A day on The Annie Oakley Set

When The Annie Oakley TV Show premiered in the fall of 1954, I couldn’t wait for it to air each week. One of the main reasons for that was Jimmy Hawkins, the young actor -- my age -- that played Annie’s kid brother, Tagg.
I had wanted to be on TV or in the movies ever since I was born. We got our first television set in 1947, when I was just about five. All the stations ever ran in those early days of TV were B-Westerns. And it was tons and tons of those wonderful, black & white, cowboy serenades that I was brought up on.
All my young peers at school thrived on sports. Not me. I hated baseball, hated football, hated basketball, hated soccer, hated them all. I loathed all sports. All I ever wanted to be was riding through the whispering hills with Johnny Mack Brown, clattering along happy trails with Roy and Dale, or just back in the saddle again with Gene and my other cowboy heroes. My sights were set on being a movie cowboy, and that was all there was to it.
With that in mind, please try to understand how I felt when my Uncle George told us that he had just been hired by Gene Autry’s Flying A Productions, and that he had recently begun working in his regular profession as a script supervisor on The Annie Oakley TV Show.
Holy Toledo, I thought. Holy Toledo was Tagg Oakley’s response to almost everything anyone ever said on the Annie Oakley Show. My uncle told us all about the experiences he was having working with Gail Davis (who played Annie), Brad Johnson (Deputy Lofty Craig), and Jimmy Hawkins (Tagg, of course), while they toiled together at Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch Western Town movie set in Placerita Canyon (near what is now Santa Clarita).
The only thing he failed to mention that day was if -- and when -- I would be visiting the set. I was so disappointed after he left, I think I must have just sat down and cried.
What can I do, I thought, to get my Uncle George to invite me out to visit the Annie Oakley set. For days, it seemed, I spent hours in my school classroom daydreaming, not paying attention to either my teacher or the lessons, all because I was brutally obsessed with coming up with a way to get to meet Annie, Lofty, and Tagg.
Finally it came to me. The next time we saw each other I would tell Uncle George that a bunch of us kids had just started a Tagg Oakley fan club, and that I had been elected the president.
Hey, it’s hard to believe, but my Uncle George bought the whole story, hook, line, and sinker. I was a shoo in.
Mom had to drive. Heck, I was still only eleven -- just about twelve -- though I looked older, I thought. I don’t really remember how we got from one end of the San Fernando Valley to the other, because there still weren’t any freeways back then. But we did.
We found ourselves driving for a while on a winding canyon road that took us past a little town called Newhall. A short while after that, we took a sharp left turn into Placerita Canyon. We were looking for The Melody Ranch (the old Monogram Ranch where many of the old B-Westerns had been filmed), which we had been told, would be on our right. Placerita Canyon really didn’t look like a movie set belonged anywhere nearby. There were oil derricks scattered here and there, several small truck farms, and an occasional tractor, but not what we were looking for. Not a full-fledged Western Town with wagons, townspeople, horses and, most of all, the cowboys.
Wait a minute, there it was. A sign -- back there, Mom. Slow down. Whoa. Turn around. Yeah, that’s it. Over there, there. Take that road -- the one with the cactus on either side.
There were a lot of trees surrounding Melody Ranch, and the backside of the Western Street, which faced the Placerita Canyon Road, had looked like a high, wooden fence to us.
Entering the gate felt like we were intruding onto the grounds of a small, private, Spanish hacienda. We passed what must have been Gene Autry’s home away from home -- a comfortable adobe layout -- then continued on through a small Mexican village.
From that point, we could see a large bus which had Gene Autry’s name painted on the side. It was parked, along with the equipment trucks and a honeywagon/dressing-room, behind some of the false fronts of the Western Street.
Mom pulled over and stopped. We were getting so used to this movie set stuff by now, we automatically listened for human movement before we got out of the car.
We saw some people mulling near a table where donuts were plentiful and a coffee urn had been set up. Mom asked them if they knew where The Annie Oakley TV Show Company might be shooting. One laid back cowboy-type pointed in one direction, while a man wearing a sheriff’s star casually pointed in another. We shrugged, deciding that the lawman’s way would more than likely be the best bet to follow.
We squeezed ourselves through a small passage between what looked to be two buildings, but I knew were only fakes. I had been around long enough by now to catch the phonies -- glassless windowpanes; curtains fluttering; sunlight seeping through the cracks. I was really becoming a pro.
