Usually providing atmospheric bits with no billing, he made an initial impression in serial cliffhangers as a third-string heavy with the popular The Green Hornet Strikes Again!

His first top featured role, however, would come with The Iron Claw as Jack "Flash" Strong, a photographer who, uncharacteristically for Walter, served as a comic sidekick to our serial hero.

The Pennington role would spark a long and steady career in movies, usually a step or two behind Hollywood's elite, in To Have and Have Not (prominently featured as the fisherman who tries to cheat Bogie), in Along Came Jones, The Blue Dahlia, Dark City and Bad Day at Black Rock, among hundreds of others.

A primary support player during the "Golden Age" of television, Sande worked on nearly every popular western and crime show available in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s and 1960s, including Johnny Ringo.

In 1949, he played Sheriff Taylor in the three-part The Lone Ranger television premiere, as he helped the masked man and Tonto capture the Butch Cavendish gang.