User Reviews

Ross Martin guests as an Italian immigrant and single father making his way from San Francisco to New York City in order to finance his young son's gift for the classical guitar; the two stop off in Virginia City to find temporary work and raise the ire of a couple of roughnecks who seem to have no course of business other than being bullies. This was a common thread in the "Bonanza" stories: innocents challenged by lawless brutes, with the Cartwrights involved for moral (and sometimes financial and physical) support. Here, it's Hoss and Adam who bring the father and son back to the ranch to cook and entertain (seems Hop Sing is away visiting a sick family member), but the villains aren't far behind. Martin's Italian accent is heavy on the Prego Prego, while Michael Davis is curiously out-of-place playing his son (a year later, Davis turned up in Disney's "The Moon-Spinners" as a Greek kid, again having trouble with his English). The gist of this plot, that you shouldn't mess with cowards because everyone's got a fighter underneath, is a bit askew, but the hero-worship sub-plot between Davis and Dan Blocker's Hoss had intriguing possibilities not explored here (and couldn't have been, at least not with psychological depth). A middling episode in the series, which once again puts the focus on select Cartwrights, leaving Michael Landon's Little Joe in the background.

The Ponderosa is in short supply of a cook with Hop Sing out of action. But rather serendipitously Ross Martin over from Italy and his young son Michael Davis get themselves rescued by Dan Blocker and the Ponderosa is getting some Italian cuisine.

They are traveling east to New York where young Davis is slated to study music. But the kid wants to be a cowboy and kind of looks up to Hoss as most of the human race does.

Hoss takes a leaf from his father's book on guidance for young people. A nice story indeed.