The owner of that fence, Tom Essex, wasn’t born into ranching, nor did he have any kind of ranching background. In fact, it seemed that Essex had grown up a million miles from the central Nevada ranch he now owned. Tom had been born the second of three sons to the wealthiest and high-powered attorneys in Chicago. And while Tom wasn’t born a cowboy, he had been fascinated with the cowboy way of life ever since his father dropped him off at the Bijou movie theater in downtown Chicago one rainy Saturday afternoon in the summer of 1951.

There was a double feature on the bill that day, a B-Western titled Storm Over Wyoming, starring Tim Holt, and another movie with a dog in it, of which he could never remember the name. Six-year-old Tom sat with his older brother Jack and Jack’s friend Tony in the back row of the theater, eating popcorn and staring at the enormous black-and-white screen that flickered in front of them. The plot had been a little hard for his six-year-old mind to follow, but it didn’t matter. The larger-than-life cowboys on fast horses, and endless expanses of wilderness enveloped him like a huge black-and-white glove that he slipped into as easily as he slipped on his Keds that morning.

From that point forward, he was hooked. For the next five years, if a Western was on the Saturday bill at the Bijou, Tom was there. Sometimes Jack would go with him, other times he wouldn’t. Tom actually liked it more when Jack didn’t go because then he could sit as close to the screen as he liked—Jack always wanted to sit in the back row, too far away from the action, as far as Tom was concerned.

In 1957 the Essex family got their first TV set. It was a consol made by Admiral that not only came with a remote control, but also contained a radio and phonograph. It was massive, and squatted in the family room where the old RCA Victor radio used to be. The picture tube was in the right side of the consol; speaker on the left and it seemed as big as the Cadillac his father drove.

It didn’t matter to Tom, though, because now instead of having to go all the way downtown on Saturdays to watch his favorite cowboy stars riding in and out of danger, the cowboys came right to him in his living room through the screen of the colossal Admiral TV. To his parents’ consternation, Tom would sit cross-legged on the floor, toy six guns strapped to his sides, watching one Western after another on Saturday mornings. Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Hop Along Cassidy, The Lone Ranger, and even Sky King, which was a show about cowboys that flew around in airplanes. By the time he was in his early teens Tom was so enthralled by the TV and movie cowboy he had taken much of his allowance and invested it in a sizable collection of TV and movie memorabilia, such as the old posters for movies like Rollin’ Plains, Phantom Rider, The Red Rider, The Crimson Trail, and of course, Storm over Wyoming.