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...Last $300,000. The center of this adulation and applause is 52-year-old, white-haired William Boyd (born in Cambridge, Ohio), who switched in 1935 from romantic roles (The Volga Boatman) to western films. He made 54 Hopalong Cassidy pictures before he was fired in 1943. Because "no one in Hollywood thought of me as anything but Hopalong Cassidy," Boyd found that he could not get another movie job. In no danger of starving, he retired to his California ranch with his fifth wife, exActress Grace Bradley, was down to his last $300,000 when...
Selling the ranch, Boyd put everything he owned into buying up all possible rights to Hopalong Cassidy. After repeated round trips to Fryeburg, Me., he drew up a contract with Author Clarence Mulford, whose original pulp-fiction Hoppy-unlike the softspoken, clean-living movie version-was a cussing, ungrammatical, hard-drinking ranch hand with a game...
...Hoppy films created something of a mass frenzy. Los Angeles' Station KTTV rented one for $250. Twelve months later KTTV showed the same film for the fifth time and paid a rental of $1,000. "People are astonished at the percentage of my fans who are adults," says Boyd. "They're not new fans-they're merely my young fans of 15 years ago grown up a little...
...clamor incessantly for such items as Hoppy roller skates (complete with spurs and jewel-studded ankle straps) and Hopalong bicycles (leather-fringed saddles, handlebars shaped like steer's horns, built-in gun holsters). Because of the craze for Hopalong hats, shirts, chaps, boots, six-shooters and gun belts, Boyd claims that U.S. manufacturers of 56% of all the Western-type merchandise are paying him royalties for Hopalong Cassidy endorsements...
Inundated by the commercial flood, Boyd promises: "We aren't going to overdo it. We'll just keep throwing wood on the fire." But he has endorsed so many products (from bedspreads to pocketknives) that he can't always keep them straight. Of his success Boyd says: "We don't think it's phenomenal. Years ago, a fellow got an idea to build a bridge across San Francisco Bay. People told him he was nuts. One morning we looked up and traffic was going across. Hopalong Cassidy was merely an idea that took 13 years...