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: When comic-strip artist Chester Gould created his famed detective Dick Tracy in 1931, he deliberately patterned Tracy's jut-jawed countenance and stoic demeanor after that of his favorite film star, Jack Holt. Dropping out of Virginia Military Institute as a teenager, Holt held down a variety of tough, he-man jobs before settling into film acting in 1913. He flourished in the 1920s as a virile action hero, especially in the late-silent Columbia productions of up-and-coming director Frank Capra. Holt was one of Columbia's most valuable commodities in the early talkie era, but his popularity waned as the quality of his films plummeted. After serving as a major in World War II, Holt returned to films as a supporting actor, often (as in the 1950 Roy Rogers vehicle Trail of Robin Hood) playing thinly disguised variations on his own off-screen persona. Jack Holt was the father of three film performers: western star Tim Holt, leading lady Jennifer Holt, and character actor David Holt.

Trivia: Tall, muscular Gordon Jones played heroes, villains, comic-relief second bananas, and just about everything in between, in a screen career lasting almost 30 years -- not bad for a fellow who, eight years into that career, admitted to a reporter that he was still learning about acting. Born in 1911, Jones came to movies in his early twenties, not out of any aspirations as an actor but on the basis of his good looks and athletic build. The brawny Iowa-born Jones was well known as a top student athlete and star football guard ("Bull" Jones) at U.C.L.A., and had also played a few seasons of professional football. Jones started doing movie work for the easy money, and got serious about acting when he found that he liked it; he soon began downplaying his football background so that casting agents would take him more seriously. Jones started out playing small roles in Wesley Ruggles' and Ernest B. Schoedsack's The Monkey's Paw and Sidney Lanfield's Red Salute, and by 1937, he had moved on to a contract at RKO. His biggest screen role in terms of billing came in 1940, in the Universal serial The Green Hornet, where he portrayed publisher Britt Reid, the alter ego of the masked hero of the title; Jones also played the Hornet, but when he was in that guise, he was redubbed with the voice of the era's more familiar radio Green Hornet, Al Hodge. Jones had gained some stage experience, particularly in comedy, during the late '30s, and this stood him in good stead when he auditioned for a role in Max Gordon's Broadway adaptation My Sister Eileen while on a visit to New York; the "rambling wreck from Georgia Tech" (billed as the Wreck in the original program) was the role of a lifetime, giving Jones the chance to play exactly what he was, a lovable big lug. He was good enough in the part to repeat it in Alexander Hall's 1942 movie version, produced by Columbia Pictures. Jones wasn't able to follow up on his success in the film, however, due to the outbreak of the Second World War. The actor held a reserve commission in the army and he was called into the service very soon after finishing work on the movie. In contrast to some actors, however (such as Ronald Reagan, who felt war service had damaged his career and resented it deeply), Jones never complained and, indeed, was very active for the next 20 years of his life in encouraging college students to consider the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC). One of his other key roles during 1942 was as Alabama Smith, John Carroll's slightly dim-witted but good-natured sidekick, in Flying Tigers (1943), a John Wayne-starring vehicle that was one of the most popular action films of the war. This picture began Jones' 20-year onscreen association with Wayne, who was also (perhaps not coincidentally) a former football player from U.C.L.A. After resuming his acting career in the late '40s, Jones appeared in prominent roles in the John Wayne features Big Jim McLain and Island in the Sky. By the end of the 1940s, Jones had aged into a somewhat beefier screen presence and into very physical character roles. He would no longer have been considered a leading man, even in serials, but he had developed a very good, slightly over-the-top comic villain persona, strongly reminiscent of Nat Pendleton, Joseph Sawyer, or William Bendix. All of these attributes meshed well with the work of the comedy team of Bud Abbott and Lou Costello; Jones' association with the duo began in The Wistful Widow of Wagon Gap (1947) with the role of the film's heavy, Jake Frame. During the early '50s, when they began their television series The Abbott & Costello Show, Jones was cast as Mike the cop, the hulking, loud-voiced antagonist to the roly-poly Costello (and, thus, succeeded Pendleton, Sawyer, and Bendix, who had played tough, burly foils to the duo in the movies Buck Privates, Buck Privates Come Home, The Naughty Nineties, and Who Done It). The program was only in production for two seasons, but was rerun regularly into the 1980s and became available on DVD in the 21st century, and, thus, has ensured Jones a permanent place in American popular culture. He remained busy in films and on television throughout the 1950s, in pictures as different as the sci-fi chiller The Monster That Challenged the World and the Tony Curtis/Janet Leigh sex comedy The Perfect Furlough, and on series ranging from The Real McCoys to The Rifleman. Jones also appeared in two very successful Disney movies during the early '60s, The Absent-Minded Professor and Son of Flubber, portraying harried school coaches in both pictures. He returned to the John Wayne stock company portraying Douglas, the bureaucrat antagonist to Wayne's G.W. McLintock in the Western comedy McLintock, in the spring of 1963. Jones succumbed to a heart attack on June 20, 1963, five months before the release of that movie. He is remembered, however, by millions of Abbott and Costello and John Wayne fans, and also for his work in serials, and he is given a special mention -- in connection with The Green Hornet -- on the home page of the town of his birth, Alden, IA.

