Trivia: Handsome leading man Rory Calhoun's successful film and television career spanned well over 50 years. In the mid-1940s,after a difficult childhood and adolescence, Calhoun found work as a lumberjack in Santa Cruz, California. It was while there employed that Calhoun was discovered by actor Alan Ladd, who suggested that the rugged young man give movies a try. Billed as "Frank McCown," Calhoun was signed to a brief contract at 20th Century-Fox, but most of his earliest movie scenes (including a sizeable supporting role in the Laurel and Hardy vehicle The Bullfighters) ended up on the cutting room floor. Free-lancing in the late 1940s, Calhoun first attracted a fan-following with his supporting role as a high-school lothario in 1948's The Red House. He returned to Fox in 1950, enjoying major roles in such films as How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and River of No Return (1955). Established as a western player by the late 1950s, Calhoun starred on the popular TV western The Texan from 1958 through 1960. He spent his spare time writing, publishing at least one novel, The Man From Padeira. From 1949 through 1970, Calhoun was married to actress Lita Baron. Perpetuating his career into the 1980s and '90s, a more weather-beaten Rory Calhoun was seen in the lead of the satirical horror film Motel Hell (1980), was quite funny as a washed-up macho movie star in Avenging Angel (1985), and stole the show from ostensible leading-man George Strait in Pure Country (1992).

Trivia: Boxing champ Max Baer made his film acting bow in The Prizefighter and the Lady (1933). This MGM "special" co-starred Baer with Walter Huston and Myrna Loy--not to mention his fellow pugilists Jack Dempsey, Primo Carnera, Jesse Willard, Jim Jeffries and Stranger Lewis. Though he evinced movie-star potential, Baer would never again have so worthwhile a film role. Nor was he as busy in Hollywood as his boxer brother Buddy Baer, with whom Max appeared in the 1949 Abbott and Costello comedy Africa Screams. In 1951, Baer was teamed with another boxer-turned-thespian Maxie Rosenbloom in a quartet of inexpensive Columbia 2-reelers. Max Baer was the father of Max Baer Jr., famed for his portrayal of Jethro on TV's The Beverly Hillbillies and for his second career as a film producer/director.

Trivia: Making his movie bow in 1941, Paul Langton became a contract player at MGM, frequently appearing in war films. During the 1950s, Langton was seen in character parts like publicist Buddy Bliss in Big Knife (1955). He often showed up in horror films, notably The Snow Creature (1954), The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957; as the hero's brother), It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958) and The Cosmic Man (1959). Paul Langton achieved TV stardom in the role of Leslie Harrington on the prime time serial Peyton Place (1964-68).

Trivia: Possessor of one of the meanest faces in the movies, American actor Ray Teal spent much of his film career heading lynch mobs, recruiting for hate organizations and decimating Indians. Naturally, anyone this nasty in films would have to conversely be a pleasant, affable fellow in real life, and so it was with Teal. Working his way through college as a saxophone player, Teal became a bandleader upon graduation, remaining in the musical world until 1936. In 1938, Teal was hired to act in the low-budget Western Jamboree, and though he played a variety of bit parts as cops, taxi drivers and mashers, he seemed more at home in Westerns. Teal found it hard to shake his bigoted badman image even in A-pictures; as one of the American jurists in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), he is the only member of Spencer Tracy's staff that feels that sympathy should be afforded Nazi war criminals -- and the only one on the staff who openly dislikes American liberals. A more benign role came Teal's way on the '60s TV series Bonanza, where he played the sometimes ineffectual but basically decent Sheriff Coffee. Ray Teal retired from films shortly after going through his standard redneck paces in The Liberation of LB Jones (1970).

