Well, I thought this time that I might discuss my lurid past. It involves something that most ladies like The Blonde in the house could care less about. So, this may be just for us old guys. Yep, for example in my unaware days back when I was a pre teenager, I played things like cowboy and Indians. What is worse I and my friends used cap pistols. We were unaware that by using them that we had a good chance of using real guns to shoot someone. Luckily, none of my old friends or I have done so, but the potential was always there. We just didn’t realize it, and no one bothered to tell us. We were alright in one respect and that was that, we never really played cowboys and Indians. Rather, one side was the bad guys (black hats) and the other side was the good guys (white hats).
That was probably due to the fact that the Grade B Westerns back then were usually a battle with the bad guys. There weren’t many battles with the Indians, believe it or not. The main Indians around were Tonto and Red Ryder’s Little Beaver. Some of the Westerns were musical – always when the heroes were Gene Autry or Roy Rogers. I even saw Roy in his first movie (when he was known as Lenard Slye). He was a villain in a Gene Autry shoot-em-up! However, that pales when compared to the fact that I was about four rows back at a theater in West View, Pa. when Gene appeared on stage. He even had his sturdy horse, Champion with him. Ah, those were the good old days!
Yep, the Grade B Westerns were a lot of fun. There were all types of good guys. There was Johnny Mack Brown for example. He had been a college football running back. The NFL didn’t pay much in those days. There was Tex Ritter who also sang, and Don “Red” Barry who was not a communist, but fought the bad guys with the best of them. Then there was Charles Starett who had a twist in his movies. He would ride into town and would notice some bad guys at work. He then would gallop out of town, change horses, put on a mask and come back as the Durango Kid. I used to think that he was giving the bad guys plenty of time to do their evil deeds. I also wondered what would happen if when he came in as the Durango Kid, the Lone Ranger came in from the other direction. Would two masked guys think the other was a bad guy?
Most of the gun battles in these movies took place out of town as that way no civilians would get caught in the crossfire. You especially did not want the heroine to get nicked prior to the hero riding out of town into the sunset. Obviously, he couldn’t stay as he had to be ready for his next movie. A hero with a wife and kids just didn’t cut it. To get back to the out-of-town gun battles, they took place in hills with big rocks to hide behind. The good guys and bad guys both used six shooters which apparently were fixed somehow as they mostly shot more than six times without re-loading. That was good for us cap gun shooters as most of the cap guns used rolls of caps so we could shoot many times. I did have at one time a Roy Rogers cap gun that was a six shooter. It did not use a roll, but had flat round caps. I soon found that I was at a disadvantage, so I went back to my other cap gun.
I might mention that when I compare our old cap guns with the video games available today and the weapons used in them, I wonder! Hmm, I hope that they don’t shoot anybody for real!
Barry Evans is a columnist for Villages-News.com.