Most of the obituaries of Fess Parker, the actor who famously portrayed Davy Crockett on television in the fifties and who died yesterday, placed him at the center of genuine coonskin fad, part of the crazy quilt of crazes of that period that included Elvis, hula hoops, drive-ins and that made up pop culture during that decade. I prefer to think Fess as being one of the key figures in the fifties and sixties who were entertaining children and adults with stories directly taken from or based on American history.
Consider all these influences which appeared between 1955 and 1965: Parker first played Crockett, one of the first national smashes in the young days of television, and then later played frontiersman Daniel Boone on an NBC series ran for six seasons after its 1964 debut. Parker’s show, The Adventures of Davy Crockett, was produced by the Walt Disney Company, which during this period also made a film version of Esther Forbes‘ Revolutionary War novel Johnny Tremain, and created a TV programs based on the adventures of the Revolutionary War hero Francis Marion, the Swamp Fox, starring 
Leslie Nielsen, of a drummer boy who served at the battle of Shiloh, and of the 7th Cavalry’s only survivor of the Battle of the Little Big Horn (Commanche, a horse.) Disney wasn’t the only television producer that tried to mine history: in 1961, there was a short-lived television series called The Americans about a pair of brothers from Virginia who ended up on the opposite sides of the Civil War, and in 1963, an anthology series on CBS called The Great Adventure, also short-lived, which depicted key moments in the lives of people like Harriet Tubman, Jefferson Davis, Nathan Hale, Sam Houston, John Brown, Jean Lafitte, Boss Tweed and others (one wonders if this approach was inspired by President Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage.) At the same time, Hollywood, whose longstanding interest in historical epics had ebbed, once again began pumping them out in earnest: The Alamo (Crockett again!), 
The Buccaneer (Charlton Heston as Andrew Jackson), The Horse Soldiers (John Wayne playing a cavalry officer loosely based as a Union cavalry officer Judson Kilpatrick), The Longest Day, PT 109, The Great Escape, The Bridge Over the River Kwai, and many, many more westerns and World War II adventures (and this wouldn’t include non-American-based films like Cleopatra, Ben Hur, El Cid, Khartoum, Spartacus, Lawrence of Arabia, The Fall of the Roman Empire, Becket, The Lion in Winter, and so on, which fed an interest in history.) On the radio, country singer Johnny Horton had a hit single with
“The Battle of New Orleans,” and a hit album that includes songs about the sinking of the Bismarck, Snowshoe Thompson and Jim Bridger. Our bookshelves were filled with Landmark Books, non-fiction biographies and accounts of battles, events and discoveries, and “You Are There. . . ” books, which showed us large historical events through the eyes of child participants. For a lighter read, Topps put out a line of Civil War trading 
cards, with grisly battle scenes drawn by Woody Gelman, who also drew Topps’ famous Mars Attacks! series. Best of all, we had toys. Toy guns, sure–flintlocks, Winchester repeaters, Colt revolvers, Lugars, .45 caliber automatics, and carbines, but all kinds of playsets full of toy soldiers and accessories that allowed us to imagine for ourselves what the Alamo, Gettysburg, Omaha Beach and the 
Little Big Horn must have looked like, had they been waged on the colorful linoleum tiles of my mother’s basement.
It’s not that kinds today get no history-based entertainment–American Girl dolls are an obvious example–but kids are far more steeped in fantasy and science fiction. I just think of myself as very fortunate to have been brought up during a very brief period when so much of pop culture enthusiastically communicated and reinforced the idea that the past was place that was exciting, and inspiring, and well worth getting to know.
From McCracken Poston: You left out one of Parker’s best historic roles, that of James Andrews, the leader of a group of Union spies who came to Georgia and stole a locomotive, The General, in a daring plan to cut telegraph lines and burn bridges in the vital Western & Atlantic (W&A) Railroad. It is a fascinating true story, and the spies were thwarted only by the persistence of William Fuller, the engineer of the General who chased them trying to recover his engine, first on foot, then by hand car, then by other trains, one of which he drove backwards North along the line toward Chattanooga. The General ran out of fuel right here in Ringgold, Georgia, and the spies dispersed throughout the countryside. I once found an old letter in a document shop in Atlanta where the writer, from Ringgold talks about the incident and that “the yankees ran right through our field!” Andrews was tried and hanged in Atlanta, but is buried in the National Cemetary in Chattanooga. His military cohorts were the first recipients of the Congressional Medal of Honor. He was civilian, so he did not win that award.