal appearances until his death from a heart attack.