Trivia: Burly American utility actor Gene Roth appeared in nearly 200 films, beginning around 1946. He was initially billed under his given name of Gene Stutenroth, shortening his surname in 1949. Most often cast as a hulking villain, Roth growled and glowered through many a Western and serial (he was the principal heavy in the 1951 chapter play Captain Video). He also showed up in several Columbia two-reel comedies, starting with the Shemp Howard/Tom Kennedy film Society Mugs (1946). A frequent foil of the Three Stooges, Columbia's top short-subject stars, Roth extended his association with the comedy trio into the 1962 feature The Three Stooges Meet Hercules. A ubiquitous TV actor, Roth was frequently cast as a judge or bailiff on the Perry Mason series and essayed two roles in the 1961 Twilight Zone classic "Shadow Play." An active participant on the nostalgia-convention circuit of the 1970s, Gene Roth died in 1976 when he was struck down by a speeding automobile.

Trivia: Veteran B-Western player Steven Darrell (aka J. Stevan Darrell) got the acting bug early, playing Abraham Lincoln in a grade-school tableau. He made his professional debut with the Galloway Players of Pittsfield, MA, and his West Coast bow with the famed Pasadena Playhouse in 1937. Darrell, who told an interviewer that he "enjoyed all kind of character roles, the more villainous the better," went on to menace nearly every cowboy hero around, from Roy Rogers to Whip Wilson, appearing in more than 100 films and over 200 television segments. Retiring after a 1967 episode of television's Daniel Boone, the veteran actor died from a brain tumor in 1970 at the age of 63.

Trivia: A tough-looking character actor in Grade-Z Westerns of the 1940s, Terry Frost's screen career was highly affected by a role he didn't get to play. In 1945, Frost, who had been portraying henchmen in Westerns since 1941, was signed to star the title role in Dillinger, a low-budget but highly publicized melodrama depicting the exploits of real life gangster and Public Enemy Number One, John Dillinger. The proposed screenplay, however, came in for intense scrutiny by the Production Code censors and when the cameras finally rolled, the part had been re-cast with newcomer Lawrence Tierney, who thus embarked on a long and profitable career portraying public enemies. Frost, in contrast, returned to the realm of low-budget oaters, laboring rather anonymously in countless Western melodramas for also-ran studios Monogram and PRC. He was even busier on television in the 1950s, appearing in seemingly every Western series ever produced, from The Gene Autry Show to Gunsmoke to Rawhide. In his later years, the erstwhile vaudevillian and coffee shop owner became a popular guest speaker at various B-Western conventions, where he would reminisce about everyone from Johnny Mack Brown to Whip Wilson. His death was attributed to a heart attack.

Trivia: American actor Dennis Moore made his first stage appearance with a Texas stock company in 1932. If his official bio is to be believed, Moore was 18 at the time, casting some doubt over his claim of having been a commercial pilot before inaugurating his acting career. Whatever the case, it is a matter of record that Moore entered films in 1936 when he was discovered by a Columbia Pictures talent scout. Two years later, he made the first of his many Westerns at Republic Pictures. In his earliest sagebrush appearances, he was a bit player, stunt man, or villain; in 1940, he attained his first cowboy leading role in The Man From Tascosa, though he would continue to take bad-guy parts (notably as a serial killer in the East Side Kids' 1941 feature Spooks Run Wild) even after his good-guy debut. In 1943, Moore joined Ray "Crash" Corrigan and Max Terhune as a member of the Range Busters in the Monogram Western series of the same name. Until his retirement from films in 1957, Moore alternated between Westerns and such serials as The Purple Monster Strikes (1945). Dennis Moore owns the distinction of starring in the last serial ever made by Republic, King of the Carnival (1956), and the last serial ever made in Hollywood, Columbia's Blazing the Overland Trail (1956).

