December 31, 1914 – February 27, 1972
TV Cowboy: Pat Brady was best known for being cowboy Roy Rogers’ comical sidekick on “The Roy Rogers Show”.
Pat Brady was the one with “Nellybelle”, the jeep. He was also a member of the singing group “Sons of the Pioneers”, as was Roy under his original name.
Biography
Born in Toledo, Ohio, Pat Brady was the son of traveling performers, and first set foot on-stage at the age of four, appearing in a road-show production of Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. Thereafter, the young Brady was hooked on show business.
Much later, in 1935, while appearing as a bass guitarist in California, Brady struck up a friendship with a young country & western singer named Leonard Slye, a member of the popular Sons of the Pioneers. When Slye moved onto screen stardom as Roy Rogers, he recommended Brady as his replacement in the Pioneers group.
It was in 1937 that Brady himself made the transition to films by playing comedy relief in several of the Charles Starrett Westerns at Columbia. In the early ’40s, Brady moved over to Republic studios, where he played oddball camp cook Sparrow Biffle in the Roy Rogers films. Then when Rogers moved over to television in 1951, Brady went with him, ultimately enlivening well over 100 episodes of the popular The Roy Rogers Show, where he tooled about the sagebrush at the wheel of his faithful jeep “Nellybelle.”
Brady continued his association with Rogers on TV and in personal appearances long after the cancellation of the weekly series. He also rejoined the Sons of the Pioneers in 1959 for awhile. By the mid-1960s, however, Brady’s acting career began its decline. In February 1972, Brady checked himself into an alcoholic rehabilitation center in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado. One day later, he was dead at the age of 58.