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Chapter 9 Tales of Wells Fargo I was kicking around Hollywood, doing odd jobs for this studio or that, but nothing to set the world on fire. L.A. is a big city, but by word of mouth, I began to get acquainted with people there who knew horses. I liked to hang around the Hudkins Brothers Stables in North Hollywood , the L. C. Goss Stables, the Myers and Wills Stables, or Fat Jones’ Stables on Sherman Way. Ralph McCutcheon, who had furnished Black Beauty for Fury, also had great horses at his ranch in the San Fernando Valley. Those guys would let me ride some of their stock, and by watching and spending time with other Western stuntmen, I started learning how to do fancy mounts and trick riding. One friend I made was an old Hollywood horse wrangler named Johnny Hawk, who’d been handling stock for the movie industry since the silent film days. Bob Burroughs, a rodeo cowboy I’d met when working on Quantrill’s Raiders, had introduced me to Hawk, who lived near Bob close to Hudkins Brothers Stables. Hawk told me he wrangled on a television show called Tales of Wells Fargo, which NBC had begun airing in March 1957. Starring Dale Robertson, another guy from Oklahoma, the show enjoyed good ratings moving into its second season. Dale’s good looks had gotten him his first acting job. He had served in the army during World War II, and while stationed in California, he went to Hollywood to have a professional photographer take a picture of him for his mother, Varvel. The photographer put a big blowup of that picture in his studio window, and Dale started getting letters from talent scouts who had seen his picture. After the war he returned to California. In 1949 he played Jesse James in Fighting Man of the Plains, a movie produced by Nat Holt for 20th Century Fox, and his career took off. In 1956 western writer Frank Gruber wrote a script for a show about 96 Cowboy Stuntman a troubleshooter working for the Wells Fargo stagecoach line, and he and Nat Holt got Dale signed on to play the lead character, Jim Hardie. Dale later told me they promised him things he never got, and his relationship with Holt and Gruber was never that good. I asked Hawk if he knew Dale and he said, “Sure. Would you like to meet him?” I told Johnny that I sure would. I thought I could double Dale, and we set a date for Hawk to walk me on the set so I could talk to him. I didn’t know if I had much of a chance, since Hawk said Dale was quite a cowboy, but I wanted to give it a try. Anyway, Hawk set up a meeting for me in August 1958. They were shooting the series at the old Republic Pictures lot, then owned by Revue Studios. When Hawk and I got there, they were in the middle of a scene. As we stood on the edge of the Western town set, here came Dale riding up the street on Jubilee. He did a running dismount like a calf roper tying a calf and the director hollered, “Cut and print!” I’m thinking, I don’t know if he needs a double or not. That was pretty good. Like me, Dale was an athlete. He had won sixteen letters at the Oklahoma Military Institute, was a good boxer, and knew horses as well as or better than I did. In other words, he was a good rider and certainly able to do his own stunts, though he had a bad knee from a World War II jeep wreck. In fact, he did do some of his own stuff, especially for establishing shots where he had to be in the picture. But when you’re starring in a series and have a grueling production schedule, if you get hurt, that shuts the company down and everybody’s out of a job. Time is money in that business. That’s why Hollywood uses stuntmen—for insurance purposes . I’d had a lot of people say that Dale and I resembled each other. I was tall, dark-haired, and left-handed. Dale was an inch and a half taller, darkhaired , and also used his left hand. Of course, that was just a gimmick. He was really right-handed, but he always shot with his left hand...

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