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: Dean Fredericks was a television star during the late '50s and early '60s, principally on the series Steve Canyon and in one very interesting low-budget feature film. Born Frederic J. Foote in Los Angeles, CA, in 1924, he served in the military during World War II and received a Purple Heart. He turned to acting in the early '50s, initially under the name Fred Foote, and had uncredited appearances as a detective in Gordon Douglas' classic sci-fi thriller Them! (1954), Jesse Hibbs' Western Rails Into Laramie (1954), as well as The Adventures of Rin Tin Tin series. By 1955, he'd changed his stage name to Norman Fredric (sometimes spelled Frederic) and was co-starring in the series Jungle Jim as the title character's faithful servant Kaseem, as well as appearing on such series as Cheyenne, Circus Boy, Gunsmoke, Maverick, and the 1957 thriller The Disembodied.It was during an appearance on the series The Court of Last Resort in 1957 that the actor was spotted by Milton Caniff, the creator of such comic strips as Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. A year later, while preparing a television series based on Steve Canyon, Caniff remembered Norman Fredric and personally chose him for the title role of the two-fisted air-force lieutenant Colonel Stevenson B. Canyon. With a name change to the more dynamic sounding Dean Fredericks, he fit the role perfectly -- indeed, he looked exactly like the character as drawn by Caniff. That was how Dean Fredericks became a star known to millions of baby boomers. Though the series was only in production from 1958-1959, it was rerun heavily in syndication, and there were Steve Canyon toys and other products associated with the program, which helped it linger in pop culture. Fredericks played mostly in Westerns following the run of his series, appearing in The Virginian, The Rifleman, and also in the Disney production The Adventures of Gallegher. In movies, he worked in Wild Harvest, The Final Hour, and Savage Sam (playing a Comanche warrior in the latter). The most interesting project of Fredericks' entire career, however, was The Phantom Planet (1961), a strange sci-fi adventure involving an astronaut who finds himself reduced to a fraction of his full size and is marooned on a tiny planetoid that houses an entire super-civilization. This film has endured in popularity for decades as a "guilty pleasure," despite some silliness in the makeup and casting. Fredericks' fame didn't outlast the early '60s, and neither did the kind of low-budget Western, action-adventure, and science fiction vehicles to which he was best suited. He died of cancer in 1999 at the age of 75.

Trivia: Don C. Harvey's screen acting career was launched when he signed a Columbia contract in 1949. An all-purpose villain, Harvey showed up in most of Columbia's serials of the era, including Atom Man vs. Superman (1949), Adventures of Sir Galahad (1949), Batman and Robin (1949), Captain Video (1950), and the studio's final chapter play, Blazing the Overland Trail (1956). He also appeared in Columbia's "A" product (Picnic), "B" pictures (Women's Prison) and two-reel comedies (the Three Stooges' Merry Mavericks). Fans of 1950s horror films may recall Harvey as Mac in Revenge of the Creature (1955) and Lester Banning in Creature with the Atom Brain (1955). Don C. Harvey was married to actress June Harvey.

Trivia: Awarded the 1944 "Villain of the Year" award by the Photo Press Fan Poll, handsome, dark-haired Pierce Lyden had performed in Little Theater and vaudeville prior to entering films in 1940. Paramount reportedly briefly considered him leading man potential, but the son of a cavalry horse breeder was instead destined to become one of Hollywood's best "dog heavies" (so-called because this nasty breed was not averse to kicking a sleeping dog), appearing in more than 125 B-Westerns and serials between 1940 and 1956. He later added television to his repertoire and would become one of the most prolific performers of the 1950s. In retirement, Lyden kept a bygone era alive by frequently sharing his memories with B-Western and serial buffs and writing on the subject for various genre publications. The veteran performer was inducted into the Cowboy Hall of Fame in 1979, honored with the prestigious Golden Boot Award in 1992 and was the 1997 recipient of Nebraska's Buffalo Bill Award.

Trivia: Six-foot-tall American actor Rory Mallinson launched his screen career at the end of WW II. Mallinson was signed to a Warner Bros. contract in 1945, making his first appearance in Price of the Marines. In 1947, he began free-lancing at Republic, Columbia and other "B"-picture mills. One of his larger roles was Hodge in the 1952 Columbia serial Blackhawk. Rory Mallinson made his last film in 1963.