Slim Pickens

Favorite Hollywood cowboy of the 1950s through the 70s; perhaps best known as the B-52 pilot who, at the end of Stanley Kubrick's "Dr. Strangelove" (1964), "rides" a hydrogen bomb to destruction, Slim Pickens was a hoarse-voiced veteran of the rodeo circuit -- in fact he was said to have gotten his name when a sidebuster looked at him and said, "Slim pickins -- that's all you'll get in this rodeo." He was 13 when he joined the rodeo and he spent years as a rodeo clown and performer before he migrated to Hollywood in 1950. Pickens made his feature film debut in 1950 in an Errol Flynn western at Warner Bros., "Rocky Mountain." He was serious about entertaining and a "pro," to be sure, but the audience took to his joie de vivre. John Ford saw it and cast Pickens in "The Sun Shines Bright" (1953), which Ford later said was his favorite film. He played dozens of sidekicks, scouts, and sometimes varmints chewing and spitting tobacco (or worse) in films of the 50s and 60s, among them "Old Overland Trail" (1953), "The Boy From Oklahoma" (1954), "Major Dundee" (1965) and the remake of "Stagecoach" (1966). Mel Brooks chose him to play Taggart, the prickly third lead of "Blazing Saddles" (1974). Whether a comically vicious outlaw in "The Apple Dumpling Gang" (1975), or Tex, the calculating survivor of "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure" (1979), Pickens was an engaging, charismatic performer.