Word: hopalong
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...crowd-puller, Hopalong would have to concede nothing to the President of the U.S. Last January a crowd of New Yorkers estimated by the police at 350,000 queued up for 25 blocks to shake his hand. This month he drew the largest circus attendance (18,700) ever to pack the Chicago Stadium. For the past year, devoted millions of children and grownups have sat entranced before televised Hopalong Cassidy films...
...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...
Wood on the Fire. But it was the children who put the golden fence posts in Hoppy's old corral. Last year small fry bought 15 million Hopalong comic books. They 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...
...fever has spread to non-Western fields: there are Hopalong Cassidy cookies, candy bars, wallpaper, soaps and watches. A Hopalong Cassidy comic strip runs in 75 daily and 42 Sunday newspapers; every week a network of 500 Mutual radio stations broadcasts the General Foods-sponsored Hopalong Cassidy show (Sun. 4 p.m. E.D.T.). And Composer Nacio Herb Brown (You Are My Lucky Star, Singin' in the Rain) has signed up for the exclusive privilege of writing songs about Hoppy...