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The classified advertisements internet platform Craigslist is one of the ways that collectibles dealers like myself have of trying to find collections to buy. I rarely look anymore on Craigslist for items to buy since most of what is offered there for sale belongs in a junkyard. However listing ads offering to buy stuff are free on Craigslist and so for many years I have been running ads asking to buy the various types of magazines I deal in. I’ve had had minimal results doing that but on rare occasions I get lucky. In early July 2020 I ran an ad offering to buy movie fan magazines in the Hampton Roads area of Virginia. Surprisingly, within two days I received an email from a collector named Calvin Kimsey who lives in my my town of Virginia Beach. It’s nice to have access to a collection nearby instead of the usual situation where you have to drive hundreds of miles to see a collection. Mr. Kimsey told me on the phone he had a few hundred movie magazines for sale. I went to visit him at his home near the beach and sure enough he had a few boxes of movie magazines waiting for me on his dining room table. I was pleased to see that that this magazine collection had a heavy concentration of two of my favorite magazine titles, TV Star Parade and TV Radio Mirror. I also noticed that an adjoining room was full of boxes. I’m always curious about the contents of boxes filling up a room and Mr. Kimsey’s boxes didn’t disappoint me. He had been a collector mostly of Western memorabilia for many years and he was now ready to sell his collection. I made three trips to Mr. Kimsey’s house over the next several days and bought most of what he had. I ended up with about 400 movie magazines, exactly 244 mostly Western comic books and lots of Western movie and TV related hardcover and softcover books.

When I was kid in the 1960s the only Western TV show I ever watched with any regularity was Bonanza which was also the only TV show at all that I remember my father had any interest in watching. The entire 14 TV seasons of Bonanza is available on DVD but I only bought the first seven seasons because Pernell Roberts left the show after that and Bonanza wasn’t quite the same after he left. I was pleased to see Mr. Kimsey also enjoyed Bonanza and had lots of Bonanza collectibles. Notice the magazine TV People with the Bonanza cast on the black cover. Circa 1999 I bought a few high grade copies of this magazine from the mail order dealer Bud Plant who advertised this magazine in his catalog as being from a “warehouse find.”  I sold one on ebay in 1999 for $26. Also about that time I was set up as a dealer at a show in Baltimore while the advisors to the Overstreet Price Guide for comic books were having a meeting there. One of them was a friend of mine, David Alexander, who I had visited at his home in the Los Angeles area to buy some comic books in the 1980s. David stopped by my booth and paid me about $10 for another copy of this Bonanza magazine I had on my display wall. I sold out of what few copies I had left at other shows and haven't seen another copy of this magazine for nearly 20 years until Mr. Kimsey showed me this one. It is in high grade condition and so I assume it’s probably from the Bud Plant warehouse find.

I didn’tt have any interest in Fess Parker’sDaniel Boone TV show in the 1960s. I did however enjoy watching in the early 1960s a rerun of the Davy Crockett TV episodes starring Parker on Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color TV series. The Davy Crockett episodes had originally been broadcast in the 1950s and set off a huge merchandising boom. In the early 1960s the boom hadn’t entirely faded and I remember having a squirrel skin cap and toy flintlock musket like many boys in those days. I was so enraptured with the Davy Crockett TV episodes that I wrote them up as a story but like most of my early childhood writings it didn’t survive the ravages of time. A few years ago I did buy the Davy Crockett TV episodes on DVD in one of those collector tin boxes that the Walt Disney company sometimes uses. If these episodes are ever released on Blu-Ray discs I will buy those too.

Like all the other Western TV shows except Bonanza I never had any interest in watching Gunsmoke. A few years ago I did buy the first season of Gunsmoke on DVD and enjoyed it but I couldn’t talk myself into collecting all 20 seasons. Maybe one day I’ll buy the first few seasons that featured Dennis Weaver as Marshal Dillon’s humorous gimp deputy Chester Goode. The hardcover book with the red cover Gunsmoke A Complete History is one of those nice reference books by the speciality publisher McFarland. Mr. Kimsey didn’t want to part with it and I had to pay quite a bit of money to persuade him he could live without it. The book has slick paper with high quality photographs and I’m sure I’ll enjoy reading parts of it before I try to sell it one day.

