21 November, 2022

Dear Dale:

  Paul Fix is a good one I loved him as Micah on The Rifleman. When I was little I wanted a toy double barrel shotgun like he had.  One Christmas or birthday I forget which there was a long present and it was a double barrel shotgun that fired those plunger darts.  I was so happy.  I used to sit in the old vinyl recliner and put the foot rest partly up and pretend it was a stagecoach... lol.   I would watch Gunsmoke and Wild Wild West that way lol.   History Direct has some Paul Fix letters but they want way too much.    I saw the two that were Bud Perkins Collection and am glad you got the one.  Paul was in TAGS but only a very small part in one of the color episodes so I look for him but do not really want to spend a whole lot.

 Did I tell you I actually have a copy of Bud Perkins' book?  I had forgotten his name but I think I bought it right from him around 1976 or 1977.  I know I was in High School.  I thought it was going to be more of a history than it turned out to be.  It was like taking 50 pages and folding it and staple down the middle with a thicker cover.  It was interesting since it had at least 100 cowboy stars most I think had the inscriptions to Bud on them.  Might have a been some older ones that didn't I cannot remember now.  I know I have that somewhere but think it is in one of the file cabinet drawers so this Thanksgiving will look for it.  When I find it I hope my Tom Monroe picture is in there, but kind of doubt it.  He I think intended on more than one book.   I think maybe some of the lesser knows he was going to put in a second one.  I am pretty sure I found this in a magazine ad.  It might have been the old Antique Trader newspaper.

 When I do find it I will type up a list of names and if any match those you have I will scan the cover and pages and send you.  That is a good provenance for them.

 I hope you are all over your cold.  

 Take care, your pal Scott

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21 November, 2022

 Morning, Scottie,

We're doing pretty good here now. My sinuses are somewhat better. Hope you're ok, too.

 What you describe as a young kid hits home here. I, too, would come home from school and at 4PM I'd make sure I was in front of the TV and watch old oaters for an hour everyday. To this day, I still love westerns. I just sometimes have wondered what happened to me to make me so western oriented. This, you will find funny, Scottie...Do you remember way back when milk bottles were made of glass and had  cardboard stoppers. These stoppers had a finger tab. You're put your fingernail under the tab and pull the stopper for the bottle out. At a very young age (say about 8 or 10). I looked at the stopper after it had been pulled out of the bottle...With the tab pulled out, and in the up position, in my eyes, it looked like a cowboy hat. The kids in the neighborhood and I would get large pieces of cardboard and cut them in large round shapes, and then cut a shape in the middle of the circle that looked like the tab in that stopper for the milk bottle. We'd open up the stopper tab in the middle of the large circle, and they looked like a large cowboy hats! The gang all made them!....We'd run around with those on, towels wrapped around our necks like Zorro pretending we were cowboys!

We were all from a poor neighborhood (much like the Little Rascals). I'll bet the parents would see us, denying that any of the kids belonged to them...

 We made our own push mobiles..God help any little girl's baby carriage ....We'd commandeer the wheels and assemble our vehicles. We'd steer those with our feet while being pushed with a long stick by the kid behind pushing you...Hahaha!

Again, parents would deny they had any familial relationship to any of us...raising Cain about the little girl's baby carriages left sitting on their axles in the grass in their yards.

Those were the days....

But somehow all those old oaters were ingrained in my mind...I'm going on 76 years old and I still love them...especially now, their autographs. I probably have 15 or 16, 4 inch binders, full of cowboys. They mean everything to me...many like friends, not wanting to part with any of them. They are a large part of me.

Your friend,

Dale