DOWN T.V. WESTERN MEMORY LANE

HOPALONG CASSIDY RIDES AGAIN

William Boyd as Hopalong Cassidy

Ever since before the taming of the real west, kids have been running around playing with toy guns.

Pulp magazines glorified gunslingers and lawmen—the movies presented heroes and villains with guns in hand as early as 1903, and then television reinforced this image in the 1950's and 1960's.

Cowboys and the wild west became a kid's way of life, and they had their heroes and had toy guns to play with.

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Until the early fifties, John Ford and John Wayne ran the west, and defined it, with help from Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott, Jimmy Stewart, Glenn Ford, Audie Murphy, Joel McCrea and Henry Fonda, in front of the camera (and Anthony Mann, Fred Zinnemann,Fritz Lang, George Marshall, and Henry King in the director's chair).

They rode through westerns of varying degrees of sophistication, first on the big screen and later on television showcases such as Million Dollar Movie, in between the inevitable commercial interruptions and edited-for-television prints.

But beginning in the early 1950's, for any kid born after World War II, ahead of all of these men and their movies came Hopalong Cassidy, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

John Wayne, Randolph Scott and company were great, but they were shooting for a bigger audience that included our parents, and our older brothers and sis ters.

Hoppy, Gene, and Roy were different-they rode the range just for us. They'd all been doing movies since the 1930's, and after a few years 1950's TV watchers would be reintroduced to those movies.

But beginning with the turn of the 1940's into the 1950's, they began coming into our home with western adventures meant for kids born during and after World War II.

I'll always remember my Hopalong Cassidy watch, a black band that looked like a western belt with a picture of Hoppy on the watch face. And when you opened the box, the watch sat on a realistic western saddle just like Hoppy's.

Hopalong Cassidy was my first two-gun hero. He had a great gun set and he wore them both well-most western heroes only wore one gun. And for a kid, it was hard enough getting your parents to buy you a holster and one gun, but to play at being Hoppy, you needed two guns.