As a teenager growing up in Knoxville I can remember that during the early 1930s The Great Depression was still on. Before girls became a significant part life, the cowboy matinees at the Strand and Joy theaters were a regular Saturday morning pastime. My friends and I all tried to help Ken Maynard, Tom Mix and a lot of other cowboy heroes capture the rustlers and shoot it out with the bad guys. Sometimes it was awfully hard though, not the shootouts… coming up with the 10-cents admission. Life was an adventure, and as I grew older, and wore this country’s uniform, another “cowboy” – Tim Holt – showed me that Hollywood was more than shootem ups and bad guys.

But life in the days before the words Pearl Harbor became a household phrase was pretty much filled with trying to make ends meet. For me it would begin early in the week when my best friend, Fred and I would start “junkin’” early in the week, which was pushing a large wooden home made push cart around to the garages and gas stations downtown, and picking up discarded metal or “junk”, which we later sold at the junk yard for a couple of pennies per pound.

Sometimes we would also reluctantly leave our warm beds early in the morning and go down to the newspaper plant. We would be assigned a downtown corner and buy a bunch of papers for 3 cents each and try to sell them for a nickel each. “PAPER, PAPER, GET YOUR MORNING PAPER” we would shout ‘til we were hoarse. The problem was that if we didn’t sell them, they were ours. We always lived for the time when the pink paper EXTRA came out with late breaking news, cause they would sell out fast. Since we seldom had any breakfast before we left home, there was always the temptation to spend any profits at the 2 for 15 cents hamburger place we had to pass on the way home.

During the hot summers, we would wait at the grocery store up the street until the Coca-Cola deliveryman came by. We would buy a 24-bottle case of “dopes” for 80 cents (borrowed from Grandma)—swipe a chunk of ice from the icebox and chop it up in a 5-gallon “crock” (when it was not being used to make home brew). Then we would ice the cokes in the crock and roll it in my little red wagon to the nearby gas factory or cotton mill. We would sell them to the workers when they came out for lunch or on a break for a nickel apiece. Our profit would be about 35 or 40 cents, depending on whether we had to pay for the ice or not.

If all else failed, Grandma might be sweet-talked out of a dime for the show!

A lot of the fantasy’s and daydreams created by these picture shows centered on escaping from the Tennessee hills and somehow getting to this place where it all started. If I did, I surely would be “found” and get to be a cowboy star too—and maybe even get to kiss Shirley Temple when she grew up.

These fantasies’s picked up a lot of speed, when we heard that the Strand theater would have a “Amateur Hour” — and — the participants would be admitted free! Well, my best friend and I didn’t plan to be contestants, but the idea of getting in free did catch our attention. We thought we would enter the theater as participants, then just disappear in the dark and enjoy the show.

It didn’t quite work that way for me (he hid under a seat and wasn’t discovered) because I was found and led back stage with the other nervous contenders. I had no idea of what I would do, but I did know most of the words to “The Strawberry Roan”, which was the current Gene Autry hit, and I decided to go with it!

I followed a fellow who did a rope trick, and a little girl in black and gold who did a sprightly tap dance. My turn came and with more “guts than gumption.”, I stood in the spotlight in the center of the stage and sang at the top of my lungs —

Once I got into it, I could see the people in the front row laughing and beginning to sing along on the chorus, and I began to enjoy it myself. A stern look from the piano player made me stop after singing the chorus for the 3rd time, and go on with the song.

Anyway, after the emcee came around behind everyone holding his hand over each head, and having the audience applaud, the little girl in black and gold that tap-danced won first place, but I came in second and won five dollars!

This, on top of the fact that Gene Autry actually came to our town with his show a little later, and I was able to corner him at the coffee shop next to the Bijou theater and get his autograph on the back of a white popcorn bag (it said “We are pals, Gene Autry”) made me just know that I had whatever it took to be a cowboy star someday.

As I grew older, my taste in movies broadened with the Ruby Keeler/Dick Powell musicals, the classic stories like “Treasure Island” and “David Copperfield” and so on, but my young boy’s fantasy still sat in the saddle of that Strawberry Roan. I started watching a lot of shows with a guy named Tim Holt on the screen.

Life just didn’t happen though like I imagined. The war came along and I joined the Aviation Cadets. I can see us now as me and my mama rode the streetcar down to the post office for me to enlist. She was crying and saying “I’d just as soon as put your head on this streetcar track and let it run over you, than have to sign these papers”. Of course she got over it when my Aunt Lilly brought her over to Nashville to the classification center and she saw how good I looked in my uniform.

