Davy Crockett dies…yet again

Actor Fess Parker, Davy Crockett for the Baby Boomer generation, died this week. For Boomers, Davy Crockett, along with the hula hoop, the Beatles and Elvis Presley, was an overwhelming fad that helped shaped their childhoods.

The Davy Crockett series and ensuing movies were the brainchild of Walt Disney. With a great storyline and the marketing power of the Walt Disney Company, the Davy Crockett fad helped shape the toy industry as well. That’s why I was so struck by a quote from Fess Parker’s obituary in The New York Times:

Children wore coonskin caps to school and wore them to bed. They wore them with their Davy Crockett plastic fringe frontier costumes while they played with their Crockett trading cards, their Crockett board games and puzzles, their Crockett color slide sets and their Crockett powder horns. They pestered their parents for Crockett toy muskets and Crockett bubble gum and Crockett rings and comic books.

By the end of 1955, The New York Times reported, American children had their choice of more than 3,000 different Davy Crockett toys, lunch boxes, thermoses and coloring books…[but]By early 1956 interest had begun to flag, and as suddenly as it had begun, the craze ended.

As powerful as Zhu Zhu Pets are and Cabbage Patch Kids were, they pale in the frenzy surrounding these earlier fads. Perhaps it was the sheer number of Baby Boomers at the time or a nation letting its breath out after two world wars and a depression. For whatever reason, Davy Crockett became not just a fad but an endelible memory of childhood for tens of millions.

And so, we say farewell to Fess Parker and Davy Crockett.  A little piece of childhood for a whole lot of people just went with them.