City Ave. was once the Wild West [archived newspaper article]

 

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.”