Buddy Roosevelt

Cowboy actor Buddy Roosevelt was born Kenneth Stanhope Sanderson in Meeker, Colorado, in 1898. His parents were emigrants from England, and at age 16 Kenneth got a job with the C.B. Irwin WIld West Show. When the show traveled to Southern California in 1914, the young Sanderson learned that stunt work in the burgeoning film industry paid much better, and was quite a bit safer, than busting broncs and the kind of roping, trick riding and other hard and dangerous tasks required of a Wild West show performer, and he soon got a job doing stunts in westerns for pioneering producer Thomas H. Ince at his Inceville studio, and often performed as a stunt double for William S. Hart. When the US entered World War I in 1917 Roosevelt enlisted in the Navy and was aboard the USS Norfolk when it was sunk. As if that wasn't enough, he contracted the Spanish flu during the 1918 influenza pandemic that killed millions worldwide, but he managed to survive both the sinking and the flu and returned to Holl