Fess'n Up About Davy Crockett

The news of Fess Parker's death at age 85 came as a shock.

I thought he had died at the Alamo!

When I was seven I loved Davy Crockett.

I had the coonskin cap, the flintlock, the powder horn, the jacket with the fringe---I wanted to BE Davy Crockett---unfortunately I looked more like Oliver Hardy in
The Fighting Kentuckian.

I cheered as Davy, along with his trusty companion, Jed Clampett, beat them savage, no-good Native-Americans!

Then Davy went and got himself elected to Congress (he must have received a lot of donations from the Backwoods B'ar-Killin' Lobby).
Poor Davy must have discovered that battlin' Injuns and killing a grizzly bear when he was a toddler was comparatively easy---but Congress!!

I just remember him pretty much ridin' outta there, saying he was going
to Texas for rest and recuperation.

Next thing he knows he's embroiled in a battle for the future and everlasting glory of a rent-a-car company.

I'll never forget Davy's last moments of that Mexican Stand-off, the last man standin', outta ammo and swinging his rifle at Santa Ana's bayonet-wielding soldiers, before they made him into a pin-cushion pinata!

I was in trauma, inconsolable, in denial---my first unhappy ending---until Davy came back in some boring sequel on a keel boat, with Liz Taylor's husband, Mike Todd (okay, my memory might be a little hazy here!)

I soon put childish things aside and took up the Hula Hoop and Elvis Presley trading cards.



Everybody sing,
"Born on a mountain top in Tennessee
Greenest state in the Land of the Free(who knew they were ecology conscious way back then?)
Lived in the woods till he knew every tree,
Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three"

These last two lines reportedly got his folks in trouble with Tennessee
Family&Children Services.