A Canadian radio announcer and a Texas schoolteacher who weighed 300 pounds walked onto a TV set in 1959. What happened next made television history.
Lorne Greene had the voice. Deep, commanding, authoritative—the kind of voice that made you stop whatever you were doing and listen. He'd built his reputation in Canadian radio, earned the nickname "The Voice of Doom" during World War II for delivering grim war news, then transitioned to Hollywood. He had experience, polish, and undeniable presence.
Dan Blocker had none of that.
He was a former Korean War infantry sergeant who'd come home and become a schoolteacher in rural Texas. At 6'4" and over 300 pounds, he'd moved his family to California so he could pursue a PhD at UCLA. To pay the bills, he worked as a substitute teacher and picked up the occasional bit part in TV westerns. One day, dressed in his usual Western attire—boots with spurs, gaudy shirt, massive straw hat—he was making a phone call in a Hollywood phone booth when a ...

Soldiers in a Red Cross convalescent home in Marfa, 1919. I saw this photo and thought "Marfa is pretty far out in the middle of nowhere," why would they put it there? So I researched it.
The key to the puzzle is that the Red Cross did not choose actually choose Marfa as an isolated place to send wounded soldiers. The Army was already there in considerable strength. During World War I, Marfa was home to Camp Marfa, the installation later renamed Fort D. A. Russell. The post had originated in 1911 during the Mexican Revolution, when the Army stationed cavalry there to patrol the volatile Big Bend border. During World War I it expanded substantially, housing regular Army, National Guard and other units, and Marfa became an important headquarters for military operations along the Big Bend section of the Mexican border.
By 1918-19, Camp Marfa was becoming a fairly substantial installation. Permanent construction began in 1918, and by the end of 1919 it had a hospital and infirmary, ...