Comics-Whip Wilson TB

Please drop this item in rural OR Premium Member Only caches.  Do not place it in an urban cache or abandon it at a caching event.  Transport the bug in the original plastic bag for as long as the bag lasts; this prevents tangling with other items.  Otherwise, take this travel bug anywhere you wish.  No permission needed to leave the U.S. 

Travel bug photos included with the logs will be posted here. 

My youth was in the late 1940s and early 1950s.  Drawing from that period, this is one of a series of travel bugs made to commemorate favorite characters from comic books, comic strips, movie cartoons, B-movies and animated feature-length movies.  Some of the characters had only a brief existence, some survived as radio and early TV programs and some have been digitally-modernized into some of the blockbuster movies of today.  There were many other characters, but these are the ones on which I was willing to spend my dimes (comic books) and quarters (movie and popcorn).  However, I didn’t pay for the daily comic strips or Sunday funnies that came with the newspaper.

Whip Wilson (Roland Charles Meyers 1911-1964) was an American cowboy film star of the late 1940s and into the 1950s, known for his roles in B-westerns.

He was one of eight children. Wilson had been a moderately successful singer before coming to Hollywood.  Following the death of the cowboy star Buck Jones in the famous Cocoanut Grove fire of 1942, which claimed the lives of 492 people, Monogram Pictures had been searching for someone to replace him.  The studio thought Meyers looked similar to Jones and this was apparently was enough to build him into a cowboy star.  

Because of the fame being generated by Lash LaRue, who used a bullwhip in his movies, Monogram decided to make Meyers a similar whip-wielding character, rechristening him Whip Wilson.  I liked the improbable skill with the bullwhip he and LaRue displayed in their movies.