ON THE PASSING OF FESS PARKER
(August 16, 1924--March 18, 2010)
The evening of 12/15/54 proved to be a watershed date for those of us, since nicknamed “the baby boomers,” who were young at that time. Host Walt Disney, introducing the latest installment of his then-new Wednesday night ABC-TV show, introduced the first of three “Frontierland” episodes about Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. (Five, if you count two more the following season). Incarnating that authentic American folk hero was a young actor named Fess Parker, previously seen only in bit parts.
One had been in a first-rate Big Bug movie called THEM!, about giant ants menacing the southwest. The young star of the film was James Arness. Someone who had seen that film told Walt Disney that the lead resembled superstar John Wayne, and might be the person Disney was looking for to play Davy Crockett in the upcoming series. Walt went to the theatre and knew at once that Arness could be Crockett. But Disney’s instincts said ’no.’ It was one of those “I don’t know just what I’m looking for but I will know it when I see it” kind of things.
So all the way through THEM!, Walt Disney went back and forth, thinking maybe yes, maybe no . . .
About two-thirds of the way through the film, Arness heads for Texas. He needs proof positive that giant ants really are out there and has heard that a Texan has been declared insane and put into a hospital owing to his claims that there are monsters prowling the countryside. As Arness pays the fellow a visit, there was Fess Parker, sitting in his bathrobe, explaining in a thick Fort Worth accent that the giant ants are coming. If the show-biz legend is to be believed, Walt Disney stood up in the theatre, pointed at the screen, and shouted: “That’s him! THAT’s Davy Crockett!”
The rest, as they say, is history. The Davy Crockett craze all but defined us through the summer of 1955. (Jim Arness, by the way, did just fine for himself in a little ol’ show called GUNSMOKE which premiered the next year).
Then we began to move on to other things. For there were Bill Haley and the Comets on the radio, singing “Rock Around the Clock” and, in doing so, introducing us to the musical style that would shortly define us as teenagers. Two months later, a young country performer named Elvis Presley made his bow on national TV. Soon, the Crockett craze was but a memory. We became the first rock ‘n’ roll generation.
Fess made a remarkable comeback ten years later, when he produced his own “Daniel Boone” show for NBC. When those of us who were, at the time, in college now saw little kids running around in coonskin caps, just as we’d done a decade earlier, it stirred us to an instant sense of nostalgia for the good ol’ days.
And, though we would never admit it in our new and now ‘sophisticated‘ guises, perhaps just a tad jealous that we couldn’t run off and play, as we once had, King of the Wild Frontier. But we could REMEMBER . . .
Fess was our imaginary friend growing up. He became my real-life friend when we met for the first time in the late 1980s. Sue and the kids and I had traveled to Santa Barbara, where Fess had become a fantastically successful real-estate agent, to do a travel story for a magazine about Fess’s Red Lion Inn. He invited me to lunch. Before long the travel story was forgotten and we talked, talked, talked about the mid-1950s, and how thanks to GREASE and HAPPY DAYS and all sorts of other popular culture phenomenon that decade had become definitive in American social-cultural history. The Fifties Forever, as some of us still say.
About four years ago, I decided to write the book SHOOTING STARS OF THE SMALL SCREEN: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TV WESTERN ACTORS, available since this past October from the University of Texas Press, Austin, which also published my two books about the impact of Walt Disney on popular culture with of course the Crockett craze included in each. There was never any doubt in my mind who I hoped might write the foreword. I sent a letter to Fess, reminding him of our previous meeting, requesting that he join me on the project.
With many big stars and multi-millionaires, such a note would immediately go into the circular file. That was not Fess Parker’s way. The phone rang one morning and there was that unmistakable voice . . . wanting to let me know that yes, he did remember meeting me and my family, and ’yes’ he would happily write the introduction. It now appears at the beginning of SHOOTING STARS, a book that makes no secret of its essential bias: Fess Parker was not only the first of the Western stars created by television for the first TV generation but by far the greatest of all.
No one else ever came even close. I reiterated that point when AMERICAN COWBOY magazine asked me to pick the five greatest TV Western stars for their February-March issue. Fess was picked, of course, as number one, thanks to his ability to combine the best qualities of Gary Cooper, William S. Hart, Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck, Will Rogers and Harry Carey into one wonderful persona that reminded us of all those favorites yet was never imitative of them.
Above all, Fess Parker was always his own man. He did it his way. And in so doing inspired us always to at least try and be as authentic in our lives as he always was.
