In 1953, the Channel 6 property housed the sets for the
daily Western “Action in the Afternoon”
The Philadelphia Inquirer
By Ralph Vigoda
October 18, 1999
The Copper Cup
Bar, the best-known saloon Huberlie, Mont., during the 1880s, has long been
dismantled. The hanging tree on the outskirts of town, where they bad guys
often met their ends - usually at midafternoon on a Friday – is gone. The
horses that stood passively, tied to the hitching post, haven’t been seen in
nearly 50 years.
The memories
though remain.
“One time,”
said Bill Bode, who had the tear-you-hair-out job of making sure everything in
Huberlie ran smoothly, “we heard this crunching noise, very loud, and it scared
the hell out of us. We didn’t know what it was. We didn’t know if it would
happen again. It turned out a horse bit the microphone.
Microphones
were on the hitching posts and just about everywhere else in the town of
Huberlie, which in reality was no frontier outpost but a field beyond the
studios of Channel 6 (then WCAU-TV) on City Avenue. That’s where television’s
only live Western, Action in the Afternoon, was beamed into sets across
the country at 3:30 p.m. Monday through Friday.
No one on the
studio lot – or watching at home – had to be reminded that it wasn’t really the
1880’s Noise from trucks and buses and planes that sometimes muted the dialogue
provided evidence for that.
It was in fact
1953 the nascent days of television, when shows filmed in Philadelphia such as Candy
Carnival and Gene Crane and Big Top with Ed McMahon, formed the
backbone of CBS programming.
Action in
the Afternoon lasted a year and a week: from Feb. 2, 1953 to Feb. 9, 1954.
It featured a new story each week, with the hero – Jack Valentine, who played a
character named, appropriately enough, Jack Valentine – usually killing,
arresting or forcing the villain out of town by Friday.
Although the
show was doomed by a lack of sponsors, the idea lived on. Gunsmoke soon
followed with a similar format and similar characters. Action in the
Afternoon featured Mary Elain Watts as Red Cotton, the sassy belle at the
Copper Cup, Sam Kressen as Sheriff Sam Mitchell; and Gene Corbett as his wife,
Amy.
John Zacherle,
who later gained a following as a TV host named Roland during the
monster-and-ghouls film craze of the late ‘50s and ‘60s, played Grimy James,
Jack Whitaker, who became a well-known CBS sports announcer, had a bit part. Walter
“Piggy” Barnes, who played with the Eagles from 1948-1951, had a recurring
role.
“He was huge,
and we used him because he could fight – because we had people fighting all the
time,” said Bode, who led one or two directing teams for the program’s
duration. “He was a bad guy in the early days, but later, when we found out the
SOB could act, he became a good guy.”
Barnes who
died in 1998, went on to play in spaghetti Westerns with Clint Eastwood.
Bode, now 73
and a resident of Winter Park, Fla. Was 27 when he was hired; hi assistant was
recent college graduate Jim Hirschfield. Les Urbach, a Hollywood dialogue
coach, was executive producer.
The show also
featured music director Dick Lester, whose behind-the-scenes job required him
not only to select the proper music for action and love scenes, but also to
keep his ear tuned to City Avenue traffic.
“Dick had to
pick music to jot just fit the emotion of the scene, but pick music that would
cover the noise from buses and trucks and those damn airplanes,” said Bode.
Dick Lester is
better known as Richard Lester, director of two Beatles movies and other
critically acclaimed films.
The idea for a
Western was pitched by station manager Charlie Vanda to CBS executives Hubbell
Robinson and Harry Omerle. (the name of the fictional town came from HUB-ell
and Om-ERLE). A Western town was constructed where the WCAU parking lot is now,
and indoor sets were created. The false-front Main Street featured a bank, a
jail, a Wells Fargo office – which blew down and had to be hastily re-erected
just before the first broadcast – and the office of Huberle Record. The
blacksmith’s stable was off to one side, as a totem pole, built to hide, a
1950s telephone pole.
“There was a
creek running through the property, and we’d damn it up when we wanted to have
water fights,” said Irv Gubin, 76, a cameraman on the show.
The budget for
a week’s worth of programming, said Bode, was about $6,500. “With that we had
to put out 2 ½ hours – the equivalent of one movie – every week,” he said.
Days began at
8 a.m. and frequently lasted until midnight, with constant rewrites, rehearsals
and planning for next week.
A big problem
during shooting was the distance between the sets. Actors had to sprint to get
from Main Street to the Copper Cup.
“If we were
going to an interior shot, it could take 60 seconds for an actor to get
inside,” said Hirschfield, 69, who splits his time between New York and Long
Beach Island. To fill the time, he said, the Tommy Ferguson Trio played Western
songs.
Still, viewers
at home must have thought it strange to watch a cowboy whom they had just seem
outside, taking a leisurely stroll toward the saloon, walk through the swinging
doors a minute later, completely out of breath after a 200-yard dash.
Sometimes,
scenes scheduled for 60 seconds had to be condensed to 10. And scenes scheduled
for 10 seconds had to be stretched to a minute. That, said Bode, separated the
actors from the pretenders. The sheriff and his wife were masters.
“Sam and Jean
were incredible,” he said. “They could cut out or make up stuff on the spot.”
But they
couldn’t prevent all the gaffes. Gubin, a lifelong Philadelphian who worked at
WCAU from 1948 to 1988, remembers bad guys falling dead before they were shot.
Hirschfield recalls a near-disaster in which the villain of the week sat
astride a horse, a rope tied to the hanging tree and the noose around the man’s
neck. The horse suddenly began to walk away, forcing the director to cut
another scene while the crew made a real-life rescue. Bode said Valentine once
frantically jumped on a horse to make a high-speed chase to capture some bad
guys – except that the horse refuse to run.
And Bode still
laughs in retelling the shock when a microphone clipped to Barry Cassell, who
played Huberle’s resident shady character Ace Bancroft, fell off as he rode
through town on a buckboard. He had to stop the carriage and improvise a scene
to retrieve it.
But perhaps
the oddest scene occurred off camera. A stagecoach got loose and rolled off the
set and down a hill, smashed into production manager Frank Fischer’s car.
“Just think
what it was like” Bode said, “to go to the insurance company and explain your
car has been hit by a stagecoach.”
