Born in a River Bottom in Tennessee

Tuesday, August 17, was Davy Crockett’s birthday. He would have been 235 had he lived.

Actually Aug. 17 was David Crockett’s birthday.

Davy Crockett, the creation of Walt Disney, wasn’t born until Dec. 15, 1954 when “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier,” aired on the ABC show “Disneyland.”

Oh, there were a few who called him “Davy” during his lifetime but for the most part he was David Crockett. Even the title of his 1834 autobiography was “A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett, written by himself.”

As any fan of “Disneyland” knows the frontiersman who was born on a mountaintop in Tennessee died at the Alamo, fighting for Texas’s freedom from Mexico. He went out in a blaze of glory and a haze of smoke, swinging his rifle like a baseball bat, as the credits rolled and The Wellingtons, a folk group, sang the last verse of the theme. (The theme song has 20 total verses.)

His land is biggest and his land is best

From grassy plains to the mountain crest

He's ahead of us all meetin' the test

Followin' his legend into the West.

Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier!

The Wellingtons would, of course, go on to greater fame...singing the theme song to “Gilligan’s Island.” Yes!

 

No one had ever heard of Davy Crockett before Walt Disney turned him into a TV show. Right?

Actually, wrong.

It’s just that before Davy got Disney-ized most people knew him as David Crockett, and yes, lots of people had heard of him.

He had been a Tennessee congressman from 1826 until 1830 and from 1832 to 1834 and had written a fantastic autobiography which made him sound like he was part horse, part alligator and part snapping turtle. Which is pretty much the way he introduced himself to his fellow congressmen when he joined the House of Representatives in 1827: “I am the same David Crockett, fresh from the backwoods, half horse, half alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle...I can whip my weight in wildcats and if any gentleman pleases, for a ten-dollar bill, he can throw in a panther too. “

That’s the part Walt Disney liked and that’s the part Walt Disney spotlighted when he produced “Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier.”

By the time Walt Disney got hold of the legend, it was pretty faded.

Davy, er, David had been a famous fellow in the 1830s, especially in the months after his autobiography was published by Carey & Hart of Philadelphia and sold for $1. (That would be $23.63 in today’s dollars, not outrageous. It just seems like a dollar back then would have been worth more.)

Walt Disney didn’t change David to Davy. He was also known as Davy during his life. A search of newspapers.com for the years 1814 to 1836, the year he died, shows 546 results for Davy Crockett and 1,323 for David Crockett. So he was known more as David Crockett during his lifetime but he was also known as Davy.

That started to change after his death when Davy started taking over.

Still in 1926 Tennessee Governor Austin Peay declared the second week of November 1926 David Crockett Week in Tennessee “to honor this great and spectacular figure in Tennessee.”

David Crockett, not Davy.

Then in 1941 director and screenwriter Lambert Hilyer made it Davy with the B-western “The Son of Davy Crockett” starring Bill Elliott – who would later play Red Ryder in that film series – in the title role, the son of the old frontiersman, and Dub Taylor as his sidekick Cannonball.

So when Walt Disney came along in 1954 it became Davy Crockett for all time.

Davy Crockett: “born on a mountain top in Tennessee.”

Which is about as far from the truth as you can get.

If you’ve been to the Davy Crockett Birthplace State Park in Limestone, Tennessee you know it is in a valley.

I know because I’ve been there.

The first time was 1954.

The first Davy Crockett episode, “Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter,” had aired Wednesday December 15, 1954. It was all the talk at recess at Johnson School the next day. And by Thursday afternoon Penney’s and J. Fred’s on Broad were swamped with moms looking to buy a coonskin cap. The coonskin cap craze was on.

We had a special interest in the Davy Crockett story in my household. Davy had been born six miles from my mother’s home place.

So the next Sunday as we left my grandmother’s Chuckey farm, my father asked if I wanted to see where Davy was born. Did I, did I? I would only be the most popular boy in Miss Wilkinson’s class if I did.

The birthplace then was nothing like it is today. Now it’s an official state park. Then you turned off 11-E, went down a gravel road to a dirt road, then bounced through what had been a pasture only weeks before.

But there we were, at the place where the King of the Wild Frontier was born. I scrambled out of our ’51 Chevy, still wobbly from the nauseous last part of the journey, and raced over to what appeared to be the Official Davy Crockett Birthplace. It was a souvenir stand no more than eight feet wide, maybe eight feet deep, with a couple of irascible old guys peering at me from behind a plank counter. They had a few cheesy Davy Crockett pennants - Davy waved a pennant at the Alamo? - a leather change purse or two and an assortment of firecrackers.

They didn’t have a single coonskin cap. Sold out, they said.

“Is this where Davy Crockett was born?” I asked.

Right here, one answered.

I recall thinking, Davy Crockett was born in a fireworks stand?

Right there where you’re standing, said the other.

I looked down. I was standing on a rock that said, “On this spot Davy Crockett was born Aug. 17, 1786.”

I remember the hair on my neck standing up. I was on the spot where Davy Crockett was born.

I think it was a couple of weeks before my neck hair was back to normal.

 

Fess Parker, who played Davy, visited that same birthplace on May 29, 1955, trailed by a photographer from Life magazine. In the crowd of visitors that day was the Davis family from my neighborhood. When the Life magazine issue came there is a photo of Parker surrounded by Davy fans at the birthplace rock. I think that is my neighbor Bill Davis just to the left of Fess. Bill is rubbing his eye.

 

Grinnin’ Down a Bar

One of my favorite scenes from the TV show was when Davy grinned down a bear, or was in the process when he was interrupted by that fussy Major Norton.

Did he really try to “grin down a bare (bear)?” I found this story in an 1833 edition of the Hagerstown (Md.) Mail about David Crockett “grinning down” a raccoon.