Back in October, when SHOOTING STARS was published, I had the pleasure of being a guest on the CRN radio show hosted by another of my generation’s favorites, Bob Conrad (“Hawaiian Eye,” “The Wild Wild West”). When Fess’s name came up, Bob mentioned that Fess was “ailing” and I knew at once why I hadn’t heard from him in some time. I made sure that UofTP and American Cowboy sent copies of the book and the magazine to him. Apparently, Fess knew that the end was near, and I wanted, in however small I way I could, to let him know that his legacy would live forever.
Perhaps Fess knew that he was not well two years ago, the last time we spoke on the phone. We talked about me coming up to visit, perhaps working on an “as-told-to” book that would be called DAN’L, DAVY AND ME: THE FESS PARKER STORY. He did not rule that out, yet let me know that he had already begun work on yet ANOTHER resort.
“But I reckon our trails will cross aga’n,” he drawled.
You have to understand that Fess didn’t “play” Crockett and Boone. He embodied them; which is to say he truly was everything that is best in the American character. In that aforementioned travel story from two decades ago, I wrote after meeting him in person: “If Davy Crockett and Dan’l Boone weren’t precisely like Fess Parker, then they should have had the good common sense TO be!“
We may have been miles apart in our political choices. So were John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, but that never kept them from being friends who made a passle of films together. Fess represented for me--and, again, my generation--the uniquely American sense of fair play; of standing by your word; of taking people not for such insignificant aspects as the color of their skin but who and what they are as an individual person. Values that, as we know from the news, are sorely tested today. Chuck Heston and I always spoke about such things whenever we spent time together and of course Hollywood-wise he was a much bigger star. But for those of us who sat in the December-darkness, entranced by that first Crockett episode so long ago, we will always be transfixed by our memories of the man in the coonskin cap.
Oh! I almost forgot: I was talking (writing) about that last phone call. Toward the end, Fess’s ordinarily certain tone faltered a bit. “At my age, Doug,” he said, his voice quivering, “I consider every day a gift.” Maybe I knew and feared at that moment that Fess was hinting at something he didn’t want to have to tell me and which, Lord knows, I did not want to hear. But which makes sense now that he’s gone.
All the same, I’ll try my best (as WE who came of age in the fifties always have) to live up to the code that this great man gave us: Always take a positive approach and remember, the glass is half full, NOT half empty.
Best to all
d
P.S.: I was interviewed by numerous radio outlets after Fess’s passing about the man and his meaning. To hear the one I did last Sunday, go to www.popcultureamerica.me
One had been in a first-rate Big Bug movie called THEM!, about giant ants menacing the southwest. The young star of the film was James Arness. Someone who had seen that film told Walt Disney that the lead resembled superstar John Wayne, and might be the person Disney was looking for to play Davy Crockett in the upcoming series. Walt went to the theatre and knew at once that Arness could be Crockett. But Disney’s instincts said ’no.’ It was one of those “I don’t know just what I’m looking for but I will know it when I see it” kind of things.
So all the way through THEM!, Walt Disney went back and forth, thinking maybe yes, maybe no . . .
About two-thirds of the way through the film, Arness heads for Texas. He needs proof positive that giant ants really are out there and has heard that a Texan has been declared insane and put into a hospital owing to his claims that there are monsters prowling the countryside. As Arness pays the fellow a visit, there was Fess Parker, sitting in his bathrobe, explaining in a thick Fort Worth accent that the giant ants are coming. If the show-biz legend is to be believed, Walt Disney stood up in the theatre, pointed at the screen, and shouted: “That’s him! THAT’s Davy Crockett!”
The rest, as they say, is history. The Davy Crockett craze all but defined us through the summer of 1955. (Jim Arness, by the way, did just fine for himself in a little ol’ show called GUNSMOKE which premiered the next year).
Then we began to move on to other things. For there were Bill Haley and the Comets on the radio, singing “Rock Around the Clock” and, in doing so, introducing us to the musical style that would shortly define us as teenagers. Two months later, a young country performer named Elvis Presley made his bow on national TV. Soon, the Crockett craze was but a memory. We became the first rock ‘n’ roll generation.
Fess made a remarkable comeback ten years later, when he produced his own “Daniel Boone” show for NBC. When those of us who were, at the time, in college now saw little kids running around in coonskin caps, just as we’d done a decade earlier, it stirred us to an instant sense of nostalgia for the good ol’ days.
And, though we would never admit it in our new and now ‘sophisticated‘ guises, perhaps just a tad jealous that we couldn’t run off and play, as we once had, King of the Wild Frontier. But we could REMEMBER . . .
