There was a bevy of "cowboys" around WBT in the '30s and '40s. Don White, Jack Gillette and Cecil Campbell, along with Claude Casey and many others worked together in different groups with various names. And Don, of course, was a member of the highly-popular Briarhoppers. We turned these pictures over to our crack photo analysis team, and he discovered that Jack and Cecil used the same horse! (Note the encircled identical markings.) A rental, no doubt. And all available evidence suggests its name was Vick. Two of the photos are signed "Happy Trailways." A sponsor's name?

From time to time a few of these vaqueros del piedmonto would venture out Hollywood-way to appear in "musical westerns," with titles like "Swing Your Partner" (1943) and "Kentucky Jubilee" (1951), in which Fred Kirby also appeared. The Tennessee Ramblers, of which Jack and Cecil were members, went out earlier, to sing in Gene Autry's "Ride Ranger Ride" (1936), in Tex Ritter's "Ridin' The Cherokee Trail" (1941), and a few others.

But mostly our caballeros de la Catawba hung their sombreros in the vicinity of Charlotte, doing 15-minute shows on WBT for such patent-medicines as Crazy Water Crystals and Peruna and Hadacol (remember those?), and performing in little auditoriums around the Carolinas.