Trivia: American actor Ward Bond was a football player at the University of Southern California when, together with teammate and lifelong chum John Wayne, he was hired for extra work in the silent film Salute (1928), directed by John Ford. Both Bond and Wayne continued in films, but it was Wayne who ascended to stardom, while Bond would have to be content with bit roles and character parts throughout the 1930s. Mostly playing traffic cops, bus drivers and western heavies, Bond began getting better breaks after a showy role as the murderous Cass in John Ford's Young Mr. Lincoln (1939). Ford cast Bond in important roles all through the 1940s, usually contriving to include at least one scene per picture in which the camera would favor Bond's rather sizable posterior; it was an "inside" joke which delighted everyone on the set but Bond. A starring role in Ford's Wagonmaster (1950) led, somewhat indirectly, to Bond's most lasting professional achievement: His continuing part as trailmaster Seth Adams on the extremely popular NBC TV western, Wagon Train. No longer supporting anyone, Bond exerted considerable creative control over the series from its 1957 debut onward, even seeing to it that his old mentor John Ford would direct one episode in which John Wayne had a bit role, billed under his real name, Marion Michael Morrison. Finally achieving the wide popularity that had eluded him during his screen career, Bond stayed with Wagon Train for three years, during which time he became as famous for his offscreen clashes with his supporting cast and his ultra-conservative politics as he was for his acting. Wagon Train was still NBC's Number One series when, in November of 1960, Bond unexpectedly suffered a heart attack and died while taking a shower.

Trivia: Born Ermes Effron Borgnino in Hamden, CT, to Italian immigrants, Ernest Borgnine spent five years of his early childhood in Milan before returning to the States for his education. Following a long stint in the Navy that ended after WWII, Borgnine enrolled in the Randall School of Dramatic Art in Hartford. Between 1946 and 1950, he worked with a theater troupe in Virginia and afterward appeared a few times on television before his 1951 film debut in China Corsair. Borgnine's stout build and tough face led him to spend the next few years playing villains. In 1953, he won considerable acclaim for his memorable portrayal of a ruthless, cruel sergeant in From Here to Eternity. He was also praised for his performance in the Western Bad Day at Black Rock. Borgnine could easily have been forever typecast as the heavy, but in 1955, he proved his versatility and showed a sensitive side in the film version of Paddy Chayefsky's acclaimed television play Marty. Borgnine's moving portrayal of a weak-willed, lonely, middle-aged butcher attempting to find love in the face of a crushingly dull life earned him an Oscar, a British Academy award, a Cannes Festival award, and an award from both the New York Film Critics and the National Board of Review. After that, he seldom played bad guys and instead was primarily cast in "regular Joe" roles, with the notable exception of The Vikings in which he played the leader of the Viking warriors. In 1962, he was cast in the role that most baby boomers best remember him for, the anarchic, entrepreneurial Quentin McHale in the sitcom McHale's Navy. During the '60s and '70s, Borgnine's popularity was at its peak and he appeared in many films, including a theatrical version of his show in 1964, The Dirty Dozen (1966), Ice Station Zebra (1968) and The Wild Bunch (1969). Following the demise of McHale's Navy in 1965, Borgnine did not regularly appear in series television for several years. However, he did continue his busy film career and also performed in television miniseries and movies. Notable features include The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and Law and Disorder (1974). Some of his best television performances can be seen in Jesus of Nazareth (1977), Ghost on Flight 401 (1978), and a remake of Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1979). In 1984, Borgnine returned to series television starring opposite Jan Michael Vincent in the action-adventure series Airwolf. That series ended in 1986; Borgnine's career continued to steam along albeit in much smaller roles. Between 1995 and 1997, he was a regular on the television sitcom The Single Guy. In 1997, he also made a cameo appearance in Tom Arnold's remake of Borgnine's hit series McHale's Navy.At age 80 he continued to work steadily in a variety of projects such as the comedy BASEketball, the sci-fi film Gattaca, and as the subject of the 1997 documentary Ernest Borgnine on the Bus. He kept on acting right up to the end of his life, tackling one of his final roles in the 2010 action comedy RED. Borgnine died in 2012 at age 95.

