Trivia: Chuck Connors attended Seton Hall University before embarking on a career in professional sports. He first played basketball with the Boston Celtics, then baseball with the Brooklyn Dodgers and Chicago Cubs. Hardly a spectacular player -- while with the Cubbies, he hit .233 in 70 games -- Connors was eventually shipped off to Chicago's Pacific Coast League farm team, the L.A. Angels. Here his reputation rested more on his cut-up antics than his ball-playing prowess. While going through his usual routine of performing cartwheels while rounding the bases, Connors was spotted by a Hollywood director, who arranged for Connors to play a one-line bit as a highway patrolman in the 1952 Tracy-Hepburn vehicle Pat and Mike. Finding acting an agreeable and comparatively less strenuous way to make a living, Connors gave up baseball for films and television. One of his first roles of consequence was as a comic hillbilly on the memorable Superman TV episode "Flight to the North." In films, Connors played a variety of heavies, including raspy-voiced gangster Johnny O in Designing Woman (1957) and swaggering bully Buck Hannassy in The Big Country (1958). He switched to the Good Guys in 1958, when he was cast as frontiersman-family man Lucas McCain on the popular TV Western series The Rifleman. During the series' five-year run, he managed to make several worthwhile starring appearances in films: he was seen in the title role of Geronimo (1962), which also featured his second wife, Kamala Devi, and originated the role of Porter Ricks in the 1963 film version of Flipper. After Rifleman folded, Connors co-starred with Ben Gazzara in the one-season dramatic series Arrest and Trial (1963), a 90-minute precursor to Law and Order. He enjoyed a longer run as Jason McCord, an ex-Army officer falsely accused of cowardice on the weekly Branded (1965-1966). His next TV project, Cowboy in Africa, never got past 13 episodes. In 1972, Connors acted as host/narrator of Thrill Seekers, a 52-week syndicated TV documentary. Then followed a great many TV guest-star roles and B-pictures of the Tourist Trap (1980) variety. He was never more delightfully over the top than as the curiously accented 2,000-year-old lycanthrope Janos Skorzeny in the Fox Network's Werewolf (1987). Shortly before his death from lung cancer at age 71, Chuck Connors revived his Rifleman character Lucas McCain for the star-studded made-for-TV Western The Gambler Returns: The Luck of the Draw (1993).

Trivia: Her mother was a piano accompanist for dancer Ruth St. Denis; Maxwell traveled with her as a child, and at age three made her first stage appearance in a dance number. After taking singing lessons, as a teenager she became a band vocalist and sang on radio. She trained for the stage at the Pasadena Playhouse. In 1942 MGM signed her as a contract player, and she played leads and second leads in numerous movies, both light and dramatic. During World War Two and the Korean War she entertained American servicemen all over the world. Her film work tapered off after the mid '50s, and she entertained in top nightclubs and appeared in several stage productions in stock. She starred briefly in the TV series Bus Stop. In 1967 she headlined a burlesque-type stage show in Brooklyn; her act included a striptease. From 1944-46 she was married to actor John Conte, and from 1954-60 she was married to screenwriter Jerry Davis. She died at 50 of high blood pressure and a pulmonary disorder.

Trivia: The son of a real-estate man, blonde, athletic John Charles Andes became Keith Andes when signed to a contract by David O. Selznick in the 1940s. At that time, Andes, a recent Temple University graduate, was a member of the Army Air Force, touring in the all-serviceman stage production Winged Victory. His stage reputation rested on his rich baritone singing voice, which he seldom got to utilize in his film and TV work. After several failed pilot films, Andes was given his own starring series in 1959: the syndicated This Man Dawson, in which he played an ex-military man hired to clean up a corrupt police department in a unnamed city. To bone up on his role, Andes was permitted to sit in on the LAPD three-man board which determined who would be selected as police officers--and became so adept at his "job" that he ended up rejecting a few candidates! Andes' later TV work included a 13-week stint as Glynis Johns' long-suffering husband on the 1963 sitcom Glynis. Never completely abandoning the stage, Keith Andes co-starred with Lucille Ball in the 1960 Broadway musical Wildcat, and later in the decade headlined a touring company of Man of La Mancha.

Trivia: General purpose actor Don Megowan began his acting career in 1951 in Robert Parrish's crime thriller The Mob, playing a beefy longshoreman. Usually playing low-mentality thugs, he made several fleeting appearances in Westerns and crime dramas. Larger roles came his way in Disney productions as Colonel Billy Travis in Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier (1955) and as Marion A. Ross in The Great Locomotive Chase (1956), and starting in the second half of 1950s he also became a familiar figure to fans of horror and science fiction -- although pretty much unrecognizable, Megowan played the title role of the land-bound Gill Man in John Sherwood's The Creature Walks Among Us (1956), and that same year was the star -- this time as the hero, the sheriff trying to understand a series of seemingly random, grisly killings -- in Fred F. Sears' The Werewolf; and in 1962, he was the lead in Wesley Barry's The Creation Of The Humanoids, a script that gave Megowan the largest amount of dialogue of his whole career . On television, Megowan was seen as Captain Huckabee on the 1961 syndicated adventure series The Beachcomber, replacing Adam West, who had been cast in the role in the pilot episode. And he later played Lucille Ball's boyfriend, whose indisposition gets her Lucy Carmichael involved in stuntman work, on The Lucy Show. One of the actor's more enjoyable assignments during the '70s was as the gum-chewing desperado in Mel Brooks' Western spoof Blazing Saddles (1974). Megowan died of throat cancer in 1981.