Intro

The Sixth Shooter The Sixth Shooter brought James Stewart to the NBC microphone on September 20th, 1953, in a fine series of folksy Western adventures. Stewart was never better on the air than in this drama of Brit Ponsett, frontier drifter, created by Frank Burt.

The epigraph set it up nicely. The man in the saddle is angular and long-legged. His skin is sundied brown. The gun in his holster is grey steel and rainbow mother of pearl, the handle unmarked.

But the gun is killed and the man is killed. People call them both the sick shooter. Ponset was a wanderer, an easygoing gentleman, and when he had to be a gunfighter, Stuart was right in character as the slow-talking maverick who usually blundered into other people's troubles and sometimes shot his way out.

His experiences were broad, but the sick shooter leaned more to comedy than other shows of its kind. Ponset took time out to play Hamlet with a crude road company. He ran for mayor and sheriff of the same town at the same time.

He became involved in a delightful western version of Cinderella, complete with grouchy stepmother, ugly sisters, and a shoe that didn't fit. And at Christmas he told a young runaway the story of a Christmas carol, substituting the original Dickens characters with Western heavies.

Britt even had time to fall in love, but it was the age-old story of people from different worlds, and the romance was foredoomed despite their valiant efforts to save it. So we got a cowboy into the sunset ending for this series, truly one of the bright spots of radio.

Unfortunately it came too late and lasted only one season. It was a transcribed show sustained by NBC and directed by Jack Johnstone. Basil Adlam provided the music and Frank Burt wrote the scripts. Hal Gibney announced.