Trivia: While still of high-school age, Marjorie Lord was a contract ingenue at RKO, playing the deadpan leading lady in two Wheeler and Woolsey comedies: Off Again On Again (1937) and High Flyers (1937). She moved to Universal Pictures in the 1940s, where she was decorative (and little else) in the studio's serials, westerns, and "B" pictures (notably 1942's Sherlock Holmes in Washington). Her best role during this period was opposite James Cagney in Johnny Come Lately (1943); she later had the chance to essay a villainous characterization in the independently produced The Strange Mrs. Crane (1948). Full stardom eluded Lord until 1957, when she replaced Jean Hagen as Mrs. Danny Williams on TV's The Danny Thomas Show (aka Make Room for Daddy). She played Kathy Williams until the series' cancellation in 1964, then re-created the role in the 1969 "revival" series Make Room For Granddaddy. She continued acting until the mid-1980s. The mother of actress Anne Archer, with whom she appeared in the 1978 TV movie Harold Robbins' The Pirate., Lord died in 2015, at age 97.

Trivia: Born in Indiana and raised in Texas, Andrew Duggan attended Indiana University on a speech and drama scholarship. He was starred there in Maxwell Anderson's The Eve of St. Mark, which was being given a nonprofessional pre-Broadway tryout; on the basis of this performance, Duggan was cast in the professional Chicago company of the Anderson play. Before rehearsals could start, however, Duggan was drafted into the army. After wartime service, Duggan began his acting career all over again, working at his uncle's Indiana farm in-between Broadway and stock engagements. In Hollywood in the late 1950s, Duggan was co-starred in the Warner Bros. TV series Bourbon Street Beat and was featured in such films as The Bravados (1958), Seven Days in May (1964) and In Like Flint (1967). He also was starred on the 1962 TV sitcom Room for One More and the 1968 video western Lancer. Because of his marked resemblance to Dwight D. Eisenhower, Duggan was frequently cast as generals and U.S. presidents. Andrew Duggan's last screen appearance was in The Private Files of J. Edgar Hoover.

Trivia: Amid the all-too-common stories of child performers who never made a happy transition to adult lives and careers, Beverly Washburn's career stands as one of the great success stories. Born in Los Angeles on Thanksgiving Day 1943, she made her uncredited screen debut in 1950, at age six, as the first victim of a plague-carrier in the thriller The Killer That Stalked New York. Even at that early age, she had a screen magnetism that shone through to audiences (and makes the death of her character, midway through the movie, a highly emotional moment for the viewer, despite taking place off-screen). The following year, she turned up (once more uncredited) playing the little girl who unknowingly entertains two visitors from the center of the earth in the feature film Superman and the Mole Men (1951), which introduced George Reeves in the role of Superman, and which was later re-edited into the two-part Adventures of Superman episode The Unknown People. She also had one great scene with James Stewart in Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), and appeared in small, uncredited roles in George Stevens' Shane (1953) and Edward Dmytryk's The Juggler (1953), starring Kirk Douglas, which was notable as the first Hollywood film shot in Israel. The mid-'50s saw a sharp downturn in film production and mass layoffs at most of the studios, and for the next five years, Washburn primarily worked in television, on series as different as Dragnet and The Loretta Young Show -- where the young actress was part of the stock company for both series -- and The Jack Benny Show. Apart from being a very quick study and an appealing child, Washburn was also popular with producers and directors for her ability to cry on cue, which eliminated the need for many a retake. Her range and ability to memorize lines -- and not just her own, but those of the performers around her -- allowed her to take roles on numerous anthology shows and guest spots on series such as Father Knows Best, Fury, and Leave It to Beaver, and she was also one of the regular cast members on an earlier Barbara Billingsley series called Professional Father. In 1957, she returned to feature films by way of Walt Disney in the movie Old Yeller, playing Lisbeth Searcy, but a lot of her work remained confined to television, across a whole range of series, including anthology series, comedies, westerns, dramas, and crime thrillers, plus appearing as a sketch player in The Hollywood Palace, one of the live variety shows of the early/middle '60s.Washburn was unable to professionally break stride as she reached her early twenties, owing to her family's financial situation. Her father contracted a serious illness in the early '60s, and in addition to being unable to work, he required expensive medical treatments. Washburn actually went to court -- successfully -- to get the trust fund money her parents had started to put aside for her from age six released, in order to pay for her father's treatments. She remained busy throughout the 1960s, and among the many series in which she turned up was the original Star Trek. Fans will likely remember Washburn as Lieutenant Galway, the luckless crewmember who succumbs to the old-age-like radiation sickness encountered on planet Gamma Hydra 2 in the episode "The Deadly Years" -- though it must be conceded that the 20-second century hairdo she was forced to wear in that episode did not become her (making her look like a young Alice Ghostley) She also appeared in episodes of The Streets of San Francisco and Scarecrow and Mrs. King and was in the 2003 pilot to Las Vegas. Washburn was still working in 2009, and, indeed, in that decade had found herself participating in cult celebrations of one of the stranger feature films in which she ever appeared, Jack Hill's Spider Baby (1964).

