B-Western Movies

                                         By kiki

Early this morning, 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, 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 late 1940s, staring Lash La Rue and his sidekick, Fuzzy Jones, AKA Al St. John was playing. I sat up in bed to watch it and as I started getting into the movie nostalgia started to creep in, “bang, bang, I got you, you're dead” I said as I’m shooting at the TV with my fingers. Connie looked at me and rolled her eyes back “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 bought back lots of old memories. Memories of how hard I had to work in the late 1940s, turning bricks to dry, shining shoes, delivering breakfasts to the Simons Brickyard workers, selling newspapers, to come up with the twenty eight cents it cost to go watch my beloved silver screen cowboy heroes at the Royal Theater on Whittier Blvd in East Los Angeles. Some of the cowboy stars we kids loved to watched were, Johnny Mack Brown, ‘Wild Bill’ Elliott, Tim Holt, Allan ‘Rocky’ Lane and Sunset Carson. And of course there was Roy Rogers and Gene Autry too. And who can forget their beautiful horses. The sidekicks were, Gabby Hayes, Smiley Burnette and Andy Clyde, among others. On the villain side there were many, too many to mention, but one that you could count to be in most of the movies was Charlie King, King was called ‘Blackie’ in all the B-Western movies he played in. One thing we, even as kids notice; was that the good guys never lost their hats in a fight or falling off their horses, and the bad guys always died with their hats on.

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 go 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, so we thought. The bus would take us to Whittier and Montebello Blvd’s where we would than take the bus heading west on Whittier Blvd to East Los Angeles. We would get off on Atlantic and walk one block west on Whittier Blvd to the Royal Theater where we would pay our fourteen cents to watch two full length B-Western movies, a series, cartoons, newsreel and coming attractions.

After watching the movies we would pay our seven cents bus fare to get back to the brickyard. In the summers we would get back home while there was still daylight, which gave us time to play cowboys. I would strap on my home made cardboard gun holsters, yes, I would make holsters out of cardboard for my two cap guns, we, were poor! I would mount my horse, a broom stick, and with guns a-blazing I would go after the bad guys….Days of Innocence!!