BOOMER ICONS: They Shaped a Generation That Reshaped the World
“Nobody knows anything … Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s a guess and, if you’re lucky, an educated one.”
— William Goldman, novelist and screenwriter (“Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”)
By Gregory N. Joseph
IN THE MID-1980s when a friend took over as editor of the features section at the large Southern California newspaper where I worked as a writer, he asked me what story I would do if I could take my pick. I didn’t hesitate: Interview the heroes of my generation, the Baby Boomers.
These were the influencers, I said, the ones who really had helped shape our perceptions of life and the world, and their impact was still being felt, for better or for worse. Our parents, who had experienced wars and a Great Depression — The Greatest Generation — had passed the baton to us in one of the most prosperous and promising periods in our country’s (or any country’s) history (especially if we were white and middle-class), but it was these influencers who all too often accounted for who were were and what we did growing up and as adults.
Our attitudes, our behavior, our dress, what we bought and thought — we mimicked and patterned ourselves after them, accepted and assimilated their likes and dislikes and how they acted and reacted, often much more than we did those of our parents. Our parents were busy working as we watched television, went to the movies, listened to the radio, and gorged ourselves on what fan magazines — and the cool kids, who got their information from the same sources — were telling us.
Now I wanted to know what those influencers had to say.
What was running through their minds then, and how did they feel about it now, looking back?
My editor gave me the go-ahead, and I was off to the races.
I set my sights on a small handful of especially influential people from the formative years of the boomer era: pioneering children’s television host “Buffalo Bob” Smith (“Howdy Doody”); cultural icon Fess “Davy Crockett” Parker of the seismic Disney franchise; the father of all TV fathers Robert Young (family patriarch Jim Anderson on “Father Knows Best” — and later the TV doctor of TV doctors, “Marcus Welby, M.D.”); the mother of all TV mothers Barbara Billingsley (June Cleaver on “Leave It To Beaver); and baseball legend Willie Mays, arguably the greatest ever to play the game (I still had the old Willie Mays baseball glove my Dad had bought me as a child, a just-because, cheer-up present he brought home in a big red box when I was at home ailing with a bad cold).
My first call was to children’s TV host Bob Smith, whose show and disarmingly cheerful demeanor — “Hey kids, what time is it? It’s Howdy Doody time!” —were among my very first memories as I squinted at this new-fangled little wooden box with a glass front, something called television, for clues about the world and what I needed to know to get along in it. Heck, those kids in the studio audience were just like me!
I was able to track Smith down through his son, Robin, a urologist in San Diego. “Please call,” Robin urged me, “he will be absolutely delighted! He really does love to hear from people.”
Robert Emil Schmidt, better known as “Buffalo Bob” Smith, was born in Buffalo, New York, on Nov. 27, 1917. Sixty-nine at the time of our conversation, he spent his summers in Grand Lake Stream, Maine, and his winters at Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He was still making appearances in character with his faithful puppet pal, Howdy Doody — back in the day, if you were lucky, you could coax your parents into buying a facsimile puppet of Howdy for your birthday or Christmas — at shopping malls and in public service spots on television and radio. He had married his childhood sweetheart — literally. Bob and his wife, Mildred, had met in the first grade. At the time of our interview, they had been married 45 years, with two other grown children and three grandchildren.
The affable Smith created Howdy Doody first only as a voice on radio with the original name of Elmer. But the character’s salutation — “Howdy Doody!” — became his name, and his personality took shape when children in the studio audience inquired as to the whereabouts of Howdy. The character fully materialized by the time the show switched to TV.
Broadcast on NBC-TV from Dec. 27, 1947, to Sept. 24, 1960 (its peak years were in my wheelhouse — 1952 and 1953), “Howdy Doody,” as it was then called, broke ground in children’s programming, the gold standard that set the pattern for all kids’ shows to follow.
Famously produced in NBC’s Studio 3A in Rockefeller Center, it also helped pioneer color production starting in the 1956 season (NBC was then owned by RCA) and was among a select group of shows used to promote color television sets in the late 1950s.
When I reached Smith, who was just as anxious to talk as his son Robin had said, he told me that a decade after the program went off the air, he was astonished to find that the boomers still sorely missed him and Howdy (remember, this was during the Vietnam War and as scandals in Washington, climaxing with Watergate, were beginning to unfold).
“It’s very thrilling,” he said from his home in Maine in the same folksy voice I remembered on TV, explaining that the revival had begun with a 1970 appearance at the University of Pennsylvania, where students had invited him to perform with Howdy.
“They wanted to relive the happy, carefree days,” he said. “I packed up my Buffalo Bob uniform, brought along Howdy and kinescopes of some old shows. My God, I walked out on that stage and I think there were 20,000 people there. It was one of the best reactions I’d ever gotten from an audience in my life.
