Trivia: The product of a profoundly unhappy home life, Eric Fleming ran away at age 11 to live the life of a Depression-era hobo. Making his way from California to New York, he worked at a series of dead-end jobs, at one point sweeping the floors of a whorehouse. After a stint with the Merchant Marine, he joined the Seabees at the outbreak of WWII. While lifting a 200-pound iron block, he miscalculated and the block fell directly on his face. Forced to undergo extensive plastic surgery, Fleming left the hospital with the craggy, weathered facial features that would ensure him steady if not always lucrative employment as an actor. Making his debut in a 1944 training film, he did stage work in Chicago and New York, and in 1951 starred on a DuMont TV network kiddie series Major Dell Conway of the Flying Tigers. While his Hollywood film roles were largely confined to standard he-man heroics in such sci-fiers as Conquest of Space (1955) and Queen of Outer Space (1956), he was afforded a wider acting range on stage, exhibiting his singing and dancing skills in the 1955 Broadway musical Plain and Fancy. In 1959 he was cast as trail boss Gil Favor on Rawhide, one of the most popular TV Western series of the era. Feeling that he was being upstaged by younger co-star Clint Eastwood, Fleming left Rawhide in 1966 to seek out film work. After playing a secondary role in the Doris Day comedy The Glass Bottom Beat, he headed to Peru to film the pilot episode of a TV adventure series, High Jungle. While filming a canoeing scene in the turbulent Hullaga River, Eric Fleming fell into the surging rapids and drowned; his mutilated body was not recovered until four days later.

Trivia: After some 15 years on the country & western circuit, singer/actor Sheb Wooley finally cracked popular music's Top Ten in 1958. It was Wooley who introduced the world to the "One Eyed, One Horned, Flying Purple People Eater," which remained the number one song for six straight weeks and stayed in the Top Ten for three weeks more. Thereafter, Wooley's recording career fluctuated between blue-ribbon country & western ballads and silly novelty songs. As an actor, Wooley was seen in such films as Little Big Horn (1951), High Noon (1952), Giant (1956), The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976), and several other films with a sagebrush setting and equestrian supporting cast. From 1961 through 1965, Sheb Wooley played Pete Nolan, frontier scout for the never-ending cattle drive on the weekly TV Western Rawhide.

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.

Trivia: The career of American character actor Robert Dix (son of leading man Richard Dix) has embraced both British and Hollywood productions since 1955. Many of Dix's earliest appearances were in swashbucklers and Westerns; among his larger roles was Frank James in 1960's Young Jesse James. He later showed up in low-budget cycle flicks bearing such titles as Satan's Sadists, Rebel Rousers, and Cain's Cutthroats. In 1970, Robert Dix penned the screenplay for the self-explanatory melodrama Five Bloody Graves.

Trivia: Pleasant-looking Russell Arms parlayed success on radio into a minor screen career during World War II, first under contract to Warner Bros. then as a freelance performer in mostly Westerns. He found more lasting fame as a host/vocalist on the long-running television program Your Hit Parade, on which he appeared from 1952 to 1957. Arms' subsequent television work included guest-starring roles on such diverse shows as Rawhide and Diff'rent Strokes.