Wild Bill Hickok
Wild Bill Hickok
First broadcast in 1951, Wild Bill Hickok was a juvenile western adventure sponsored by Kellogg Cereals. Guy Madison starred as Marshal Wild Bill Hickok and Andy Devine was cast as his grainy-voiced and fun-loving sidekick, Jingles B. Jones.
Wild Bill Hickok was a simple show, full of good-natured comic relief and a bit of not-so-good-natured gunfights to add a bit of excitement. Wild Bill was the hero – a strong and fiercely brave western Marshal along the same lines as The Cisco Kid and Hopalong Cassidy. Hickok would inevitably get into a fistfight with outlaws and emerge victorious.
At the end of the show, Jingles and Wild Bill would mount their respective horses, Joker and Buckshot, and ride into the sunset.
The radio show was loosely based on the life and times of James Butler Hickok, better known as Wild Bill Hickok and a gunfighter, scout and lawman in the American Old West. Many of his exploits are fiction, but it made great fodder for radio and later, for television. The real Hickok first traveled west as a stagecoach driver and then became a lawman in the states of Nebraska and Kansas.
The real Hickok also fought in the American Civil War and gained fame as a marksman and top scout for the Union Army. He was a professional gambler who was frequently rumored to have been in shootouts and was killed while gambling (poker) in a saloon in the Dakota Territory.
Andy Devine, (pictured opposite on left, Guy Madison on right) who played Jingles on the radio show, was a sought after character on many other radio shows, including Breakfast at Sardi’s, a human interest show which premiered in 1941 and starred Tom Breneman as host (Breneman also created the show) until his death. Garry Moore and Cliff Arquette were subsequent hosts of the show.
Devine was also a guest on The Fitch Bandwagon, along with Eddie Cantor. Eventually, he landed a part in the extremely popular comedy, Jack Benny Program, as Buck Benny, which featured western spoof skits.
In 1950, Andy Devine was featured on the radio show, Lum and Abner, a comedy, with Zazu Pitts, Cliff Arquette, Francis “Dink” Trout and Opie Cates. The show took place in a fictional town called Pine Ridge, a hillbilly town in an Arkansas hamlet, where the largest building was the General Store.
Later, Wild Bill Hickok made its debut on television, starring the same cast. The radio show was in competition with Roy Rogers and the Cisco Kid, but there seemed to be room for all – and eventually all three shows successfully made the transition from radio to television.
Happy listening my friends,
