Actor Fess Parker, who mesmerized children in the mid-1950s portraying frontiersman Davy Crockett on television and then won a new audience in the 1960s as Daniel Boone, died Thursday at 85, the Los Angeles Times reported.
Parker, who later became a Santa Barbara hotel developer and owner of a Santa Ynez Valley winery – each bottle of his wine featured Crockett’s coonskin cap – died of complications from old age at his home near the winery, family spokeswoman Sao Anash told the paper.
He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Marcella, two children, 11 grandchildren and one great-grandchild.
The 6’6” ruggedly handsome Parker was 29 when Walt Disney chose him to play the lead in a three-part series about Davy Crockett.
When the first episode aired in December 1954, he became an overnight sensation and prompted a run on coonskin caps for children along with anything else Crockett-related.
At the same time, the show’s theme song “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” filled the airways and stayed at Number One for 13 weeks.
More television episodes and a feature film were rushed into production.
“Those Davy Crockett episodes really brought American history — indeed, a Disney version of American history — to the playground as well as to the American living room,” Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, told the Los Angeles Times some years ago.
Parker filmed “Old Yeller,” the children’s classic about a yellow mongrel, in 1958 and later went on to success as another frontiersman in “Daniel Boone,” which ran on NBC from 1964 to 1970.
In 1987, Parker bought a 714-acre ranch in Los Olivos, in Santa Barbara County’s Santa Ynez Valley. Although he had planned to live there and run cattle on the land, the Times said, the climate and the soil were ideal for a vineyard.
The Fess Parker Winery & Vineyards had its inaugural harvest in 1989 and by 12 years later, the wines had won more than 30 medals.