Davy was his first fad

You never forget your first fad.
Mine was Davy Crockett, and its echoes continue to this day.
I was in second or third grade, maybe caught up in the summer between the two.
Television was in its infancy. Not every house in the neighborhood yet had one of the huge, clunky, erratic, black and white sets. But that was changing by the day.
There was, of course, not all that much to watch. A good antenna could get you stations in Dayton and Indianapolis, but everything from the weather to sunspots seemed determined to create interference.
In fact, “interference” was one of those new words in the family vocabulary back then, along with “rotor” and “test pattern” and “station identification.”
The advantage of having so few choices was that the odds were good that your friends were watching the same thing.
Go to school on a Monday and someone would mention a performer on the Ed Sullivan Show. Go to church on Sunday and someone would either mention the latest “Gunsmoke” or Jack Imel’s appearance on Lawrence Welk.
And then came Davy Crockett.
Walt Disney, who was a master at whipping up an audience of kids, launched a multi-part, multi-week serial about the frontiersman on his show.
And every kid in America was watching.
Suddenly, everyone wanted to be Davy Crockett. We played Davy Crockett at recess. We sang — with incredibly annoying repetition — the theme song of the Davy Crockett episodes. (“Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier,” etc.)
And most importantly, we all wanted stuff with Davy Crockett (played by the lanky and laconic Fess Parker) plastered all over them.
The great American marketing machine was happy to oblige.
Within a matter of weeks, it seemed, Davy was everywhere. The intensity of the fad was astonishing to a kid who had never seen anything like it before.
The intensity of the wheedling was astonishing as well.
Every kid of a certain age (my age) drove his or her parents nuts. We wanted Davy Crockett lunchboxes, Davy Crockett notebooks, and Davy Crockett whatever.
The most envied kids were those whose parents actually sprung for a kid-sized coonskin cap, complete with a raccoon tail. (They were envied less after a bully pulled the tail off at recess.)
Despite some world-class wheedling on my part, my parents held firm. There was to be no coonskin cap in my wardrobe.
There was, however, a Davy Crockett t-shirt that was instantly my favorite. The only problem was that my mother felt that it ought to be laundered now and then.
I figured I ought to be able to wear it daily throughout third grade.
If all of this was a bit baffling for kids, it must have struck adults of that era as if the world had gone mad. A woman like my third grade teacher — Josephine Corle, who already seemed nostalgic for the 19th century — must have been dumbfounded by it all.
And then it ended, almost as suddenly as it had begun.
To real Davy devotees, that shift was almost as jarring as the start of the fad. We thought it was going to go on forever.
Still, there are the echoes.
An e-mail from an old buddy last week mourned the passing of Fess Parker and waxed nostalgic about the Davy days.
His proudest possession, back when I was wearing that t-shirt that needed to be washed, was an official Davy Crockett belt buckle.
Over the weekend, I found one on eBay and sent him the link. Will he buy it? I doubt it. His belt size has grown a bit since elementary school.
But I hope the sight of it brought a smile to his face.[[In-content Ad]]