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: A former Mousketeer, Johnny Crawford is best remembered for playing young Mark McCain on The Rifleman (1958-1963). His career slowed after he reached adulthood when he was relegated to supporting roles.

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: While attending the medical school of Columbia University, Gerald Mohr was offered an opportunity to audition as a radio announcer. The upshot of this was a job at CBS as the network's youngest reporter. He moved to the Broadway stage upon landing a role in The Petrified Forest. Shortly afterward, he became a member of Orson Welles' Mercury Theatre. He was chosen on the basis of his voice alone for his first film role as a heavily disguised phony mystic in Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939). Following wartime service, the dark, roguish Mohr was selected to play thief-turned-sleuth the Lone Wolf in Columbia's B-picture series of the same name. His detective activities spilled over into radio, where Mohr starred as Philip Marlowe, and TV, where in 1954 he was cast as Bogart-like café owner Chris Storm on the final season of the syndicated Foreign Intrigue. Gerald Mohr died at the age of 54, shortly after playing a crooked gambler in Funny Girl (1968).

Trivia: The son of a brewery owner, steely-eyed American character actor Paul Fix went the vaudeville and stock-company route before settling in Hollywood in 1926. During the 1930s and 1940s he appeared prolifically in varied fleeting roles: a transvestite jewel thief in the Our Gang two-reeler Free Eats (1932), a lascivious zookeeper (appropriately named Heinie) in Zoo in Budapest (1933), a humorless gangster who puts Bob Hope "on the spot" in The Ghost Breakers (1940), and a bespectacled ex-convict who muscles his way into Berlin in Hitler: Dead or Alive (1943), among others. During this period, Fix was most closely associated with westerns, essaying many a villainous (or at least untrustworthy) role at various "B"-picture mills. In the mid-1930s, Fix befriended young John Wayne and helped coach the star-to-be in the whys and wherefores of effective screen acting. Fix ended up appearing in 27 films with "The Duke," among them Pittsburgh (1942), The Fighting Seabees (1943), Tall in the Saddle (1944), Back to Bataan (1945), Red River (1948) and The High and the Mighty (1954). Busy in TV during the 1950s, Fix often found himself softening his bad-guy image to portray crusty old gents with golden hearts-- characters not far removed from the real Fix, who by all reports was a 100% nice guy. His most familiar role was as the honest but often ineffectual sheriff Micah Torrance on the TV series The Rifleman. In the 1960s, Fix was frequently cast as sagacious backwoods judges and attorneys, as in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962).