THURSDAY'S THEORY OF RELATEEVEETY - THE ANKRUM LINEAGE

'PERRY MASON'

Morris Ankrum is probably best known as being one in the main coterie of Los Angeles judges who witnessed the jousts between defense lawyer Perry Mason and District Attorney Hamilton Burger.  He appeared in twenty-two episodes in all.  That show was his penultimate role.

For the most part, the name of his judge was not revealed during the episode.  But there were a handful of times when we learned his name during the trial (usually thanks to those name plates found on the bench.)  

Unfortunately, out of those five episodes in which he did have a name, only twice was it a name that had previously been used.

Here are the five episodes in which he was named:

• The Case of the Stuttering Bishop (1959) ... Judge Bates
• The Case of the Borrowed Brunette (1959) ... Judge Bates
• The Case of the Lucky Loser (1958) ... Judge Cadwell
• The Case of the Rolling Bones (1958) ... Judge Morrisey
• The Case of the Nervous Accomplice (1957) ... Judge Hoyt

His last two appearances on the show had the same name - Bates.  It's not much but I'm going to consider that name to be his true name just because it was used more often, even if it was just twice.

As for the others?

I don't have it in me to go for some wild theory that could only happen as seen on TV.  All of the judges he played in those 22 episodes were Judge Bates, even in those in which no name was given, but especially those in which he sported a different name.

So why was he also known as Judge Cadwell, Judge Morrisey, and Judge Hoyt?

It's because Judge Bates was a practical joker.

There were several times during his career on the bench, and we saw three such examples, when Judge Bates would swipe the name plates of other judges and preside over the court proceedings under their names rather than his own.  He never declared himself as Hoyt, Cadwell, or Morrissey, and if found out, he would shrug it off as an "honest mistake"; that he grabbed the wrong name plate in error.

Being a practical joker wasn't so bad. He could have been a convicted forger and even a possible murderer like his great-grandfather.

'MAVERICK'
'THE MARQUESA"
(Sound familiar?  Yeah, we covered this episode on Tuesday.)

Justice Bates' grandfather was a convicted forger who served time in prison with Bart Maverick's ne'er-do-well "friend" Nobby Ned Wingate.  HIs name was originally Ortiz but he was in Santa Leora, passing himself off as Judge Jason Paynter.  He was in on the plan to scam the town out of some prime real estate, working with his brother Manuel Ortiz.

When found out, Paynter tried to shoot his way out of the situation, but he was killed by a knife thrown by lunatic Pepe which was meant for Bart Maverick.

Ortiz had been born and raised in the Los Angeles area while it was still under the control of the Spanish and he once saw Zorro in action as a young man.

But he abandoned his wife and daughter to seek his fortune once he discovered he had a skill in forgery.  There were times when his bilking of banks with his forged certificates almost got him captured by Secret Service agents James T. West and Artemus Gordon.

He hid out in Santa Leora under the alias of Justice Jason Paynter, for which he forged the necessary papers.  While there, he passed the time by reading the dime novels of Ernest Pratt which featured the pure, heroic adventurer Nicodemus Legend.  And in one of those stories, Paynter learned about Pratt's fictionalized account of a plot to steal land in Nevada with a falsified Spanish land grant.

This gave the avaricious Ortiz aka Paynter the idea to pull the same stunt right there in Santa Leora.

(You can find the video for "The Marquesa" at DailyMotion.)

The news eventually made it back to the City of Angels and devastated Ortiz's daughter.  As a young woman she had a striking beauty which brought many suitors calling from not only the Spanish community but from eligible Anglos in the area.  But she lost her heart to a young sheriff's deputy named Bates from Pierceville, Kansas, who had been sent to Los Angeles by Sheriff Dan Bassett to escort a captured murderer back with him to hang in Pierceville.  (It may have been her revulsion at her father's life of crime which drew her to the deputy.)

The feeling was mutual and so, abandoning all common sense, Senorita Ortiz agreed to go with Deputy Bates back to Pierceville, Kansas.  Before their trip together with the caged murderer, Deputy Bates warned her that life in Pierceville would not be as exciting as she had in Los Angeles.  But the shame of her father's crimes had soured her to a world where temptation and sin beckoned and she looked forward to that life in a moral absolute like Pierceville.  

As they made the journey, Deputy Bates regaled her with tales of his life as a lawmanonly had one story about his family which he thought was of any interest - that he was a second-generation American; that he had cousins still back in England in the Yorkshire area.

The only thing he held back from her was that he showed a weakness in character.  Bates caved to group pressure and nearly hanged an innocent man at a lynching.  Luckily that man - one Festus Haggen - had friends in the Marshal of Dodge City and a fellow deputy (who happens to be distantly related to my televersion.)  They arrived in the nick of time to provide backup for Sheriff Bassett against the mob.

In 1897 (by which time Sheriff Bassett had resigned his position and Bates had become the sheriff), she gave birth to their son.  When he got older, he wanted to pursue justice like his father, but he had a more modern outlook on the world.  He decided to pursue a career in the Law and become a lawyer.  So he went back to his ancestral roots in Los Angeles and enrolled in the law school of California University.

After he spent time as a public defender, then as an assistant district attorney, Bates got a job with a very influential law firm, Dundee, Culhane, Culhane, and Brewster.  Eventually he sought a judgeship in Los Angeles, and that's when we as the Trueniverse audience finally met him, in the sunset years of his career.

He was still on the bench when he passed away.  He died in 1964 at a toney party celebrating a new law firm, MacKenzie, Brackman & Cheney.  It wasn't a dignified exit from this mortal plane and he pitched forward into the bowl of tomacco dip.

And there you have it, the Toobworld mythography for Justice Bates, beginning with 'Maverick', running through 'Gunsmoke', and ending up in 'Perry Mason'.

Happy trails!

TV SHOWS CITED:

• 'MAVERICK'
• 'PERRY MASON'
• 'GUNSMOKE'
• 'LEGEND'
• 'BONANZA'
• 'DOWNTON ABBEY'
• 'THE WILD, WILD WEST'
• 'SUGARFOOT'
• 'BLACK SADDLE'
• 'DUNDEE AND THE CULHANE'
• 'SAVED BY THE BELL: THE COLLEGE YEARS'
• 'BEVERLY HILLS 90210'
• 'L.A. LAW'
• 'THE SIMPSONS'