Argosy magazine was one of the longest running magazines in American history. It lasted from 1882 to 1978. It started out was a pulp magazine and later became a better produced magazine for mostly working class men with the usual fiction and articles about colorful adventures in exotic locations around the world. I’ve sold on ebay a few issues over the years and I see it offered for sale at the annual Pulpfest convention in Pittsburg I attend. On my first visit to Mr. Kimsey I looked over his printout of items in his collection and I was intrigued by his notation of an issue of Argosy from 1959 with Gunsmoke on the cover. He couldn’t find it then but on my second visit he produced it and I was glad to buy it. The cover is a photo-realistic painting of the reverse angle of the teaser opening of the early Gunsmoke TV shows. Those TV openings showed Marshal Dillon in the foreground with his back to the camera with his opponent facing him in the background.

I’ve been a John Wayne fan almost was long as I can remember. The first Wayne films I saw in a theater or drive-in were probably Rio Bravo and The Alamo in the early 1960s. As a kid in Savannah, Georgia in the 1960s I even made it a habit to watch Wayne’s 1930s B Westerns on the TV late shows. I could tell those movies were low budget poorly produced affairs but with John Wayne walking around and talking in them I still enjoyed them. Later when watching on TV Wayne’s best movies from his heyday in the 1950s and 1960s I became even more enamored with him. Among my large Blu-Ray disc movie collection I have more John Wayne movies than any other actor. Today many big movie stars from before the 1970s are mostly forgotten but not John Wayne. Wayne is the only movie actor in history to have his own regularly produced magazine still being being published today and that is just one testament to his durability. He is still remembered largely because he long ago transcended being a mere movie star. Wayne projects an image that personifies the way Americans want to see themselves: as tough and brash but still basically honest and decent. That is why people will still be watching John Wayne movies untold years from now when the memory of today’s so called movie stars are dust.

The only movie star since the 1970s who is anywhere near a worthy successor to John Wayne is Clint Eastwood. Mr. Kimsey didn’t have much Eastwood memorabilia, only one Rawhide comic book and a few books and one magazine. At least the magazine was a good one with a great cover featuring with Eastwood striking his iconic pose with his .44 magnum pistol from his famous movie Dirty Harry. Guns magazine was published by the same company that put out the highly collectible girlie magazines Modern Man and Cabaret in the 1950s and 1960s.

Mr. Kimsey was especially fond of these TV And Western Movie magazines. They are from the late 1950s and Mr. Kimsey told me they were extremely rare which is true since I checked on ebay and only one of them is currently listed. I had to pay Mr. Kimsey extra money to get him to relinquish them. The four volumes of the Official TV Western Book also costs me a little extra to pry them loose from Mr. Kimsey. These softcover books are from the late 1980s and are not easy to find either.

For me this complete six issue run of Wildest Westerns was the highlight of Mr. Kimsey’s collection. This rare magazine was published in the early 1960s by the Warren Publishing Company best known for publishing the leading monster magazine Famous Monsters Of Filmland and also the illustrated horror magazines Creepy, Eerie and Vampirella. Issues #2, 3 and 4 have painted covers by Jack Davis best known for being an EC comic book artist in the 1950s and a satire cover artist for TV Guide magazine later. Issues #5 and 6 were painted by Famous Monsters Of Filmland’s regular cover artist Basil Gogos. I have never had any of these magazines in high grade like these are and I’ve never owned at all the most popular issue which is #2 with the John Wayne cover and long article. I’ve never had much luck over the years finding these magazines. I managed to sell three midgrade copies on ebay 20 years ago and I may have sold one or two more at shows in the late 1990s before moving over to ebay. But I’ve never until now had all six of them together in high grade and it will be a long time before I ever offer these for sale.

