As an aspiring actor doing community theater, he played a blind pirate in Pasadena and got a good review.
As Buck Rogers on the CBS radio show during the Golden Age of Radio in the early 1930s, he enthralled listeners voicing the star character’s adventures that happened 500 years into the future, becoming part of a legacy that influenced more modern-day movie makers such as George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg.
But leading an eight-man crew of Coast Guard Reserves in the “Hooligan Navy,” sailing in the darkness looking for Nazi subs off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in 1942, was the role that nearly cost the Cheyenne native his life and left such an impression that he chose a military graveyard as his final resting place.
Curtis Carley Arnall was born Oct. 1,1897, to Fielding Marvin Arnall, a railroad worker, and Clara M. (Smith) Arnall in Cheyenne, the third of three children. He had two older sisters, Ada and Hazel.
But by 1905, his parents’ marriage was on the rocks and a divorce followed. The 8-year-old with his sisters and mother moved to Washington state, then South Dakota, and eventually back to Cheyenne.
Arnall worked on a ranch in Wyoming as a cowpuncher, according to his obituary. He also was a radio instructor for the military at Harvard University and worked as a radio instructor at the Great Lakes Naval Training Station in Chicago.
Community Theater
By 1925, Arnall relocated to the West Coast where he worked as a telegrapher for the stock firm E.F. Hutton and became involved in community theater at the Pasadena Playhouse in Pasadena, California, getting small parts and increasingly more attention in local newspaper reviews.
In 1928, Arnall was touring the country in a play called “The Squall,” and in 1929 he returned to the East Coast and Broadway doing the play “Red Rust,” followed in 1930 with “Elizabeth the Queen” and in 1931 with “The Devil in Mind.”
As the Great Depression set in and more Americans, including those in Wyoming, looked to the radio to provide entertainment, Arnall stepped up to the microphone to take on the persona of the comic strip hero Buck Rogers, the first science fiction comic segued into a new medium.
University of Southern California Professor Leo Braudy, who specializes in studying popular culture, said while growing up and listening to a Mutual network station in Philadelphia, he didn’t have a chance to hear the classic “Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.”
But he knows how influential the character became. Arnall was the first to bring Buck Rogers to life for live audiences, but by far not the last. Serial movies, full-feature films and television programs built around Rogers’ adventures 500 years in the future have followed.
“Those 15-minute radio dramas were for a whole generation of kids and introduction to a wide variety of genres — Westerns, superheroes, melodramas, comedy and, of course, with Buck Rogers, sci-fi,” he said.
“Being radio, they also engaged the imagination, as every listener tried to visualize what was happening in the story,” he added. “Spielberg and Lucas are a few years younger than I am. But I’m sure that those radio shows had a strong influence on their imaginations and their later work.”
Steven Spielberg in his film “E.T.” highlighted the influence of the character in culture when he had the alien star be inspired by a Buck Rogers comic strip as he made a device to phone home.
The comic strip “Buck Rogers” was about a World War I pilot who after the war worked in a mine.
During a mine collapse a mysterious gas was released that suspended his life until he woke up to another war 500 years in the future.
For Arnall, the 1930s meant the future was “now” as he made appearances as Buck and posed for promotional photos in costume and with a ray gun. The role would also lead to other radio opportunities.
Yachts And The Sea
But outside the radio studio, the actor and former cowboy had also developed a love for the sea and raced sailing yachts on the East Coast, where he gained skills that would prove useful for the nation.
On Jan. 24, 1941, Arnall was 44 and married a professional photographer, Anne Wassell. They had a son, Curtis Stanton Arnall in 1944.
As the United States entered World War II, Arnall had moved on to doing the voice of the lead for a popular daytime radio drama that changed its name from “Red Davis” to “Forever Young” to “Pepper Young’s Family.”
The Roanoke Times on June 28, 1942, still listed Arnall as playing “Pepper Young” who, in a new script, had “received notice of his rejection by the Air Corps.”
In real life, Arnall rejected his radio roles and transitioned in October of that year from radio work to full-time coastal security on the racing yacht Zaida, a boat owned by George Ratsey of the Larchmont Yacht Club in Larchmont, New York, and a world-renowned sail maker.
After serious ship losses to German submarines in the first year of the war, the U.S. Coast Guard Reserve was created in May 1942 as part of an effort to defend the East Coast and help stop the sinkings.
The officially named “Corsair Fleet” renamed by participants as the “Hooligan Navy” involved yachts, tugboats, and other privately owned vessels that were put under the Coast Guard’s authority and mission.
Yacht owners were given the opportunity to crew their boat and receive pay as a chief boatswain’s mate or choose someone for that role.
Other crew members gathered by the ship owner or appointed master would be assigned Coast Guard enlisted ranks based on experience. The men received some training in weapons and communications, were issued radios, and sent out to report locations of German U-boats.
While not the owner of the 58-foot Zaida, Arnall, then 45, was given the rank of chief.
Swamping
It was a cold day Dec. 3, 1942, when Arnall and his crew — which included a taxi driver, ex-banker, college student and others — were 50 miles off the coast of Nantucket Island patrolling an area for submarines when a massive storm came in and nearly capsized and swamped the yacht, breaking one of its two masts and destroying rigging.
Radio batteries were filled with salt water as was the ship’s generator. They had to bail out the boat, and their little auxiliary motor was useless.
Arnall and the crew were able to get a message of their plight to an overhead B-25 via Morse code using a light.
News reports show that 14 Canadian planes and 11 American planes, as well as other surface craft, were dispatched to find and rescue the crew.
A British destroyer found the ship Dec. 4 and working with the Zaida crew was able to attach a line in heavy seas, but it broke during the night and the ship drifted away and became lost again. The search continued in the following days and on Dec. 17, a B-17 saw the ship, identified it, and tried to drop supplies by parachute, but the supplies were lost to the sea.
On Dec. 23, a Coast Guard cutter found it off of Ocracoke inlet in North Carolina.
“Again, the line parted during the night, but a Navy blimp picked up the scent again the next day,” the Greensboro News and Record reported Friday, Dec. 25. “This morning the near exhausted crew finally was landed at Ocracoke.”
Arnall’s obituary in The New York Times after his eventual death in 1965 stated that he went on to serve in the Philippines during the war and taught navigation at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
Following the war, he kept up with his love for the sea by buying two fishing boats and had a fishing business off Greenport and Montauk, Long Island, until the boats were lost in a hurricane.
He also bought a sloop called the “Deepwaters” that he raced from Montauk to Hampton Roads, Virginia.
In his later years, Arnall moved to Maryland and served as a telegrapher for an investment securities firm in Washington, D.C.
Arnall died of cancer Sept. 22, 1964. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.
There is no mention of his Buck Rogers or other radio roles on his headstone, but his most important role is: “CBM R,” his chief boatswain’s mate reserve rank, is etched into it.
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.