Well, all the tests and things I took showed I would be a pretty good Navigator or a Bombardier, so they sent me to Navigation school and a little later I graduated and became a 2nd Lieutenant—boy, was mama proud of me then! But the A-26 Attack bomber was coming into use then and it only needed a 3 man crew, a pilot, a gunner, and a combination Navigator-Bombardier, so guess what? —they then sent me to Bombardier school!

When we “combination men” finished Bombardier school, we were to join the much decorated 319th Bomb Group, which was leaving the European war after a long and meritorious service, and regrouping in Columbia, South Carolina for a go at the Japs. However there were delays and until they could work things out, they sent us to Victorville, California to be Bombardier Instructors.

Glory Be! Victorville was only a hop and a jump out of Los Angeles and Hollywood, California. Could my boyhood dreams really be coming true after all?

Well, you probably won’t believe this, but things just got better and better! One of the first things I heard was that Tim Holt (you know, the cowboy picture star) was also an instructor and administrative officer there!

I worked with students on the bomb trainer—this is a small tower-like structure with 3 round metal legs on rollers and is about 12 or 15 feet high. It has a Norden bombsight mounted on the top, and the target (which you are supposed to hit) is on a small, robot-like pad. Both are motorized and controlled by your calculations and manipulations of the bombsight. The student makes his calculations for the simulated bomb run—starts twisting the bombsight knobs, and this causes the trainer and target to move. At the appropriate time, the “bomb” is dropped and a plunger arrangement pierces the target where your bomb would have hit. Pretty neat, huh?

While working with a student on the trainer one day, I needed some help, and who should this “help” be, but Tim Holt! The conversation turned (of course) to the movies and my desire to see the inside workings of a studio.

The next weekend (and several thereafter), my friend Kaminsky and I took the train to Los Angeles and headed for RKO Studios where we were admitted and given a guide for a tour. Later the guide was dropped and we had free access except for closed sets.

And oh, what wonders we beheld!

We watched one of “The Saint” series being filmed with Tom Conway (brother of George Sanders, who was married to Zsa Zsa Gabor), We walked thru a massive prop warehouse, containing elaborate items of all descriptions that had been and were being used in various movies. Also, we watched craftsmen build an entire hillside that appeared to fade into the distance, but was actually only 20 or 30 yards in depth!

Everyone seemed to go out of their way to be nice to us—mainly, I’m sure because the country was at war and we were in uniform. We ate in the commissary with all the colorful extras in costumes and kept searching for familiar screen faces. We had a ball.

My innocence, however, was shattered forever while we were visiting a sound stage for a movie called "Betrayal from the East." It was a Japanese spy story and the scene being filmed was in a huge dark tank of water giving the illusion of a ship sinking in the distance. Smoke and fog were everywhere. The heroine was Nancy Kelly, whom I had admired and been smitten by in movies like Jesse James. The cameras had been following her as she supposedly swam from the sinking ship. When the scene ended, she pulled herself up on the edge of the tank and let out a string of profanity to the effect that the G D water was so f ___ng cold it would freeze the B___ off a polar bear and could someone please get her a f___ ng towel and some brandy!.

I was stunned!! In those days, nice girls, particularly heroines, did not even think those words, much less say them!

The next weekend they were still filming "Betrayal." We were invited to sit in as background extras in a Chinatown Bar Scene, sipping fake liquor as the scene was shot and reshot for most of the afternoon. Boy, talk about being up close and personal! And—at long last I was actually going to be in a movie! As it turned out however, the scene was so dark and smoky, you couldn’t even tell who anyone was.

I later learned that Tim was always doing nice things for others and that we were no exception. One time he arranged a party at one of the country clubs for us, and a busload of young ladies arrived (we all said they were starlets) for the guys who did not have dates. He also had a lot to do with getting the Bob Hope show to come to Victorville.

The contacts we made and the people we met thru the RKO visits led to other exciting weekend happenings, like, getting into a radio broadcast by a young singer named Frank Sinatra — a concert in the Hollywood Bowl — going backstage after the show at Earl Carroll’s Vanities and ogling the half naked showgirls — being introduced by a drunken buddy to Roy Rogers who was trying to make a call in a phone booth — a bunch of us riding down Hollywood Blvd early one Sunday morning in an old open classic touring car (complements of the older boyfriend of “Tommye’s”, a chorus girl at Paramount) — dancing to Harry James’ Orchestra at the Hollywood Palladium — going to Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey’s place on the pier at Venice and wild cab rides across town in the early hours of the morning, with a sweet young thing clinging to your neck as you tried to catch the last train back to Victorville before Monday morning roll call.

So, thanks in part to Tim Holt — for one brief shinning moment — before the reality of being called back to the 319th Bomb Group to help fight the “dirty Japs” — this young East Tennessee hillbilly thought he had surely already died and gone to heaven!