B-Western Movies

By kiki

Early one morning a few years ago before the sun came up, I turned the TV on and watched the local news for a short while; there was nothing new on the news channels, same old thing, some homie got shot, and the shooter got away, no, it was not the Zimmerman-Martin case. I then decided to switch to the Western Channel. An old B-Western movie, "Stage to Mesa City," circa the late 1940s, starring Lash La Rue and his sidekick, Fuzzy Jones, AKA Al St. John, played. I sat up in bed to watch it, and as I started getting into the movie, nostalgia began to creep in, "bang, bang, I got you; you're dead," I said as I was shooting at the TV with my fingers. Connie looked at me and did an eye roll "crazy old man," she muttered under her breath as she walked out of the bedroom.

But, crazy old man or not, watching that old cowboy movie brought back many memories. Memories of how hard I needed to work during the late 1940s: turning bricks to dry, shining shoes, delivering breakfasts to the Simons Brickyard workers, and selling newspapers on street corners, to come up with the twenty-eight cents it cost to watch my beloved silver screen cowboy heroes at the Royale Theater on Whittier Blvd in East Los Angeles. Some cowboy stars we kids loved to watch were: Johnny Mack Brown, Wild Bill Elliott, Tim Holt, Allan "Rocky" Lane, and Sunset Carson. And, of course, there were Roy Rogers and Gene Autry too. And who can forget their beautiful horses; the sidekicks were Gabby Hayes, Richard Martin, Smiley Burnette, and Andy Clyde, among others. There were many, too many to mention, on the villain side, but one you could count on to be in most movies was Charlie King; King was called 'Blackie’ in all the B-Western films he played in. Even as kids, we noticed that the good guys never lost their hats in a fight or fell off their horses, and the bad guys always died with their hats off.

On Sundays, after Mass at Mount Carmel Catholic Church in Simons, we had to go to Mass, or our parents wouldn't let us go to show; the gang, around six of us, would walk to the corner of Greenwood and Sycamore to get the Montebello bus. After dropping our seven cents bus fare in the coin box and getting our bus transfers, we would sit in the back of the bus, not that we had to; we just thought it was cool to sit in the back. We were cool guys, or so we thought. The bus would take us to Whittier and Montebello Blvd, where we would then take the bus heading west on Whittier Blvd to East Los Angeles. Finally, we would get off on Atlantic and walk one block west on Whittier Blvd to the Royale Theater, where we would pay our fourteen cents to watch two full-length B-Western movies, a series, cartoons, newsreels, and coming attractions.

After watching the movies, we would pay our seven cents bus fare to return to the Brickyard. We would return home while there was still daylight, giving us time to play cowboys. First, I would strap on my homemade cardboard gun holsters; yes, I would make holsters out of cardboard for my two cap guns; we were poor! Then, I would mount my horse, a broomstick, and with guns a-blazing, I would go after the bad guys….Days of Innocence!!