Phyllis Kirk

On Saturday I had a slice of pizza with chipotle sauce for lunch.

I worked on my journal.

My upstairs neighbour David knocked on my door to give me a slice of pepperoni pizza and though I had pizza coming out of the wazoo I didn’t have the heart to turn him down. This was really a pizza day!

I didn’t get around to doing my butt muscle exercises but they didn’t feel too bad.

I heated the pizza David gave me plus one of the slices of the pizza from the food bank for dinner and had them with a beer while watching “Tales of Wells Fargo”.

In this story the Wells Fargo agent Jim Hardie gets robbed by Belle Starr and her gang at a train stop. This was even more historically inaccurate than the Stories of the Century depiction of Belle Starr. They had her blonde, wearing jeans and not riding sidesaddle. There is no record of her ever having actively participated in any train or stage robberies, although she was friends with the James boys, her brother was a robber and so was her husband and her brother. She was more into horse rustling and behind the scenes criminality such as bribes to get her friends off from convictions. In this story Hardie goes after her and poses as a horse racer, challenging her to a race. He wins but she is a sore loser and her men take Hardie’s horse away. As they ride back to their headquarters Belle is trailing behind the others as she is also leading Hardie’s horse. He jumps her and captures her, aiming to take her back to Fort Smith, Arkansas to stand trial. After camping out one night she is rescued by her gang. They are going to shoot Hardie but in a very unlikely scene she tosses him a gun and he shoots two of her men. Even though she has saved his life he still takes her into Fort Smith where she is tried, sentenced to nine months and lives a straight life afterwards. That last part is also not true. Although she was a model prisoner she did return to crime when she got out and that only stopped two years later when her husband was killed.

Belle was played by Jeanne Cooper, who became a regular on The Young and the Restless from 1973 until 2013. When she had a face-lift some footage of her surgery was incorporated into the show. She’s the mother of Corbin Bernsen, who played the cad and ladies man on LA Law.

I had planned on only watching that show because I’d thought it was going to be an hour long like the last Tales of Wells Fargo that I’d watched. But this one was only a half an hour long and so I also watched the first story from the United States Steel Hour dramatic series. They called it the Steel Hour because it was for people doing hard time. People for who time is fragile watched the “Tin Hour” and those for who time was money watched “The Gold Hour”.

This story takes place in a hospital for recently released P.O.Ws from Korean prison camps. They had undergone torture and brainwashing and all have what later came to be known as PTSD but this story aired in 1953. The main character Lucky, who had been a leader of the group when they were prisoners and many of them credit him for helping them through. But Lucky had always been social and so although he was lucky enough to avoid physical torture he’d received the worst torture of all in being repeatedly kept alone in a hole, which broke him. After a brief stay in the hospital he is sent home to his family and his girl Betty Lou but he can’t stand being touched or being alone in his room and so he goes back to the hospital. There had been an attempted prison break when they were in the camp but someone among them leaked the plans to the Koreans and they were captured. One of them, Fitch lost his legs and he blames Lucky because he thinks he talked. Lucky thinks he talked too but it turns out that he didn’t and it was really Brian Keith’s character Iron Man who’d been tortured with sharp metal being put in his food. Fitch gets hold of a gun and wants to kill Iron Man for the loss of his legs but Lucky tells him, “What if the Korean’s had offered to give you your legs back in exchange for Iron Man’s life?” Fitch realizes it’s not Iron Man’s fault.

Betty Lou was played by Phyllis Kirk who played the TV version of Nora Charles on the Thin Man series. In the 60s she got involved in social causes and campaigned against the execution of Caryl Chessman. She visited him in prison regularly until his death sentence was carried out.