Remembering the King of the Wild Frontier

            On the night of December 15, 1954, something dramatic happened.  I have no memory of the event.  I was only two years old at the time, but what happened that night had a huge impact on my childhood, as well as the childhoods of millions of baby boomers. 

            Not surprisingly, the event happened on TV on a show called "The Wonderful World of Disney".  Several years later, the show was re-named "Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color".

            In 1954 there was no color TV, so it was "Walt Disney's Wonderful World in Black and White." 

            An estimated forty million viewers tuned into the show that night, most of them little yard apes like me and their parents.  Walt Disney himself introduced the show, telling forty million Americans that they were about to see the beginning of a mini-series about a legendary Tennessean.  And then, as the series began, America heard the following theme song:

            Born on a mountain top in Tennessee,

            Greenest state in the land of the free,

            Raised in the woods so he knew every tree,

            Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three.

            Davy, Davy Crockett,

            King of the Wild Frontier!

            Suddenly, we baby boomers had a hero, a great frontiersman named Davy Crockett, played by a twenty-nine year old actor named Fess Parker.

            We boomers were absolutely mesmerized by Fess Parker in his coonskin cap and buck skins.

            What happened over the next few years graphically demonstrated the power of television in combination with baby boomer consumers.  Within weeks, every playground and schoolyard in America was covered with little tykes wearing coonskin caps.  According to William Manchester in The Glory and the Dream, the price of coonskins jumped to an all time high, $8.00 a pound.  In 1955 alone, Americans spent over $100 million on coonskin caps, Davy Crockett sweatshirts, blankets, toothbrushes, lunchboxes, swing sets, sandboxes, tents, bicycles and of course, toy flint-lock guns. 

            And that theme song?  Well, "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" was the number one record in America for over four months. 

            The Davy Crockett fad kept going for years.  On June 10, 1956, I celebrated my fourth birthday with an official Davy Crockett party in my back yard.  My family album contains a picture of me wearing my coonskin cap and my buck skins, as I blew out the candles on a Crockett cake.

            When he ran for president in 1956, Tennessee Senator Estes Kefauver tried to jump on the Crockett bandwagon.  In the New Hampshire primary, he campaigned in a coonskin cap.  While he won the primary, he eventually lost the Democratic nomination to Adlai Stevenson, but only because children are not allowed to be delegates at a national political convention. 

            I admired President Eisenhower, but I guarantee you that when I was four years old, I would love to have had a President who wore a coonskin cap.

            In 1960, young John F. Kennedy was elected President, and although he didn't wear a coonskin cap, he promised a "New Frontier", so we boomers had our own President Davy Crockett, at least for a few wonderful years.

            Last week, I read the news that Fess Parker had died at the age of eighty-five.  The picture of him that accompanied the news story was not of an eighty-five year old retired actor.  It was of the twenty-nine year old Davy Crockett in his prime, and I am grateful for that.  Davy Crockett should never grow old.  He should always be that heroic young fellow Tennessean who came into my life a half century ago and inspired me to don a coonskin cap and explore the wild frontier.