Well, that is true. What I meant to say was that the actor who played Davy Crockett is dead. Fess Parker died at age 85 today. It was his wife’s birthday. They had been married for 50 years. Parker also played Daniel Boone, but Davy Crockett was the idol of every kid in America in the 50s.
Parker appeared on Disney Hour as well as in the film Davy Crockett. He was a tall man, 6 foot 6 inches tall and every young male wanted to be Davy Crocket. Even the girls wore coon skin caps. There were lunch boxes, figurines, buckskin shirts, rifles, and of course there was the song, the Ballad of Davy Crockett:
Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, greenest state in the land of the free. Raised in the woods so he knew every tree, kilt him a barr when he was only three…(be impressed, that was from memory.)
Nancy Reagan has expressed her condolences over the death of Fess Parker and has stated that he was certainly a good friend to her and Ronnie. RIP Fess Parker. You certain rocked the world of a lot of little baby boomers.
Something like that – I guess!
Better than me – I think because I was judged correctly to be a very bad actor – I was a tree!
Wolverine, I know the name Straight Arrow (and the references to it x years later…as in George is a real straight arrow.) I just cannot place the show in my head. I liked the old Superman daily shows also. My brother was a big Zorro fan.
Gee, I remember it being “Broken Arrow” 🙂 Wolfie, does that place it in your head?
OK, I’ll confess to watching the Angel TV series!
broken. straight…some sort of arrow is in my head. I will research and get back to you all. I expect it was one of my brother’s shows.
GR, how about Buffy? I love Angel and Buffy both, although Angel is the more sophisticated show.
Rez, I thought broken aarrow was a song by Rod Stewart?
OK, I’ll admit to watching Buffy too. I started watching it in the beginning and thought for awhile it was fun to watch it for the bad special effects and silly plotline.
I will agree, Angel was far more sophisticated of a show than Buffy ever was! Although, Buffy did get more serious in the last couple of seasons. I kind of never wanted to admit to anyone I watched it though, at the time it was on!
I seem to think that song was a Rod Stewart song too. I could be very wrong about that though.
Maybe we are talking about two different songs – but I did a google search and this is the “broken arrow” song I was thinking of that is a Rod Stewart song (must be the same one MH is thinking of):
http://www.kovideo.net/broken-arrow-lyrics-rod-stewart-637830.html
“Broken Arrow” was the Michael Ansara portrayal of Cochise. “Straight Arrow”, as I recall now was a radio show which we kids always listened to. We did not get television until later and listened to a whole lot of radio adventure shows. You must be getting old when you can no longer remember what was radio and what was television. Hours and hours of adventure radio: “Lone Ranger”; “Straight Arrow”; “Horatio Hornblower”; “Bobby Benson of the B-bar-B”. Even when we finally got television, it seemed like it was always going on the fritz. We had a relative in the business who seemed to spend whole afternoons at our place trying to fix that set.
Wolverine, you have my vote. I was nutty about sitting on the floor in front of the radio listening to the great shows of all time. it was fantastic time. Of course, we could also ride our bikes unsupervised until dark (and sometimes late when we could get away with it.) The rule in our house? Be home when the DC street lights came on. 🙂
Broken Arrow, if youtube is to be believed, is Neil Young/Buffalo Springfield.
I looked up Broken Arrow the TV show and I remember the INdian dude but not the white guy. Of course, look who I like in Big Love. There is a pattern.
oooops, I liked. It most certainly is a Rod Stewart song.
Ooops, GR, I got sidetracked, You put the right one up. I got all tangled up listening to Rod Steward up on Amazon.
If anyone needs a good parent gift, he has about 4 albums out with 50s type music…I don’t mean like Buddy Holly. I mean earlier than that…late 40s and early 50s I guess. If you have parents 80, the stuff they would like.
By the way, didn’t Fess Parker sing Davy Crockett?
Yes he did, Rez. That is supposely who is singing in the video I planted up near the beginning.
You know, Moon, I think Fess Parker would have very much appreciated this thread.
He probably would have. Thanks for saying so, Wolverine. I was sort of smiling over this thread. There are a lot of comments which speak to Fess Parker’s universality and the popularity of his characters. What is neat is that we can all argue like old grizzly ‘barrs’ on the outside and then we can come in on this thread and reminisce about our younger days and childhood and who do we have to thank for it? Fess Parker.
This was really a great thread. A lot of really good stuff posted here, and everyone kind of getting all sentimental. But, it is fun thinking back about things like this that happened in the past.
I wonder if Fess Parker knew how many of us he influenced?