I regret now I never watched Wagon Train when I was a kid. On my second visit to Mr. Kimsey I looked over his DVD collection of Western TV shows and noticed that he had season 1 and season 7 (only season in color) of Wagon Train. I had always heard good things about this show over the years and enjoyed the lovely main theme music on a number of CD Western music collections I have. If you buy any vinyl album or CD of Western TV show music themes it’s a good bet Wagon Train will be included. Since the price of Mr. Kimsey’s DVDs was way cheaper than anywhere else I bought the two seasons of Wagon Train and a few other TV shows. I was pleasantly surprised at how good these Wagon Train episodes are. Some Western shows feature the main character as a lone drifter like Cheyenne but Wagon Train was the other type which had a cast of regular characters like Bonanza, Gunsmoke, The Big Valley. The acting chemistry between the cast of Wagon Train for my money was ever bit as good as the more famous and longer lasting Bonanza and Gunsmoke. I especially liked the flashback stories in the first season showing how Major Seth Adams (Ward Bond) had Sergeant Bill Hawks (Terry Wilson) and Private Charles Wooster (Frank McGrath) in his Union Army detachment during the Cilvil War before they all went West together. There was even a flashback episode that showed Seth Adams and Bill Hawks as prize fight promoters in a big Eastern city before they joined the Union Army. I also appreciated Wagon Train having some sense of story continuity unlike most Westerns (including the vaunted allegedly realistic Gunsmoke) where every episode exists in a vacuum with no references to the past and no foreshadowing of the future. One example of Wagon Train continuity was when Major Adams’s wagon train was moving West the terrain changed from open plains to Southwestern deserts as they approached their destination in Sacramento, California. Another continuity example is the train’s scout Flint McCullough (Robert Horton) was shot in the arm in an episode and had to wear a sling. He was still wearing the sling in the next episode. The continuity moved along with the last episode of season 1 actually showing the wagon train reaching Sacramento. The continuity was so good that while in that city the train’s crew members met a few guest stars (Dan Duryea, Linda Darnell) they had met in earlier episodes and these guest stars had said they were also going to Sacramento but on their own without the wagon train. I don’t think any other type of 1960s Western TV show paid that much attention to continuity. When watching season 7 I first noticed that the aforementioned beautiful theme music was composed by Jerome Moross who I remembered as the composer of the famous music in the big budget 1958 Charlton Heston and Gregory Peck movie The Big Country. The different theme music in the earlier seasons was also pretty nice. I enjoyed these two seasons of Wagon Train so much I just bought the final season 8 at the regular ebay price and I’m watching them now. As Major Adams and later Chris Hale (John McIntire) would say: Wagons, Ho!

As a kid in Savannah, Georgia circa 1966 I bought an issue of TV Guide with Larry Hagman and Barbara Eden of I Dream Of Jeannie on the cover from Fordham’s Super Market on Montgomery Cross Roads. Fordham’s is where I sometimes bought my precious Marvel comic books if I couldn’t find them at my main source down the road a bit, Mr. Wu’s 7-11 store. I don’t know what possessed me to buy an issue of TV Guide. I guess there were no Marvel comics at Fordham’s that day and I had 15 cents burning a hole in my pocket. While reading this TV Guide I was surprised and pleased to see a notice in the news bulletin section that was always on yellow paper that several Marvel comic characters like Spider-Man and the Hulk would be appearing as cartoons on TV soon. Several years passed with no further interest in TV Guide but in the 1970s my family started subscribing to TV Guide and I learned to enjoy reading some of the articles about my favorite TV shows. I noticed that the articles were actually written by fairly objective journalists who stuck mostly to the facts and weren’t just wallowing in juicy gossip and innuendo like all the other movie or TV related magazines I had seen. TV Guide in those days even had a big name critic named Cleveland Amory who didn’t hesitate to slice up a TV show if it displeased him. Still, despite my love of movies and some TV shows I never made any real effort to collectTV Guide, partly because even routine issues of TV Guide can be surprisingly expensive. In recent years I’ve toyed with the idea of trying to buy the 1950s issue of TV Guide with George Reeves as Superman on the cover and the few 1960s issues of Star Trek but those are way expensive items out of my financial reach. So I was pleased when I got to buy at reasonable prices from Mr. Kimsey about 100 single issues of TV Guide and also the bound volumes you see in the photo above. I had never seen bound volumes of TV Guide and so to figure out what I should pay Mr. Kimsey we looked them up on ebay. I was perplexed that the few bound volumes on ebay had the same gold lettering and blue cloth binding that Mr. Kimsey’s bound volumes had. If some libraries by themselves had decided to bind TV Guide like they do other periodicals surely the volumes wouldn’t look all the same? I knew there had to be some central authority behind these bound volumes that made them all look the same. Some sketchy information from ebay sellers reveals that the TV Guide publishing company used to arrange for various local TV stations in the different geographic regions (Eastern Illinois Edition, Iowa Edition and so on) to have these bound volumes. The publisher didn’t have the binding done in one place. The bindery card in the front of each volume shows the volumes were bound locally and the bindery must have then delivered them to the TV station; but the publisher obviously required all the different binders to use the same gold lettering and blue cloth binding. The nice part about these bound volumes is that bound volumes give you the issues in rarely seen high grade condition. The issues in the bound volumes are basically “file copies” that were never seen by the public. Regular issues of TV Guide bought by the public are usually in terrible shape due to being heavily handled since it was a reference magazine and many of them have mailing labels that collectors hate. The only drawback to these bound volumes is the articles can be a bit hard to read when the text gets sucked down a bit into the bound spines. Anyway I look forward to thumbing through these bound volumes to read the nicely written articles and soak in the nostalgic ambience of the 1950s and 1960s TV era before I sell them.