Trivia: Trained at Iowa's Morningside College for a career as a musician, American actor Emory Parnell spent his earliest performing years as a concert violinist. He worked the Chautauqua and Lyceum tent circuits for a decade before leaving the road in 1930. For the next few seasons, Parnell acted and narrated in commercial and industrial films produced in Detroit. Determining that the oppurtunities and renumeration were better in Hollywood, Emory and his actress wife Effie boarded the Super Chief and headed for California. Endowed with a ruddy Irish countenance and perpetual air of frustration, Parnell immediately landed a string of character roles as cops, small town business owners, fathers-in-law and landlords (though his very first film part in Bing Crosby's Dr. Rhythm [1938] was cut out before release). In roles both large and small, Parnell became an inescapable presence in B-films of the '40s; one of his better showings was in the A-picture Louisiana Purchase, in which, as a Paramount movie executive, he sings an opening song about avoiding libel suits! Parnell was a regular in Universal's Ma and Pa Kettle film series (1949-55), playing small town entrepreneur Billy Reed; on TV, the actor appeared as William Bendix' factory foreman The Life of Riley (1952-58). Emory Parnell's last public appearance was in 1974, when he, his wife Effie, and several other hale-and-hearty residents of the Motion Picture Country Home and Hospital were interviewed by Tom Snyder.

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: One of the last of the singing cowboys, Rex Allen performed on-stage and in radio (as a headliner on The National Barn Dance) before hitching up with a traveling rodeo. Allen was brought to Republic Studios in 1949 as a potential replacement for Roy Rogers. He appeared in several slick B-Westerns of the early '50s, usually teamed with Slim Pickens, then worked for Republic's TV division as star of the 1958 TV series Frontier Doctor. Filmgoers of the 1960s were more familiar with Rex Allen's voice than with his rugged physique: Allen was the laid-back narrator of such Walt Disney films as The Legend of Lobo (1962), The Incredible Journey (1963), and Charlie, the Lonesome Cougar (1967).

Trivia: While touring in a USO show during World War II, singing cowboy Monte Hale was discovered by Republic pictures talent scout Phil Isley (the father of actress Jennifer Jones). Given the fact that Hale was hired as a possible replacement for Roy Rogers, it is puzzling that Republic took its sweet time promoting their new contractee to "B"-western stardom. He played straight contemporary roles in such films as Steppin' in Society (1944) and the 1945 serial The Purple Monster Strikes, then worked in support of non-singing sagebrusher Sunset Carson. Hale was finally allowed to carry his own series beginning in 1947. Hale remained at Republic until 1950 (he guest-starred with the rest of the studio's western lineup in the Roy Rogers "special" Trail of Robin Hood), then concentrated on his stage appearances with country-western bandleader Ray Whitley. He also began writing and performing patriotic songs, the most popular of which was "That Statue in the Bay," before making one of his last appearances in the 1966 Marlon Brando picture The Chase.

Trivia: The son of actors, William Farnum was 12 years old when he joined his parents and his brother Dustin and Marshal in the family business. Dustin (1874-1929) made it to motion-picture stardom first, as leading man of Cecil B. DeMille's first feature, 1914's The Squaw Man. That same year, William made his movie debut in another popular western, The Spoilers (1914). The climactic fight scene between Farnum and co-star Tom Santschi made stars out of both men, though only Farnum graduated to matinee-idol status. Signing with Fox films in 1915, Farnum became one of that studio's most popular leading men, thanks to such solid vehicles as Tale of Two Cities (1917), Les Miserables (1917) and If I Were King (1920). At his peak, Farnum was pulling down $10,000 dollars per week. He briefly returned to Broadway in 1925 to star in The Buccaneer. Later in 1925, Farnum suffered a serious injury on the set of The Man Who Fights Alone; as a result, he was confined to supporting roles for the rest of career. While many of these roles were sizeable (notably King Arthur in the 1931 Will Rogers version of A Connecticut Yankee), Farnum would never again recapture the glory of his silent stardom. William Farnum remained a busy character actor up until his death in 1952, often playing minor roles in remakes of his silent triumphs--including the 1942 remake of The Spoilers.

