Hoppy

(Editor's Note:  The following history of fictional cowboy, Hopalong Cassidy, was provided by guest blogger Bob Randall.  Thank you, Ranger Bob, for sharing your unique knowledge of this iconic figure with our readers!)

Hoppy
by Bob Randall
 
One of my childhood heroes was a tough-talking, roughhousing, hard-drinking, quick-to-fight-or-settle-an-argument-with-a-gun, redheaded cowboy whose smokes were hand-rolled.   His horse wasn’t white and neither was his hat. He didn’t bother hanging cattle rustlers or horse thieves. He just shot ‘em. He took a bullet in the leg and had a slight limp thereafter. I’m not talking about any guitar-strumming, girl-chasing, slick-back hair, smooth-talking Hollywood movie star. This guy was real.
 
That is only partly true. Most of that is a description of the early personification of my real hero. Just after the turn of the century 120 years ago, a guy named Clarence Mulford wrote a book. It was a success, so he wrote some more. I was a middle-aged man before I even knew those books existed. It was all a precursor of my hero who made movies and tv shows, rode a white horse, wore black clothes and even a black hat. His hair was pure white, he drank sarsaparilla, and was the foreman of the Bar-20 ranch. He captured villains unharmed and turned them over to the law for justice. He didn’t smoke and he didn’t cuss. He took a bullet in the leg but somehow recovered well enough that he didn’t limp anymore. The nickname stuck anyway. That was quite a transition from the page to the screen.
 
No, he didn’t have a partner who drove an open-topped Jeep. His horse wasn’t a palomino, and he didn’t sing songs in a cowboy band. 
 
No, he didn’t ride with a guitar and his partner wasn’t named Froggy.
 
No, he didn’t wear a mask, shoot silver bullets, or answer when addressed as “Kimosabe.”
 
His sidekicks were California Carlson and Lucky Jenkins. His horse was named Topper and he didn’t have a dog. 
 
When Hollywood decided to make a western movie about this character, William Boyd was cast as Hopalong Cassidy, and the great American western genre was born. TV and a case of mistaken identity in the newspapers ruined all of that. He was broke and unemployed. He sold everything he had to buy the rights to the character and the movies. He parlayed that into the television Hoppy that I grew to admire.
 
When I was in grade school and we played cowboys at recess, I was always Hopalong Cassidy. One of my other buddies was Roy Rogers and another was the Lone Ranger. A fourth kid was always the bad guy. He didn’t want to be the villain, but we shot him dead every recess anyway.
 
Bill Boyd was born and raised in southeastern Ohio. Cambridge, OH, had a Hopalong Cassidy Festival complete with a parade of cowboys, a contest for wannabe big screen cowboy hero look-a-likes, and opportunities to buy memorabilia and replica items. There was even a Hopalong Cassidy Museum. I’m glad I went to the festival about ten years ago. The museum burned to the ground in 2016. Do all good things come to an end? At least, some do.