“I discovered a long time ago that a coon couldn’t stand my grin. I could bring one tumbling down from the highest tree. I never wasted powder and lead when I wanted one of those creatures.”

The story continues: One night David spotted a coon in a tree near his cabin and determined to grin it down. He grinned and grinned and grinned and nothing. He thought he was losing his power. It wasn’t until he felled the tree with an axe that he discovered “what I had taken for a coon was a large knot upon a branch of the tree and upon looking at it closely I had grinned the bark off and left the knot perfectly smooth.”

And that’s why they call it the Legend of Davy Crockett.

 

 

The Bristol Stomp*

This year marks the 100^th anniversary of the Kingsport High – Bristol, Tennessee High football rivalry: 100 years, 88 games and a 68-19-1 D-B advantage.

It didn’t start out that way. Tennessee High won that first game on Nov. 11, 1921 by a score of 54-3.  Then Kingsport High (not yet Dobyns-Bennett) ran off six wins in a row, including a 100-0 win in 1925 (Bobby Dodd was the quarterback).

The two teams played twice in 1922 and 1923 but not at all in 1926 and 1943. They didn’t play from 1992 to 1997 and they also paused the series from 1998 till 2005.

Perhaps the most anticipated game in hundred years of the series was in 1959. The teams came into the game with D-B ranked number one in the state in the Litkenhous ratings and Tennessee High number three.

It was so intense that football game coverage spilled over from the sports pages to the editorial pages, certainly a first for the Tri-Cities.

The lead editorial in the Bristol Herald Courier on Friday morning Oct. 30, 1959 was headlined:

OUR OPINION: We Are Confident Tennessee Will Win

The editorial continued:

Football is a game. A rough game, but still a game.

Yet, we know of no other sport which attracts such intense interest, and promotes such keen rivalry, as does football. It is thrilling to watch, fun to play, and always a mark of quality for a city and a school.

Tonight, one of the greatest football games in the history of East Tennessee will be played at Kingsport. Opponents in the contest will be the Vikings of Tennessee High School and the Indians of Dobyns-Bennett High School.

Interest in this game is so high that some area schools have changed the dates of their own games, playing on Thursday and Saturday nights so that fans and other football players might journey to Kingsport to see the big game.

Out of this contest at Kingsport will come, in all likelihood, the champion of the Big Seven Conference. Probably, too, the winner will be acclaimed Tennessee state champions.

So, more than just one game is riding on the outcome of tonight's contest.

We are not much at prognosticating. But every indication we have is that Tennessee High School can and will win the game. It will not be an easy victory. No victory over Kingsport ever is. But it will be a victory, nevertheless, because we believe in the ability of our boys and in their eagerness to hand Tennessee High School its second straight conference championship.

Our best wishes go with the Vikings tonight. We know they will play a great ball game and we are confident they will win.

 

The sports gang at the Kingsport Times were so thunderstruck by the fact that Bristol was editorializing about the game that it reprinted the entire editorial in the afternoon edition of the Times that day. Just in time for the D-B players to read it before taking the field.

That’s what coaches call “bulletin board material.”

Maybe it worked. Or maybe the better team won.

But this is what it looked like: 

D-B cruised to that 27-6 win before a reported 14,000 fans.

D-B’s Wally Bridwell scored on a one-yard quarterback sneak and a three-yard run, Denny Revell caught an 18-yard touchdown pass from Bridwell, and Bob Slaughter finished up the scoring with an eleven-yard run. Boby Prater kicked three extra points. Tennessee High didn’t score until the waning minutes of the game after D-B coach Bill Jasper had put in his second-string defensive.

 

If the unnamed Bristol Herald-Courier editorial writer had looked at that week’s Litratings before making that prognostication, the writer might not have been so confident. The Litratings had Kingsport a nine-point favorite. But the Bristol writer couldn’t do that because the Herald-Courier didn’t subscribe to the Litratings service.

If you are scratching your head, asking, “Litratings? What are Litratings?” you probably weren’t a sports fanatic in Kingsport in the fifties and sixties.

The Litratings were a mathematical system that ranked high school football and basketball teams, assigning a number, a sort of power rating, to each school’s team. They were widely published and quoted across the state.

Dr. E. E. Litkenhous, always identified as a Vanderbilt professor, had devised his system in the 1930s using a secret “difference-by-score” formula. If that’s all you knew about Dr. Litkenhous, you would probably have assumed he was a mathematics professor. No, he was a professor of chemical engineering. And a sports fan. (He had played baseball at the University of Louisville in the twenties.)

The first paper to run his Litratings was the Louisville Courier-Journal in 1936. A promotional ad boasted “the Litkenhous System of Football Rating is based on calculus and is as accurate as mathematics can make it. Year in and year out, Litkenhous Difference by Score Ratings are more than 85 percent correct.”

At the height of their popularity in the fifties and sixties, Litratings handicapped high school, college and professional football and basketball teams and were carried by newspapers all over the south.

Dr. Litkenhous died in 1984 although his Litratings lived on until the end of the 2017-2018 basketball season, when the Louisville newspaper – which had purchased his formulas – phased them out.

He had hand delivered the last Litratings that he personally computed to the Nashville Tennessean a week before his death in Dec. 1984. Those Litratings rated the University of Maryland one point better than its Sun Bowl opponent, the University of Tennessee. Maryland won 28-27.

Dr. Litkenhous went out on a winning streak.

*"The Bristol Stomp" was a hit in 1961 for the Dovells. It had nothing to do with Bristol, Tennessee or Bristol, Virginia. It was about a dance craze that originated in Bristol, Pennsylvania. Nevertheless it was adopted by the D-B cheerleaders in the fall 1962 as D-B prepared to play Bristol. 

Here is the game story for the very first Kingsport-Bristol game in 1921: