Tom Klein, a Bay Area businessman in his mid-40s, is the proud father of a 6-month-old son. At night, or whenever Jackson is "about to melt down," Klein lullabies the baby to sleep by singing:
Born on a mountaintop 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 3. Davy, Davy Crockett, King of the wild frontier!
Why that particular song?
Because, says his wife, Kate, "it's the only one he knows."
Klein is not the only graying boomer with a long memory for Davy Crockett. His lingering affection for the near-mythical figure--who was born more than 200 years ago and died in 1836--is in fact a fairly mild case.
To baby boomers, Davy Crockett was far more than the coonskin-capped "king of the wild frontier."
When Disney's version of his life was first broadcast 40 years ago, it ignited a Crockett craze that helped solidify the then-new medium of television, touched off the greatest merchandising fad the world had ever seen and instilled in an impressionable generation a set of values that persist to this day.
Not to mention that confounded song.
"The Crockett craze had a deep impact on a lot of people," says historian Paul Andrew Hutton of the University of New Mexico. "For kids in the 5-10 age group, it really did shape their lives, giving them an appreciation not only of history but of a kind of patriotism and self-sacrifice."
Fess Parker catapulted to fame in the role of Crockett that summer. Today, a real-estate developer and winery owner in the Santa Barbara area, he maintains that "a lot of today's leaders--people making business decisions, heading up our education system and so forth--had a lot of their values shaped by their early exposure to that show."
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Those who have made a study of the Crockett craze (yes, there are such people) attribute it to the unprecedented confluence of several threads: the dawn of television action programming, the impressionability of a large pool of subteens, the spending power of their parents and the inherent appeal of the character as viewed through Disney's lens.
But did an entire generation in fact grow up with a subconscious voice--sounding uncannily like Fess Parker's--urging them to always act morally and surely, to "be sure you're right, then go ahead"? Could that simple motto have left as profound an impression on the postwar class as the collective guidance of parents, teachers and Dr. Spock?
Parker, now a soft-spoken 70-year-old, seems to think so.
"The folks who come to visit the winery tell me over and over how much that character shaped their lives," he says. "I have to believe that the impact of those programs was due as much to the values inculcated in them as to their entertainment quality. The Crockett shows were unique in that; I've yet to see anything that suggests that youngsters took values from the Western shows that came along shortly thereafter, the 'Gunsmokes' and 'Wyatt Earps.' "
Those familiar with Walt Disney's political conservatism may be surprised to learn that at least one scholar believes the Crockett series was crucial in exposing youngsters to "liberal values."
But it's a Cold War liberalism to which historian Hutton refers. He argues that the Crockett shows "predisposed the baby boomers to sympathize with U.S. efforts to spread our values abroad, conditioning their response to John Kennedy's and Lyndon Johnson's clarion call to fight for freedom in a distant land."
That analysis is echoed by Parker, who likes to talk about the young troops he met in Vietnam in the 1960s who told him that their conduct in battle--in dealing with fear, or in choosing not to shoot someone they had in their sights--had its roots in values they derived from his portrayal of Crockett.
But where Parker dodges a follow-up question about how his characterization might have influenced those '60s kids who chose \o7 not \f7 to fight in Southeast Asia, Hutton addresses it directly.
"Absolutely," he says when asked whether there was something about Crockett that was internalized by those boomers who rejected the U.S. effort in Vietnam. "There was a great example of it in the '60s diary 'The Strawberry Statement,' when the author, a college student, is trying to understand where his resistance to the war came from. Then he realized it came from Disney's Davy Crockett--the whole 'Be sure you're right, then go ahead' thing."
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That was then, of course, and this is now--and Hutton acknowledges that Crockett, as an ongoing symbol of bedrock American virtues, appeals primarily to conservative elements in today's society.
He died for "freedom," most folks believe (on the basis of the fictionalized Disney version), in an effort to expand the nation's boundaries. (The argument over whether the Alamo's defenders died to create an independent Texas, or on behalf of a future state of the Union, is one that may never be settled. Either way, that episode hardly made Crockett a hero to those of Mexican heritage.)
