Cowboys of the Fifties | Eastern North Carolina Now

    If you were a young boy in the early fifties, you were no doubt a cowboy fan. I was then and I still am today. I will be the first to admit it was a sanitized world with white hats and back hats used to make it easy for impressionable young kids to tell right from wrong.

    My earliest memories of cowboys probably started with visits to the two movie theaters in Little Five Points. The Saturday morning serials were a staple of all the boys in my era.

    I guess the first cowboy I remember was Red Rider & Little Beaver. It started with the comic books and eventually went through the serials and finally TV. The two most memorable things about Red was the marketing campaign that required every little boy to want a Red Ryder "Carbine-Acton Two-hundred-shot Range Model Air Rifle BB gun". Yes I had to look it up. The other I did not know until many years later. Bobby Blake, later to known as Baretta, played little Beaver for a time. The horse was Thunder.

    Here are some of my memories of the other cowboys of my youth in no particular order:

    Gene Autry & Smiley Burnett was the team that had been around for many years prior to my arrival on the scene. Gene Autry was probably one of the better businessmen in the Cowboy industry. He developed the genera to include record sales, movies, and all manner of toys. His horse was Champion. All it takes is a few bars of "Back in the Saddle Again" to take me back in time.

    Roy Rogers & Dale Evans were a team that expanded the horizons for many kids. My earliest exposure to them was a set of 78 records that my family had which featured the "Sons of the Pioneers" circa 1930's. One of the featured tracks on that set of records was The Ballad of Pecos Bill with all the sound effects and the harmony of the group. My cousin Art and I would sit for hours in front of the RCA player and listen to those records over and over again. If you never heard it check this out.



    Roy went on to star in his own TV show featuring Nelly Bell, his horse Trigger and dog Bullet. One of the tunes I keep on my ITunes playlist is "Happy Trails to You?. Whenever I get a bit down and out, this song snaps me back to those happy days.

    As I matured into my late single digit years, the Lone Ranger & Tonto became one of my favorite TV Shows. The Lone Ranger represented all that was good about life. Today I may quibble with some of the points in The Lone Ranger Creed but as a kid, I had a copy on my wall. No doubt, it was a gift from my mom because it was a mini sermon on doing right which was her strong suit.

    Here are a couple of points from the Creed.

    "That sooner or later somewhere...somehow we must settle with the world and make payment for what we have taken.

    That all things change but truth, and that truth alone, lives on forever".

    All I know about classical music I learned from The William Tell Overture, better known as the Lone Ranger Theme song.

    His horse was Silver and his sidekick was Tonto who was a faithful and loyal friend.

    Hopalong Cassidy is definitely on the list. I had one of his signature hats with the crease down the middle. I also had a lunch box with his picture on it. He was the first to appear on a lunch box in 1950 and started a craze. I wish I still had the lunch box but I can do without the endless parade of Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwiches that I ate daily all the way through grammar school. His horse was Topper.

    For a while, my dad nicknamed me Hoppy.(he had numerous nicknames for me the least attractive of which was Knot head) Even though the Lone Ranger was my favorite, Hoppy was shorter and stuck with me for many years. I the last months of dad's life at 99 he reverted to calling me Hoppy.

    Last but not the least is the Cicso Kid & Pancho. The idea of a cowboy speaking with a Spanish accent did not seem out of place to me at the time. His horse was Diablo. For years, my cousin and I used the ending lines to this TV show as a goodbye. Oh Pancho, Oh Cicso. ( Oh_Pancho_Oh_Cisco.mp3 )

    So until we meet again, Happy Trails to you.
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( May 28th, 2015 @ 9:42 am )
 
Nobody ever died in these TV Westerns. Then along came Sam Peckinpah.



My First and Last Minutes in Vietnam Small History, In the Past, Body & Soul, The Arts A Memorial Day Thought - Updated 2018


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