Careening Spaceships & Thundering Hooves: The Magic, Memories And Friendship Of Buster Crabbe … And Of An Era!

By Steve Vertlieb: When I was a little kid,prior to the Civil War, I had an imagination as fertile and as wide as my large brown eyes, dreamily filled with awe and wonder. My dad brought home our first television set in 1950. It was an old RCA Victor TV with a screen not much bigger than my youthful head, but I was glued to its black and white imagery like flies on butter. I was but four years old. In those early days of television, programming didn’t even begin until late afternoon or the dinner hour, but I would sit in front of the little brown box staring longingly at the Indian head portrait frozen in Cathode promise.Among the programs especially tailored for children in those pioneering days were The Pinky Lee Show, Howdy Doody, The Roy Rogers Show, The Gene Autry Show, Hopalong Cassidy (whose premature silver hair brought to mind my dad, and so became a beloved celluloid role model), Disneyland (1955) Wild Bill Hickcock, The Cisco Kid, Space Patrol, Rod Brown of the Rocket Ranger...