Hopalong Cassidy

Hopalong Cassidy is an old-time radio western, and its announcer bills the hero as the most famous of them all. William Boyd, introduced as the star of the motion picture series, plays Hoppy. Andy Clyde plays California, the partner the opening calls a laughable old character, and the two split the work: Hoppy faces the danger, California supplies the comic relief. Stories begin with an announcer and the ring of silver spurs. They end on spoken credits naming the writer, producer Walter White, Jr., and Clarence E. Mulford as creator of the characters, followed by the line marking it as a Commodore production. Harold Swanton is credited on several stories, and Irvin Ashkenazy on Death Paints a Picture. The trouble in between belongs to the range. Border of Nowhere is set where nobody will serve on a jury, so a judge has to try the case himself, accused rustlers are acquitted for lack of evidence, and a man named Peasley asks two dollars a head for protection. Range War widens the frame to Sweetwater Valley, where homesteaders barricade their ranch houses and wait for cattlemen to ride in. Hoppy rides into that story on his white horse along a cottonwood bottom. The Medicine Man turns on money. Cassidy is three days overdue, four ranch owners are uneasy, and someone has lifted a saddlebag, leaving the money short. That story cuts away to two men scheming over coffee by a campfire, so the scheme takes shape out of the hero's sight. Several tales run on detection. In Death Paints a Picture, a photograph from Mrs. Kingsley goes to the sheriff, a wire comes back from Ranger headquarters in Fort Worth, and her brother matches the description of an escaped convict who had been jailed for robbing a bank. California, sent to comb the honky-tonks for anyone who saw the man last, comes back empty-handed. Another story starts with a week's mail beside the cookstove and leads Hoppy to a tool shed, where he tests the memory of a longtime local named Charlie Borden about a kid named Bannock, whose buried stash the Creeds never got. Hoppy Meets His Match changes the setup: California asks for a story, and Hoppy tells it himself, set on the plains of eastern New Mexico after the Lincoln County War. It puts the partners on a train toward Albuquerque, where the guards of a princess said to own more cows than Jesse Chisholm tell them to move to a car that is already full, and the answer is a polite refusal. For a first listen, Death Paints a Picture shows the detective side, and Range War shows a conflict that takes in an entire valley.