By Dan Mackie
For the Valley News
I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid, but most of it is as forgotten as the battered Barbies, deflated footballs and cockeyed kitchen chairs that litter the Lebanon landfill.
I can hardly recall what programs I liked. I liked whatever was on, I guess, or made peace with it. We had less than a handful of stations — only two with perfect signals — so you watched Bonanza or you watched Disney, or when all else failed you did your homework.
One highlight, though, came to mind recently with the death of Fess Parker, the actor who played Davy Crockett, one of my boyhood black-and-white TV heroes. In those days kids had to endure lots of programming aimed at their parents — Steve and Eydie singing a medley from Camelot, or newsmen in eyeglasses talking about steel prices—but Davy Crockett was all ours.
Crockett, if you are too young to know, was “king of the wild frontier.’’ According to hit song lyrics, he was “born on a mountaintop in Tennessee’’ and “kilt him a bar (bear) when he was only 3.” Thus are heroes made.
He wore buckskin clothes and a coonskin cap, and cradled a musket rather than a cell phone in his arms. That was no fanny pack at his hip — it was a powder horn.
Davy went on to have a number of TV adventures, some semi-comical, some soft-core violent (in those days you could stab an adversary to death without drawing blood and the deceased merely seemed to faint). It all was utterly entertaining to an 8-year-old boy. When Davy (spoiler alert) died at the Alamo while whacking Mexicans with his musket, I knew I was going to miss the big fella.
A couple of years ago I picked up a VHS copy of Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier for less than a buck. It sat unwatched until last week, when Parker’s passing reminded me I had it.
Fortunately, we have a video machine that still works, though its front door is permanently open and you have to put a tape in two or three times before it catches. I unhitched the DVD player and reattached the VHS box, which makes strange clunky noises and lightly hisses. To prepare myself, I had read a little about the real Davy Crockett on the internet. (Wikipedia is the lazy researcher’s friend.) I hit play and hurried back to the couch — we’ve long lost the VHS remote — and returned to Davy and Disney land.
The video was in color, although I’m quite sure I first saw it in black and white, since my family wasn’t an early adopter of the newfangled color sets. But this time I watched Davy on a medium-big LCD TV, not high-def, but with a lot more def than our old Zenith.
Davy Crockett is still Davy Crockett, but 8-year-old Danny Mackie is long gone. Still, I kind of liked it.
Davy Crockett a la Disney was a man of few words, and those few he uttered were often ungrammatical. He “reckoned’’ a lot. “I reckon I gotta learn you how,’’ he said to his sidekick, George Russell, played by a grizzled Buddy Ebsen, who later played Jed Clampett in the Beverly Hillbillies. “I ain’t much at speechifying,’’ Davy began when he was thrust into frontier politics.
Davy was my kind of hero. He was good-natured and slow to anger, but whupped those what needed whupping, to express it as he might have. At the beginning he was an Indian fighter, but later became an Indian friend, after he bested a chief in a hatchet fight and gave him a lecture about white man’s law being good for all. Davy was an optimist.
As a boy I wasn’t bothered by the fact that Davy may have had commitment issues. In the Disney story he comes back home to his family only for a couple of days before he gets “restless,’’ and heads off to war, or another frontier, or another miniseries.
In fact, his pretty wife dies from fever when he’s away and Davy shakes it off right quick. “I just need to be alone fer awhile,’’ he says, and briefly broods by a tree. No grief work for Davy. His “young ’uns’’ are never heard from again.
Things were simpler then. Bad people were “varmints.’’ The settlers in Texas were, in Davy’s summation, “Americans in trouble.’’ As I mentioned, death in battle didn’t seem so bad; Indians or Mexicans who were shot just tumbled off their horses onto the ground, as if they’d fallen off a playset.
The real David Crockett lived an interesting life. After his pioneer phase he was elected to the U.S. Congress, but fell out with the Andrew Jackson Democrats and lost a bid for re-election. He told the voters, “you may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.’’ Those are few words, but they are good ones.
The rest is history, or history with lyrics: The Ballad of Davy Crockett. Three versions of the song made the Billboard charts in the 1950s, when the Crockett craze was at full roar. It doesn’t have a great melody, and you can’t really dance to it, but me and ol’ Davy never was much for dancin’ anyway.
The writer lives in West Lebanon. He can be reached at dan.mackie@yahoo.com.