Trivia: Athletically inclined, Tyler entered films at age 21 as a stuntman and extra. He went on to play supporting roles in several late silents, then signed a contract to star in Westerns. He soon became a popular screen cowboy, often accompanied by sidekick Frankie Darro; he survived the transition to sound, going on to star in a number of serials in the early '30s. He remained popular through the early '40s and occasionally played supporting roles in major films. In 1943 he was struck by a crippling rheumatic condition; although he appeared in a handful of additional films throughout the next decade, his career was effectively ended as he was relegated to minor roles. By the early '50s he was broke. He died of a heart attack at age 50.

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: Born Harold Albershart, he played football and modeled before working as a stage actor in the late '20s. He debuted onscreen in Not Quite Decent (1929), playing the romantic lead; he had similar roles in 25 films made during the '30s at various studios. He began starring in serials in 1940. In 1944 he made his first starring Western, and for almost a decade he was a Western star, twice appearing (1951 and 1953) on the Top Ten Western Money-makers list and appearing in over 100 features and serials, often with his "wonder" horse Blackjack; he portrayed Red Ryder in eight films, then adopted the name "Rocky" Lane in 1947. After B-movie Westerns fizzled out in 1953 his career came to a virtual halt, and he had supporting roles in just three more films. In the '60s he was the dubbed voice of the talking horse on the TV sitcom Mr. Ed.

Trivia: Born in an upstate New York rural community, George Duryea was raised by relatives when both his parents died young. Educated at Columbia University and Carnegie Tech, Duryea embarked upon an acting career, first with a Maine stock company, then on Broadway. He played Abie in the hit comedy Abie's Irish Rose in New York, then toured with the production for several seasons. In 1928, he was brought to films as a young leading man, appearing in such "A"-list productions as Cecil B. DeMille's The Godless Girl (1929). By 1930, however, he was having trouble securing work that is, until he changed his name to Tom Keene and signed on as RKO-Pathe's resident cowboy star. Throughout the early 1930s, Keene's western vehicles played profitably if not spectacularly in neighborhood houses throughout the country. He made a brief return to dramatic roles as the leading character in King Vidor's populist classic Our Daily Bread (1934), but returned to westerns when his performance was drubbed by the critics. When George O'Brien succeed Keene at RKO, the latter moved on to smaller studios, retaining his popularity into the early 1940s. In 1944, he adopted a new nom de film, Richard Powers, and flourished as a character actor into the 1950s. He briefly returned to his "Tom Keene" persona in the all-star western "special" Trail of Robin Hood (1950) and the 1958 Rowan & Martin cowboy spoof Once Upon a Horse (1958). One of George Duryea/Tom Keene/Richard Powers' final appearances was in the deathless Ed Wood Jr. opus Plan 9 From Outer Space.

Trivia: With his articulate speech patterns and his wide range of facial nuances, George Cheseboro was a cut above the usual western supporting player. He began his career with a stock company in 1907; three years later, he toured the Orient with another acting troupe. Vaudeville experience followed, and then in 1915 Cheseboro made his first motion picture. With 1918's Hands Up, Cheseboro became a popular serial star, extending his repertoire to western leads after serving in World War I. Though his star had faded by the time talkies arrived, Cheseboro prospered as a character actor in the many "B" westerns clogging the market in the 1930s, usually playing a scuzzy henchman, barroom bully or lynch-happy bystander. One of the actor's most satisfying screen moments occurred in the 1950 Roy Rogers feature Trail of Robin Hood. The climax contrives to have several popular western stars ride on the scene to rescue movie-star-turned-rancher Jack Holt from rustlers. As Allan Lane, Rex Allen, Monte Hale et. al. greet each other effusively, Cheseboro rides up to offer his help--whereupon he is roundly snubbed. A little girl steps out of the crowd to reprimand Cheseboro for spending his cinematic career on the wrong side of the law. "I know, honey," replies George Cheseboro with a warm smile. "But after being beaten up by Jack Holt in twenty pictures, he's reformed me!"

Trivia: Born Raymond Benard, Corrigan was a big, handsome, tough star of cowboy films. After working as an electrician and gym teacher, he entered films in 1934 as a stunt man and bit player; for his excellent physique, he was hired as a body-double for Tarzan star Johnny Weissmuller. By 1936 he starred in serials and action pictures; one serial, Undersea Kingdom, featured him as the character "Crash Corrigan," and he adopted the name as his film pseudonym. His best-known role was that of Tucson Smith in two dozen films featuring the "Three Mesquiteers" (himself, Bob Livingston, and Max Terhune); from 1937-43, the Three Mesquiteers made the western money-makers top ten list, peaking at #5 in 1938. In the '40s he appeared in a series of films (which he co-produced) with another cowboy trio, this one called "The Range Busters." Afterwards he retired and became a businessman; his business interests included Corriganville, a ranch and "small-town" movie set he rented out to western movie production companies.

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.