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Risking Life
True tales of "stunt" men and women. You cannot afford to miss a single paragraph of these thrilling yarns. There's one towards the end of the story that alone is worth the price of admission. Read — and don't jump — this story
'Be hard. Live dangerously"
DUST — the crash of six-shooters — the thunder of horses' hoofs on hard ground — the roar and rumble of an onrushing train — the shrill call of man to man — and out of the dust and roar ride thirty men to board the speeding train. Jesse James and his men are on the loose and heaven help the poor working girl!
The horses are alongside the train — and the dirty deed is done. No one seemed to notice that the train was going thirty miles an hour when the men "transferred" from horse to car and engine. No one seemed to care that underfoot the ground was dangerously uneven. No one seemed to worry about the wheels rolling over the steel rails. Nasty wheels that would cut, mangle and kill anything getting under them.
And closest to these wheels, riding the brake beams under the oldest and most dilapidated coach Fred Thomson could find for his latest feature, "Jesse James," was one man. As Thomson climbed down out of the engineer's cab he saw him.
"Mason! What the devil are you doing under there? That's one stunt I don't remember the script calling for. What's the idea?" He really seemed put out about it. Those brake beams were old and rusted and liable to fall apart.
"Aw, Boss, don't get sore. I didn't have anything to do on that scene and wanted to get a good look at you crawling into that cab from your horse. "
And so I first saw "Suicide" Buddy Mason, stunt man extraordinary. Like the mail-carrier who went walking on his day off Buddy liked to be in the middle of things. Later I talked to him.
"Who are stunt men," I asked him. "And have you any standard by which stunt men are judged — by other stunt men?"
"Nope. It's just — well, when you get so they call you by your first name when you come into the hospital, then you belong."
It was Winnie Brown, most famous of feminine "stunt men," who once defended a director like this: "Can't nobody run that man down to me. He treated me whiter than any director I ever worked for. You remember the time I was doing that stuff on a trestle in one of Mix's pictures? Say, every time I made that jump he had an ambulance waiting right there on the bank for me. That's the kind of a guy he is. "
AN author will have a nightmare and wake up with it **-still in his mind. He'll put it in his next script and think it's fine. And it is because when the time comes to do it the casting director for Fox or First National or M-G-M will just take down the telephone and call Al Wilson.
"Hop over to the studio, kid. You're due to take a dive out of a flaming aeroplane with a parachute which won't open for company."
Their creed might be Nietzsche's famous line, "Be hard. Live dangerously."
30
Immediately after the crash in "Wings," Dick Grace (center) was photographed with his aeroplane. Later, it was discovered that his neck was broken!