Stepping out onto Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch Western Street was really awesome. If I hadn’t known two minutes earlier that it was 1954, I would have bet it was 1884. With no movie crew in sight, all we could see was what appeared to be an active, late nineteenth-century, western town -- with a wagon or two crossing here and there, horses and riders passing by, and townspeople bidding each other a morning howdy.
As brief as it was, I felt I had been given a rare look back into the past -- a past I was in love with -- even though I usually only saw it through the minds of writers and actor’s interpretations; plus the eye of a Mitchell Camera.
Uncle George saw us before we saw him. He came running across the dusty street to welcome us. He explained that he had been rehearsing with the director and actors in one of the buildings across the street and that was why he wasn’t able to meet us earlier. He said he had to get back to work and he left us, moving across the street just as the crew appeared and began setting up for the next scene.
Mom and I stood back behind the sound truck watching, as Annie, Tagg, Lofty and several other Western actors ran through a scene while the director looked on. All while the cameramen, grips and electricians checked the lighting and measured with a tape for focal distance.
We took a few pictures with our little Brownie Hawkeye then kept very quiet as the scene was performed for the big camera.
When the director called, “Print,” and before I even knew what was happening, my uncle grabbed Jimmy Hawkins and brought him across the street to meet us.
“Steve, this is Jimmy Hawkins,” my uncle said, introducing the two of us.
“Holy Toledo,” I stammered, not realizing that I was using Tagg Oakley’s favorite phrase.
Jimmy chuckled. “I don’t ever say that in real life,” he told me. “It’s just a stupid saying that my character, Tagg, uses in the scripts.”
We both stood there for a moment or so, with me not really knowing what to say. Then Hawkins spoke again.
“George tells me that you have a fan club going for me. Is that true ?” he asked.
“Uh, oh, uh,” was all I could say. I had completely forgotten about the little white lie I had told my uncle.
“Uh, sure. Yes. I mean, yeah,” I went on, blubbering. “It’s not anything big. Just a few of the neighborhood guys who watch your show all the time,” I fibbed again.
“And you’re the president, I hear,” said Jimmy.
“Uh, I guess so,” I answered, with a noticeable shake to my voice.
“Well, that’s neat, “said Hawkins. “No one’s ever had a fan club for me before.”
I tried to change the subject to something else but Hawkins kept hammering away about the fan club. Today, when I look back on it, I sometimes think that just maybe he had seen through my thin charade and was just playing along for my uncle’s sake. I lucked out; someone called both Jimmy and my uncle back to work. I wasn’t able to talk to either one of them until lunch, and by then both had forgotten about my fabricated fan club.
After lunch, Mom and I noticed some men positioning a covered wagon near one of Gene Autry’s barns. Within minutes, the Annie Oakley crew had broken away from their location on the Western street and were moving everything, camera and all, setting up in front of the wagon, which was now adorned with loaves of phony, black & white wrapped, delicious, Wonder Bread -- the show’s sponsor.
They were about to shoot several commercials. We watched as Gail Davis and Jimmy Hawkins promoted their sponsor’s product, joking between takes, with the crew laughing the loudest at Hawkins, who was now becoming more of a regular kid in my eyes.
Once, when Davis and Hawkins stepped away to rehearse their lines, I went over to the covered wagon and stood where Annie and Tagg had been standing and Mom snapped my picture.
Later on that afternoon, they were doing a stagecoach arrival scene in the middle of the street. Lofty, played by Brad Johnson, was doing a fight scene with one of the heavies. They rehearsed and rehearsed, then, when they called for quiet and began shooting, an airplane flew over going real slow, canceling the shot automatically. Everyone had to wait for what seemed like forever until the small aircraft was completely out of sight -- and hearing range.
I finally met Gail Davis and found her to be charming -- just as nice as the character of Annie Oakley she played on TV. Brad Johnson was also a very friendly person. They both allowed Mom to take a picture of me with them. Jimmy even joined us for a photo. We laughed and had a great time until the assistant called it a “Wrap.”
On the long drive home, Mom and I talked forever about the day we had just spent. We were almost home when she turned to me and said, “How long will it take you to collect the letters?”
“What are you talking about,” I gasped. “What letters?”
Her eyes squinted a little, quite possibly from an oncoming car with its brights on. “The Tagg Oakley Fan Club letters,” she reminded me. “You’re Uncle George told me that Jimmy Hawkins is expecting a fan letter from every boy in the club.”
“Holy Toledo,” I gasped.