Update 3-23-10

Hi,

Just gotta do this.  Ya'll can sing along.

"Born on a mountain top in Tennessee,
The greenest state in the land of the free,
Raised in the woods so's he knew ev'ry tree,
Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three!
Daaay-veee!
Davy Crockett!
King of the wild frontier!"

More on Mr. Parker later.

As for the scholarship money -- we're coming along.  We raised $250 from four people in the first six days.  So, added to the almost $100 we already had, from four other people, that leaves $650 to go. 
    The sooner we get it, the sooner we can let South know that we can honor the scholarships for another year, which would be nice, as would making it to the promised ten years.  This one would make it seven.
    So please send your checks to me, Rich Eisbrouch, at:  23030 Dolorosa Street, Woodland Hills, California  91367.  And please remember to indicate in the bottom left corner of the check which scholarship you'd like to support, or if you'd like your money split between them.  I'll let you know as soon as the goals have been reached.  Thanks.

And for the summer reunion.  First, Art Halprin asked me to remind people of the dates, so no one absently schedules to be in another place.  So far, we're thinking of Friday, July 16th to Sunday, July 18th, and everyone seems to have tacitly agreed on that.
    As for the place, well, here are some room rates at LaGuardia and Kennedy airports to help us along.  So we're not comparing hotels to motels and hotels of uneven quality, these are hotels that are the equivalent to the Hilton we stayed at in Huntington for the 40th reunion, and the Hyatt we stayed at in Hauppauge for the 37th.

LaGuardia Airport Marriott  Hotel         .6 miles from airport      $159.00/night

LaGuardia Airport Courtyard Hotel       .7 miles from airport      $149.00/night

LaGuardia Airport Fairfield Inn              2 miles from airport      $139.00/night

LaGuardia Airport Fairfield Inn Astoria   2.1 miles from airport   $149.00/night

JFK Airport Fairfield Inn                       1.8 miles from JFK      $139.00/night

JFK Airport Courtyard Hotel                 2.5 miles from JFK      $199.00/night

JFK Airport Sheraton Hotel                  1.8 miles from JFK      $195.00/night

Now, these prices are all off the Internet.  I haven't actually been at either of these airports in probably over twenty years.  So if other people have actual information about these hotels, or information about other decent area hotels, please send it along.

Again, for comparison:

Rockville Centre Hampton Inn (Hilton)   4.5 miles from South       $186.00

Huntington Hilton                                25.5 miles from South    $159.00

Hauppauge Hyatt Regency                  36 miles from South       $131.00

You'll notice that rates previously quoted for Rockville Centre, Huntington, and Hauppauge might have been different.  And I can find varying rates online for all ten of these hotels.  So these are approximate.  If we try for a group rate, and if we try for a group rate sooner rather than later, we can probably knock off ten bucks per night.  Also, most of these rates are for two queen-sized beds.  So people can share rooms.

In mail:

Valerie Nelson Gillen mentions:  The Irish Coffee Pub is also a catering hall so I am sure they have a separate room but I thought that would defeat the purpose of seeing  Booker Gibson play. 

Art Halprin adds to his previous note:  Just get someone to arrange a room rate at one hotel with a suite or small meeting room that we can use and make dinner simple.  It can be anywhere on Long Island.  Those of us flying in can rent cars or get friends to pick them up at La Guardia or Islip.

Ken Ulric mentions that he and Laura only lost electricity for five minutes during the storm, but that neighbors merely four blocks away lost it for five days.

Neil Guberman mentions that the snow is finally melting in Pittsburgh.

Again, if you haven't sent a card to Joe Argenzio, his address is:  St. Mark Village, 2655 Nebraska Avenue, Palm Harbor, Florida 34684.  Just write your name and the year you graduated from South.  That'll make him smile.

Finally, about Fess Parker.  "An Enemy of Raccoons but a Friend of Marketers," by Charles McGrath, published in the March 21st, New York Times, and used, of course, without permission.
    If you grew up in the 1950s, then the character Davy Crockett, played by Fess Parker, who died at 85 late last week, is an essential part of your mental furniture. His ballad most likely still plays over and over in your head, especially the fourth line, with its odd Appalachian spelling and suggestion of folk tale strangeness: “Kilt him a b’ar when he was only 3.” Cosseted in your urban or suburban television room in Eisenhower America, how could you fail to be impressed by a feat like that?
    In truth, Davy Crockett was less the “king of the wild frontier,” as the song goes on to say, than the king of a merchandising juggernaut that convinced millions of children that they needed to own Davy Crockett pajamas and lunchboxes and coloring books and official Davy Crockett coonskin caps. We actually wore these little ratty-looking toupees with no irony or embarrassment at all.
    The formula has since been duplicated countless times: someone dreams up a television show, gets children to watch it and then foists stuff on them. But the success of the Crockett episodes, which began appearing on the “Disneyland” program on Dec. 15, 1954, took even the producers at Disney by surprise. Forty million people watched the shows, which were broadcast by 163 stations.
    Television, which by then had been introduced to more than half of all American households, was a medium just waiting for a cultlike show with mass appeal to come along. But when the Crockett programs began catching on, the whole phenomenon still felt fresh and innocent. Watching, and then buying the Crockett souvenirs, seemed less like taking part in a fad than like participating in a civic ritual.
    Much of the shows’ success stemmed from Mr. Parker. Unlike Buddy Ebsen, who brought a certain vaudeville anticness to the role of Crockett’s sidekick, Georgie (and who a few years later, in inspired casting, turned up as another television backwoodsman: Jed Clampett on “The Beverly Hillbillies”), Mr. Parker inhabited his role with complete naturalness. He wore Davy’s coonskin cap, which was a big, furry bonnet, not the skimpy mass-market version, without a trace of self-consciousness.
    Mr. Parker was a big man, well over six feet, who combined some of Jimmy Stewart’s handsomeness and winning charm with John Wayne’s physical presence, and he projected a natural air of modesty. His bosses at Disney, concerned with protecting Crockett’s image, discouraged him from taking parts in more grown-up pictures, like the John Ford film “The Searchers” or “Bus Stop” with Marilyn Monroe, and so we never got a chance to see what his range as an actor might have been. He was doomed to buckskin, reappearing in the ’60s as Daniel Boone, but on him it was as dignified as a suit.
    By today’s standards Davy Crockett is an unlikely hero. He trapped animals and ate them. He made his own leather and wore it. He fought Indians. But he was in many ways the perfect embodiment of ’50s America. He was self-reliant, plainspoken, neighborly but not pushy, and he had no patience with foreign invaders. In the Disney version of Texas history, the battle of the Alamo, where Crockett dies (or we imagine he does; the show depicts him fighting to the end, swinging “Old Betsy,” his rifle, like a baseball bat), was all about protecting American soil from Mexican invaders wearing foppish, European uniforms.
    The violence of the shows was stylized, even benign, and that too seems innocent now. But Mr. Parker’s character was never corny, probably because he brought such conviction to it, and the shows never seemed preachy. They were meant to be wholesome family entertainment, and they were. This was back when parents and children actually watched TV together instead of retreating to private sets in different corners of the house.
    It seems entirely fitting that in later life, having come to the end of his acting career, Mr. Parker reinvented himself as a successful vintner. Once an idol of baby boomers, a model of coonskin fortitude, he now became for them a source of middle-aged balm and solace, making wine they could sip in the evening as the shadows lengthened. Davy would probably have abstained, but he lived in an America where people were nobler and firmer of purpose.

The South '65 e-mail addresses:  reunionclass65.blogspot.com

The South '65 photo site:  picasaweb.google.com/SouthHS65 


Rich