Fess was our imaginary friend growing up. He became my real-life friend when we met for the first time in the late 1980s. Sue and the kids and I had traveled to Santa Barbara, where Fess had become a fantastically successful real-estate agent, to do a travel story for a magazine about Fess’s Red Lion Inn. He invited me to lunch. Before long the travel story was forgotten and we talked, talked, talked about the mid-1950s, and how thanks to GREASE and HAPPY DAYS and all sorts of other popular culture phenomenon that decade had become definitive in American social-cultural history. The Fifties Forever, as some of us still say.
About four years ago, I decided to write the book SHOOTING STARS OF THE SMALL SCREEN: AN ENCYCLOPEDIA OF TV WESTERN ACTORS, available since this past October from the University of Texas Press, Austin, which also published my two books about the impact of Walt Disney on popular culture with of course the Crockett craze included in each. There was never any doubt in my mind who I hoped might write the foreword. I sent a letter to Fess, reminding him of our previous meeting, requesting that he join me on the project.
With many big stars and multi-millionaires, such a note would immediately go into the circular file. That was not Fess Parker’s way. The phone rang one morning and there was that unmistakable voice . . . wanting to let me know that yes, he did remember meeting me and my family, and ’yes’ he would happily write the introduction. It now appears at the beginning of SHOOTING STARS, a book that makes no secret of its essential bias: Fess Parker was not only the first of the Western stars created by television for the first TV generation but by far the greatest of all.
No one else ever came even close. I reiterated that point when AMERICAN COWBOY magazine asked me to pick the five greatest TV Western stars for their February-March issue. Fess was picked, of course, as number one, thanks to his ability to combine the best qualities of Gary Cooper, William S. Hart, Jimmy Stewart, Gregory Peck, Will Rogers and Harry Carey into one wonderful persona that reminded us of all those favorites yet was never imitative of them.
Above all, Fess Parker was always his own man. He did it his way. And in so doing inspired us always to at least try and be as authentic in our lives as he always was.
Back in October, when SHOOTING STARS was published, I had the pleasure of being a guest on the CRN radio show hosted by another of my generation’s favorites, Bob Conrad (“Hawaiian Eye,” “The Wild Wild West”). When Fess’s name came up, Bob mentioned that Fess was “ailing” and I knew at once why I hadn’t heard from him in some time. I made sure that UofTP and American Cowboy sent copies of the book and the magazine to him. Apparently, Fess knew that the end was near, and I wanted, in however small I way I could, to let him know that his legacy would live forever.
Perhaps Fess knew that he was not well two years ago, the last time we spoke on the phone. We talked about me coming up to visit, perhaps working on an “as-told-to” book that would be called DAN’L, DAVY AND ME: THE FESS PARKER STORY. He did not rule that out, yet let me know that he had already begun work on yet ANOTHER resort.
“But I reckon our trails will cross aga’n,” he drawled.
You have to understand that Fess didn’t “play” Crockett and Boone. He embodied them; which is to say he truly was everything that is best in the American character. In that aforementioned travel story from two decades ago, I wrote after meeting him in person: “If Davy Crockett and Dan’l Boone weren’t precisely like Fess Parker, then they should have had the good common sense TO be!“
We may have been miles apart in our political choices. So were John Wayne and Kirk Douglas, but that never kept them from being friends who made a passle of films together. Fess represented for me--and, again, my generation--the uniquely American sense of fair play; of standing by your word; of taking people not for such insignificant aspects as the color of their skin but who and what they are as an individual person. Values that, as we know from the news, are sorely tested today. Chuck Heston and I always spoke about such things whenever we spent time together and of course Hollywood-wise he was a much bigger star. But for those of us who sat in the December-darkness, entranced by that first Crockett episode so long ago, we will always be transfixed by our memories of the man in the coonskin cap.
Oh! I almost forgot: I was talking (writing) about that last phone call. Toward the end, Fess’s ordinarily certain tone faltered a bit. “At my age, Doug,” he said, his voice quivering, “I consider every day a gift.” Maybe I knew and feared at that moment that Fess was hinting at something he didn’t want to have to tell me and which, Lord knows, I did not want to hear. But which makes sense now that he’s gone.
All the same, I’ll try my best (as WE who came of age in the fifties always have) to live up to the code that this great man gave us: Always take a positive approach and remember, the glass is half full, NOT half empty.
Best to all
d
P.S.: I was interviewed by numerous radio outlets after Fess’s passing about the man and his meaning. To hear the one I did last Sunday, go to www.popcultureamerica.me
