Bob Sanders: I miss those old westerns on television

Remember when westerns were all over the TV? Some lasted for years, some for only a year. “Wagon Train,” “Cheyenne,” “Have Gun Will Travel,” “The Rifleman,” “Maverick,” and on and on and on.

And now and then a big-budget western movie will come out, “The Unforgiven,” for example, or “Once Upon a Time in the West,” “The Wild Bunch,” etc.

But there is that other group of westerns that, sadly, our children and grandchildren will never know, or not the way we knew them.

I mean those wonderful Saturday afternoon westerns. Two or three of you remember By just a little before World War II, practically every town with a population of 500 or more had a picture show. You still see the buildings as you go through towns like LaFayette, Tallassee, Wetumpka, Sulligent, my hometown. You notice the sad looking marquee jutting out over the sidewalk.

But there’s just a hull there, or maybe some totally different office or business.

But there was a time...

Every theater had its own schedule, arrived at by trial and error. The picture show came to our town when I was nine. I can’t think of anything that thrilled me more, not even when the airplane lit in Bert Guin’s cotton field.

The schedule settled into this: Sunday, the big movie of the week. Monday night, same one. Tuesday, no show. Wednesday night, maybe a good movie, maybe a cheapie. Didn’t matter, ‘cause that was the night of the drawing. The jackpot grew ten dollars each week if there wasn’t a winner, and if it got up to a hundred or so, the theater would be packed. Thursday, no movie. Friday night, the weekend western. And Saturday afternoon and night, same western again.

With the western, you not only got to see Gene or Roy or the Three Mesqueteers or Johnny Mack or Tex or Buck or Lash or Hopalong, you also got a serial chapter, and a comedy, and previews, and perhaps a “selected short subject.”

And we’d talk to our buddies all next week about how the serial chapter ended, and if Red Ryder could possibly have escaped destruction. Our hired man would say, as he expertly rolled a Country Gentleman cigarette, “Boy, that little Bob Steele can fight. He’d whip Gene Autry ... just like that.”

The main producer of those westerns was Republic.

They ground them out by the dozen, not much plot, and generally terrible acting (Gene Autry, bless his good singing heart) may have been the worst actor in history. But we loved them ... and wish we could recapture that kind of Saturday afternoon thrill.

Oh, there was a late show Saturday night, which might be the Dead End Kids or Laurel and Hardy ... or one that made walking home a very scary ordeal.

Bob Sanders is a longtime radio personality with WAUD in Auburn and writes a weekly column for the Opelika-Auburn News.