Thursday, November 08, 2007

Tim McCoy RR equipment 1938 #1


Scan000010426, originally uploaded by bucklesw1.

Best dressed bill crew I ever saw.
Looks like they just stepped out of the movie "Some Like It Hot".

6 comments:

Bob Cline said...

Another great set of photos Buckles. This is one of the very few shows that was literally built new from the ground up. It's a shame it only made it for so long during 1938.

Buckles said...

Didn't last long enough to any mud on the wagons.
Brings to mind the time my mother told me I should wash the elephant truck and my dad said, "It shows we've been some place."

Anonymous said...

Here, in the days before television, they had a substantial crew of billers. Today with all the competition in entertainment: computers and electronics in general, movies, tv, cable, dish, satellite radio, iphones, ipods and idon'tKnowWhats, you'd think that it would make sense to have "more" billers and promoters in front of a show.
Arena shows are starting tickets at the bottom end of $40. and it makes you think why a GOOD CIRCUS can hardly get $15. with enough "sold" per day to make the nut. Remember a gallon of gas is $50. and milk is $4.

Anonymous said...

Didn't McCoy's equipment famously sit on a siding for months after the show closed? (Around Washington?) I seem to remember one series of pictures taken over time where you could literally see the weeds growing up around it.

Anonymous said...

I believe the snappy dresser at the left end of the photo is Col Clint Finney.

About half way down the line, the tall guy in the light overcoat is Mike Kitzman, son of Francis.

Mike told me that the window-size pictorial posters had not been printed on time for opening and in the first town the lithographers only had 2-sheets and assorted dates to work with.

For the uninitiated: a 2-sheet is twice as big as a 1-sheet and is generally too big for window work.

Anonymous said...

Richard Reynolds says - -

This McCoy opera and 1947 Sparks were the only new rail shows to have been built from the ground up since when, maybe ever? All the preceding ones seem to have been copped together with equipment, rail cars etc. from numerous sources. Of course other shows were equipped with new cars from time to time but not in their beginnings.