The Parkers

I have no stories today, no embellished historical drama, no flights of fancy, no morality plays. There are times when one has to escape from their flittering mind for a moment and assess the reality of the moment. Sometimes it takes an event or a well-placed word to collapse the fancy into the fact.

Yesterday while watching my pre-work news and weather program on TV, the announcement was made that Fess Parker died. I think they said he was 85 years old.

For those of you that are almost mature like me, and those of you that have reached maturity will probably know who Fess Parker is. I don’t have a lot to say about Mr. Parker for I only knew him as a child for his portrayal of Davy Crocket on television.

“Daveee, Davy Crocket

King of the wild frontier.”

Fess’ Davy was handsome and gentle and would rarely kill people with his trusted musket and was more of a mediator with warring Injuns and had a pretty wife and lived in a log cabin and had a coon skin cap and always had adventures which had a moral to them. As a ten year old, I thought he was the best actor in whatever that place was that actors came from.

“Born on a mountain top in Tennessee
Greenest state in the Land of the Free
Raised in the woods so's he knew every tree
Kilt him a b'ar when he was only three.
Daveee, Davy Crockett.King of the wild frontier!”

Fess Parker’s Davy Crocket was courageous, plain spoken, kind and tolerant, and resolute in what was right. This was a time when we needed a hero and he fit the part perfectly. I’ll not say he became a model for my life but he should have. His motto has always stuck with me: ‘Be sure you’re right, then go ahead.’

I’m just not sure how to handle the fact that Davy…I mean Fess, died.

Which brings me to another unrelated Parker.

Many of you, even those not-quite-reaching-almost-maturity of under 60 years of age, might have heard of Robert G. Parker. He was a very popular author who entertained zillions of readers who did not require their authors be sophisticated, erudite, soul-enriching and full of passionate prose. He wrote 300 page novels that one grabs off the end table while you are propped up in bed preparing for sleep.

I have always envisioned Mr. Parker wandering around his house bored and then would suddenly say to himself, “I’ll write another book” and wanders over to his computer and spits out another terse, quick-witted Spencer book and hits the send button on his computer to fire it off to his publisher who would dare not publish it because it would be an instant best-seller just like his other 36 books. The reason I like this image is that I am jealous of it.

The hero of most of Parker’s books was Spencer, a tough softie-inside Private Detective that cooks well and knows his wines and has a love relationship with psychiatrist Dr. Susan Silverman. Parker’s books are all about dialogue, or rather the lack of very much dialogue. I think I have laughed every time I have read one of his books…laughed at the dialogue. It is indeed terse and witty and the reader is left to fill in the blanks.

Lately Mr. Parker switched gears to write of a troubled small town Police Chief name Jesse Stone. They tried, unsuccessfully I think, tried to make TV movies out of these books starring Tom Selleck. Like everything else that Mr. Parker wrote, his books were instant best-sellers and routinely hit the Bestseller Lists.

Robert B. Parker died last January sitting at his computer whipping out another novel. I liked him. Now I have no more of his books to look forward to.