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Galloping through life's troubles Ashland man owns 2,000 old westerns By PAUL FATTIG ASHLAND -- As a financial analyst working for Uncle Sam, Doug Wills had enough stress. What he needed was a healthy recreational activity offering a few hours of relaxation, the kind he enjoyed during those carefree childhood days watching grade-B western movies in the local theater in Woodland, Wash. That's when the accountant saw the ad in the magazine, the one offering copies of a Red Ryder western movie called "Cheyenne Wildcat." He bought the film. Fast forward 20 years. Wills now has some 2,000 grade-B western movies and serials in his video collection. "It began as a kind of a release," he explained. "Two or three of us would get together to watch these movies two or three times a month. It would take us back to our childhood where we would forget about all our problems." Wills, 56, and his wife, Jeanne, recently moved to Ashland to be near a daughter and their two grandchildren. He retired in 1995 after first working for the General Accounting Office, and later the Bonneville Power Administration. Wills, who formed a club with two other grade-B western movie and serial aficionados in Portland, hopes to find others who share his interest in the Rogue Valley. "It's not for everyone but it was something people my age loved to see when we were 6 to 12 years old," he said. "These characters were our heroes back in those days. "It was the white hats versus the black hats with a lot of gunfire," he added. "They weren't deep, complicated plots. For the first half of the movie, the bad guys always seemed to be winning. But the good guys always won at the end." The grade-B westerns were low-budget films to serve as a secondary feature to the main event. The serials were shorter versions which ran for 12 to 15 episodes. Out of the 231 grade-B western serials made, the club, which has no name, collected 220 of them, he said. His shelves also are chock full of other genre B serials like the Green Hornet, Captain Midnight and Flash Gordon. But his passion is for the old westerns. Of the 66 Hopalong Cassidy films produced, he has collected 54. But he also has videos starring Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Gabby Hayes. There is Monte Hale in "Pioneer Marshal" and Rocky Lane in "Renegades of Sonora." A strapping fellow named John Wayne was in the 1934 flick, "Winds of the Wasteland." On one wall in Wills' home is a large poster announcing the release of "The Kid from Broken Gun" starring Charles Starrett with his sidekick Smiley Burnette in 1952. "That was the last movie Starrett ever made," Wills said. "We still haven't got that one. That's one we want to get." Starrett made about 65 Durango Kid movies in about 16 years, Wills said. "He would crank out about eight movies a year," he said. "I have about 50 of them." A child of the 1940s, he spent much of his spare time during his childhood at the nearby theater where a dime would buy his way into the world of western fantasy. Saturday afternoons were spent watching the serials. "Local businesses would put them on to let all us kids go in free while our parents went shopping," he recalled. "The serials would always end to make it look like the star was about to get killed. So you had to go back each week to find out what happened." Of course, the star in the white hat was never killed. He -- sometimes she -- would invariably foil the villain's fiendish plot at the last second. "All we had was going to the theater," Wills said. "Back in those days, the cowboys in the white hats -- the good guys -- were the big heroes." The biggest of all in his mind was the Durango Kid played by Charles Starrett. "He was my all-time favorite -- he was the Robin Hood of his day," Wills said. Actually, the Durango Kid often wore a black hat. "But he rode a white horse," Wills said. "He played two roles. He played the sheriff in town, but when he wanted to save someone, he'd sneak off into the woods and come out dressed in black and riding a big white horse." In fact, Wills attended a convention of western B movie buffs in North Carolina in 1984 where he had his photograph taken with Starrett. "We also had dinner with Lash LaRue," he said of another cowboy actor from that era. "He was the guy with the whip." In the movies, not at the dinner table, he noted. Wills also has attended the B western movie festival at Lone Pine, Calif. "That's where they made all the movies," he said as he opened a scrapbook full of photographs and pointed out a lonely pinnacle. "That's the Gene Autry rock I'm standing by." Although the bad guys tried their best to do in the good guys, it would be television in the early 1950s that would bring about their demise, he said. "We kind of got away from them at that point," he noted. Wills rode off into the sunset, to high school, Portland State University and to the world of work. But he never forgot the pure relaxation provided by the old movies and serials. One serial he recalled watching as a child was "Dangers of the Canadian Mounted" starring Jim Bannon. "I saw the first, second and third chapters, then I got sick and didn't see what happened," he said. "The guy was getting blown up on the train. But I missed the fourth chapter and I never knew how the guy was able to save himself." Until he began gathering video copies of the serials more than three decades later. "I finally got a copy of it and watched what happened," he said, adding, "Yeah, he was able to save himself." Mail Tribune Copyright � The Mail Tribune 1998, Medford, Oregon USA