“Girls got up in the audience and when they’d go to talk, they’d start to cry. The Philadelphia Inquirer and Bulletin (newspapers) were both there. The next thing I knew, we got ca lls from Temple University and Villanova. I told a golfing buddy, Jack Drury, a press agent who also handles Ed McMahon (at the time Johnny Carson’s sidekick on “The Tonight Show”), what happened. He made up a brochure for me, and I was off and running. I think I did 500 shows at 50 colleges in the next five or six years.”
Although the college performances had diminished somewhat by the time we talked and the original Howdy generation had graduated from college, new fans began to spring up among youngsters in the 1980s as their parents enthused about the old show and its characters.
The promise of a new generation of Howdy lovers overjoyed Smith.
Although slowed by a heart problem, he insisted he was not about to retire, and didn’t. He passed away on July 30, 1998, at the age of 80.
Fess Elisha Parker Jr. (1924–2010) — better known as Fess Parker — was an actor who played the 19th-century Tennessee frontiersman and politician Davy Crockett on the ABC television series “Disneyland” in a five-part serial from 1954 to 1955, with the first three episodes and last two subsequently edited into hugely popular big-screen theatrical releases, “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier” and “Davy Crockett and the River Pirates,” respectively. Children saw the movies with their friends multiple times (I did), and their parents sometimes joined them.
In the process, Davy Crockett — and Parker — became cultural icons, enduring touchstones in the lives and memories of Baby Boomers that still persist to this day.
Crockett products, including ubiquitous coonskin caps, flooded stores and probably still reside in Baby Boomers’ closets. And doubtless many people still have old copies of the franchise’s hit song “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” one version recorded by Parker himself in a surprisingly mellifluous voice, stored in their vintage record collections and still find themselves warbling the lyric, “Davy, Davy Crockett” that was woven throughout the productions.
After playing Crockett, Parker most famously went on to star in and produce the long-running (1964–70), very Crockett-like television series “Daniel Boone.” In the 1950s, NBC had approached him about doing a Crockett TV series, but Disney nixed the idea, saying it would be competing against his own program.
Parker ultimately left acting altogether, becoming a winemaker and resort owner in California.
I spoke to him for the boomers story and later in the late 1980s, when the Crockett character re-emerged with a younger actor in the role for a new TV miniseries, asking for his perspective — not only had he played Crockett, but he had earned a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Texas. (Although Crockett had supposedly been killed at the Alamo, a storyline that was followed in the Disney miniseries and elsewhere, Parker insisted there was evidence that Crockett in fact might have survived.)
“I’d like to take a moment and remind people that Davy Crockett was a flesh and blood man,” Parker said solemnly. “Somewhere, I have a book of quoatations of things he said when he served in Congress. I, too, have benefited from that very famous slogan of his — “Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.
During our discussion about his own career, Parker confided he had considered a run for the U.S. Senate.
“My initial reaction was that I liked the challenge of the campaign,” he said. “I realized I had an extremely good chance of being successful and it brought me up short. I realized it would change my life. I kept fluctuating and by that time there were 10 or 11 people in the race. I do have some regrets. It seems the guy who played Davy Crockett might have been a little chicken.”
Not in my eyes, as I reminded him — borrowing the Crockett slogan, he just wasn’t sure and didn’t go ahead.
Before I hung up, I said his bone-honest characterizations had inspired a whole generation, including me. He was touched and insisted upon sending autographed Crockett photos to my three children — which we still have, framed, and put away with other family treasures.
Fess Parker — Davy Crockett — said he hoped I would call him again. I never did. I didn’t want to impose. I wish I had. He was a very nice man. As influencers go, the baby boomers had chosen well.
My next call was to Robert George Young — the popular film, TV and radio actor known as Robert Young — who was not only the father of all TV fathers as family patriarch Jim Anderson on “Father Knows Best” (a beloved series that ran on CBS, then NBC, then CBS again) but would also go on to become the doctor of all TV doctors as “Marcus Welby, M.D.” (who, much to the chagrin of real physicians, still made house calls!).
“My kids used to tease me,” said Young, whose four daughters by then were grown, by phone from his home in Westlake Village, on the border of Ventura County, California. “‘How come,’ they wanted to know, that Jim Anderson has all the answers glibly on the tip of his tongue, he’s such a wise and wonderful person, and it takes you two and a half hours to come up with responses that are half as good? I’d tell them that the answer was simple. Jim Anderson had writers that are paid $5,000 a week to put words in his mouth, he doesn’t just think of those things off the top of his head.”
Young, 79 at the time, refused to refer to himself as retired: “That word means going to bed or putting new tires on your car.”
“Father Knows Best,” he explained, began as a radio series in 1949 and made the transition to television in 1954. It was actually canceled after its first season by CBS, but was then picked up for its second season by NBC. The last original episodes of the series aired in the 1959–60 season. “Marcus Welby, M.D., which originally ran on ABC from 1976 to 1976, was the first series for that network ever to rank number one for a full season.
