Bob Baker

He was home on the Hollywood range only a few years but Bob "Tumbleweed" Baker (ne Stanley Leland Weed) still made his mark by the time he rode off into the sunset. Born on November 8, 1910, in Forest City, IA, his family eventually moved to Colorado and then to Arizona during his growing years. He enlisted in the Army when he was 18 and earned the nickname "Tumbleweed" while also learning how to play the guitar. He later served during WWII and the Korea War. Baker made an initial name for himself on radio. A chance audition for Universal Pictures, which was on the lookout to groom a new singing cowboy star after the meteoric success of Gene Autry, was his big break, beating out such other sagebrush hopefuls as Roy Rogers. Baker's first film, Courage of the West (1937), was a success and the new singing cowboy stud-in-town ventured on with such solid white-hatted vehicles as The Singing Outlaw (1937), The Last Stand (1938) and The Phantom Stage (1939). Astride his horse Apache, he made nine oaters in 1938 and was ranked 10th in the "Top Ten Moneymaking Western Star" poll of 1939. That same year, however, Universal decided to form a movie trio partnering Baker with Johnny Mack Brown and Fuzzy Knight. Brown was clearly the star of the series, however, and Baker's career started to tumble. By 1942 he had gotten lost in the dust and was appearing in unbilled parts. One of his final roles was that of a bus driver in the Bud Abbott and Lou Costello comedy Ride 'Em Cowboy (1942). Claiming his career had been fatally mishandled by Universal, Baker left Hollywood and would return on a very rare occasion as a stuntman. The former western star returned to his home in Arizona with wife Evelyn (since 1935) and four children and worked for a spell as a policeman. Quite the handyman, he also owned a saddle shop where he made and sold saddles and assorted leather goods. During his last years, Baker was in extremely poor health brought on by a series of heart attacks. He suffered a fatal stroke at age 64 while battling cancer.