Trivia: A onetime opera singer, wizened, glowering American character actor Richard Hale spent most of his screen time playing small-town sourpusses. Many of his movie appearances were small and unbilled: he enjoyed larger assignments as outlaw patriarch Basserman in Preston Sturges' The Beautiful Blonde of Bashful Bend (1949), the Soothsayer in Julius Caesar (1953), and the father of the retarded Boo Radley (Robert Duvall) in To Kill a Mockingbird (1962). He also showed up with regularity on television, often cast as a taciturn farmer or hard-hearted banker on the many western series of the 1950s and 1960s. One of Hale's showier parts was in the Oscar-winning All The King's Men, as the father of the girl killed in an auto accident caused by the drunken son (John Derek) of demagogic Willie Stark (Broderick Crawford), his character name: Richard Hale.

Trivia: Bald, hook-nosed character actor John Harmon launched his film career in 1939. Harmon's screen assignments ranged from shifty-eyed gangsters, rural law enforcement officials and hen-pecked husbands. He was seen in films as diverse as Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux (1947) and the "B" horror flick Monster of Piedra Blancas. Star Trek fans will remember John Harmon for his supporting role in the 1967 episode "City on the Edge of Forever."

Trivia: Redheaded leading man Robert Horton attended UCLA, served in the Coast Guard during World War II, and acted in California-based stage productions before making his entree into films in 1951. Horton's television career started off on a high note in 1955, when he was cast in the weekly-TV version of King's Row as Drake McHugh (the role essayed by Ronald Reagan in the 1942 film version). The series barely lasted three months, but better things were on the horizon: in 1957, Horton was hired to play frontier scout Flint McCullough in Wagon Train, which became the highest-rated western on TV. Horton remained with Wagon Train until 1962. He then did some more stage work before embarking on his third series, 1965's The Man Called Shenandoah. When this one-season wonder ran its course, Horton toured the dinner-theatre circuit, then in 1982 accepted a major role on the popular daytime soap opera As the World Turns. Horton continued acting until the late 1980s. He died in 2016, at age 91.

Trivia: Robert Fuller spent his first decade in show business trying his best to avoid performing. After his film debut in 1952's Above and Beyond, Fuller studied acting with Sanford Meisner at New York's Neighborhood Playhouse but never exhibited any real dedication. He tried to become a dancer but gave that up as well, determining that dancing was "sissified." Fuller rose to nominal stardom fairly rapidly in the role of Jess Harper on the popular TV western Laramie (1959-63). Once he found his niche in cowboy attire, he stuck at it in another series, Wagon Train, turning down virtually all offers for "contemporary" roles. When westerns began dying out on television in the late 1960s, Fuller worked as a voiceover actor in commercials, earning some $65,000 per year (a tidy sum in 1969). On the strength of his performance in the Burt Topper-directed motorcycle flick The Hard Ride, Fuller was cast by producer Jack Webb as chief paramedic Kelly Brackett on the weekly TVer Emergency, which ran from 1972 through 1977. In 1994, Robert Fuller was one of several former TV western stars who showed up in cameo roles in the Mel Gibson movie vehicle Maverick.