He admitted that the storylines of both series would have to be updated to reflect more topical issues — “You can’t skirt those things” — but he was convinced the fundamental themes of both shows remained sound and enduring.
Young was especially pleased that the gentle Jim Anderson/Marcus Welby philosophy might have rubbed off on people who had families and businesses of their own.
And he liked hearing from those people: “Usually, it’s a very gracious, loveable semi-shyness sort of thing. They say something like, I don’t know how to put it — they use the expression, ‘I was raised on your show.’ We seemed to strike a kindred chord. There must have been people who felt along the same lines as we did.”
Robert Young died in 1998 at the age of 91, the headline of his obituary in one major newpaper singing his praises with the headline, “Forever Young.”
Young’s opposite parenting number, the TV mother of TV mothers, was Barbara Billingsley (Dec. 22, 2015-Oct. 16, 2010).
Born Barbara Lillian Combes, she began her acting career with uncredited parts in films like “Three Guys Named Mike” (1951) and “The Bad and the Beautiful” (1952) — in the latter playing a film studio costume designer outfitting Lana Turner — and had various TV roles before gaining lasting notoriety and a place in the television firmament on the sitcom “Leave It To Beaver” (1957–1963) and its sequel “The New Leave It to Beaver” (1983–1989). (She also appeared in the 1997 film version of “Leave It To Beaver” — this time as a character named Aunt Martha — wink-wink).
The TV Cleaver family of the original series lived at 211 Pine Street on the outskirts of EveryCity (Mayfield, if one insists upon giving it a name). She and her television brood were as middle-class — in the era when the post-World War II middle class was just taking shape — as meat loaf, crab grass and basketball hoops. Dad Ward Cleaver, played by the late High Beaumont, was an accountant; June was a housewife, and proud of it. Unlike other TV sitcom families of the day — the Lucys and Rickeys, the Georges and Gracies, the Ozzies and Harriets — June and Ward and their sons Beaver and Wally were grounded, solid, sane and sensible.
Some have argued, as they did with “Father Knows Best,” that “Leave It To Beaver” depicted an ideal that no real family could possibly achieve, and thus did some damage to actual relationships between parents and children watching at home because kids expected their mothers and fathers to be that perfect.
Billingsley politely disagreed.
“I like to think if June and Ward as ideals, rather than perfect,” Billingsley said by phone from her home in Santa Monica, Calif.
Billingsley, every bit as refined and imperturbable as her television alter ego, said that while doing the show, she herself was actually a working mother with two sons the same as Wally and Beaver, and could relate to the character in that regard as well.
“I would like to have been perfect in real life,” she said, “but I was like any parent. There were times I felt like choking my kids (Drew and Glenn). But you know what? June felt that way about Wally and Beaver sometimes too.
“I think the show had an awful lot of truth to it. A lot was written (in the scripts) about things that had happened to our writers or their children. Those things would really happen to people, like the time Beaver got a traffic ticket for driving a go-cart in the street. The next year, my nephew did the same thing. Do you know how horrendous that is for a child — to get a ticket? Well, it was just like the show. That’s the way our writers handled situations.”
She said that Beaumont was very much like Ward, that in addition to being an actor, he was a lay Methodist minister and preached to his congregations all throughout his years in show business.
She explained that playing the near-flawless June never put any pressure on her. Well, maybe just once.
“When the series first started, I would sometimes smoke a cigarette on the set at the break,” she recalled, noting that it was something her character would never be allowed to do. “Visitors would come by and see me and be so surprised! I remember hiding when some nuns visited the set! I finally stopped smoking — because of June Cleaver!”
Like Young, she lived a long life, passing away at the age of 94 in 2010.
Finally, I reached out to William Howard Mays Jr. — Willie Mays — the baseball legend affectionately nicknamed “the Say Hey Kid” for his flashing smile and exuberant style of play.
Regarded as one of the greatest players ever, ranking behind only Babe Ruth on many all-time lists, he played center field in the National League between 1951 and 1973 for the New York/San Francisco Giants and the New York Mets in a way that prompted another all-time great, Mays’ contemporary on the New York Yankees and fellow Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle, to comment: “We all knew he could do things that we couldn’t do.”
Now 91, Mays is the oldest living member of the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.
When I explained to him then how he had inspired so many us both by his play and his attitude, he was brief and to the point.
“It can be lonely being something ‘special’,” he said, his voice trailing. “It is difficult. It really is. But it’s difficult just being yourself, day in and day out, too.”
And in those few words were the secret.
All of these baby-boomer heroes had somehow unlocked my generation’s quest for being themselves, sometimes for better and sometimes not so.
And that was truly special.
