Clint Walker

I'm a son of the west, born and raised in Denver, Colorado. I love the mountains, the wide open spaces, and especially the canyon lands in Utah and Arizona. My favorite place in the whole world is Monument Valley.

I grew up playing Cowboys and Indians. My favorite TV shows were the oaters, the horse operas. All my brother, Steve, and I ever wanted for Christmas was cowboy hats and six guns. It was our youngest brother, Randall, however, who got to join the Westernaires horse riding club and become the real cowboy. He was in the cavalry in the James Arness How the West Was Won series in 1978.

As far back as I can remember, every Saturday morning was Roy Rogers. It was a special moment in 1997 when we passed through Victorville, California and stopped at the Roy Rogers and Dale Evans Museum. Just as we were about to leave Roy came through the lobby riding on a golf cart and we got to shake his hand. My son, Jonathan, was just two years old then and he stood in awe looking up at this real live cowboy. Do you know who that is? I asked him. John Wayne, he replied. I had a full sized John Wayne poster on the wall in our basement so he was already aware of him.

My dad loved westerns and I loved westerns. In fact, westerns is about the only thing I remember watching in my childhood. In our house every Friday night after dinner we watched Have Gun, Will Travel followed by Gunsmoke. Paladin and Matt Dillon were almost household names. My favorite, though, came on Monday nights. Warner Brothers had a rotating series called The Cheyenne Show. Three programs, Cheyenne, Sugarfoot, and Bronco alternated every Monday night. Bronco and Sugarfoot were okay, but my cowboy hero was the big tall guy who played Cheyenne, Clint Walker.

Clint Walker was born in Illinois just before the Great Depression. He had a twin sister, Neoma. They grew up in a conservative midwestern family, and he grew strong and big working along the Mississippi River. He would eventually reach 6'6" tall with a 36 inch waist and a 52 inch chest. With jet black hair and blue eyes, his face was finely chiseled and his looks were perfect. Not only was he the biggest guy around, he was the hands down handsomest.

He joined the Merchant Marines at age 18 at the end of World War 2, then worked as a longshoreman in Los Angeles, finally moving his family to Las Vegas, where he had a security job in the Sands Hotel. He had a great baritone voice, and somewhere along the line a movie actor, Van Johnson, suggested he should be in the movies. He went back to L.A. where an interview was arranged with Cecil B. DeMille, and the rest, as they say, is history.

He had a couple of small roles in movies, including being the Captain of the Guard in The Ten Commandments. He actually had speaking lines in the movie but they were cut out because he stole the scenes from a very proud, and apparently very jealous of being outshone, Yul Brynner. Then he was invited to test for a western series at Warner Brothers. They immediately liked him, bought his contract from DeMille, and in September 1955 he had the lead role in the first hour long TV western. Cheyenne was an immediate hit. It put Warner Brothers on the TV map. For eight seasons it was a top 20 rated show, three times in the top ten. For awhile Clint Walker was the biggest thing in Hollywood, not just in size, but in popularity as well.

His acting ability is often described as being wooden and very stiff. If you watch the first two or three seasons of Cheyenne that's probably a good description. But I don't think Walker is given enough credit by the critics. He essentially walked off the street and became an almost overnight star. He had no acting experience, no resume to go on to indicate he had any acting ability. He was learning as he went. If you compare his acting in his later Cheyenne episodes you see a real transformation into a quality performer. He started making movies in the late 1950s as well, and in those he was very good. Fort Dobbs, Yellowstone Kelly and Gold of the Seven Saints were all B rated films, but Walker's acting in each of them is top notch.

In the mid 60s he reached his zenith as an actor. He had tired of the same monotonous story lines in Cheyenne, and with contractual disputes he left it behind, but from 1965 to 1969 he was in some very highly rated movies including None but the Brave with Frank Sinatra, Night of the Grizzly, and The Dirty Dozen. Night of the Grizzly was his best starring role, and probably the best movie he ever made. (He actually wrote the script.) He seemed to be in demand then making several television appearances, including two on The Lucy Show where he proved himself to be very good at comedy. In 68 and 69 he was busy making several films including The Great Bank Robbery, Sam Whiskey, and More Dead Than Alive.

After a meteoric rise to fame and a decade at the top, his career started to decline at the end of the 60s. The Dirty Dozen was probably the biggest movie he was ever in, and he didn't have a major role. By the 70s he was back in television with a series, Kodiak, that lasted only one season, and several made for TV movies, mostly westerns, but he did branch out. In Cry Wolf he plays a very convincing psychotic bad guy opposite Peter Graves. In 1972 he went to Spain to make Pancho Villa with Telly Savallas, in which he has a very funny scene with Ann Francis. Francis was also in More Dead Than Alive. It's too bad they didn't make more movies together because they seem to have played well off each other.

It was also in 1972 that he had a near life-ending accident while skiing. He fell and one of his ski poles actually pierced his heart. It was only because of a doctor who recognized him and wouldn't give up working on him that his life was spared.

It's always been a puzzle to me why he wasn't more in demand in the 70s and on into the 80s. He hadn't lost his looks any, and from what I've seen, his ability as an actor grew from those wooden early days to some quality emotional performances. In Yellowstone Kelly he actually shed tears when his young protege is killed by Indians. He did again when his wife is killed in Deadly Harvest (which may have been the worst movie he ever made but not because of his acting).

It may be because of his conservative values and that he was very picky about the roles he accepted. He refused to do anything with gratuitous sex, excessive swearing, or bloody graphics. He rarely if ever said a foul word in his films. That kind of standard doesn't get you very far in Hollywood anymore, if it ever did. In the 80s he was making cat and dog food commercials on The Family Channel. Nowadays he runs his own website, Clint Walker: the Big Guy Himself, with his wife, Susan, selling his movies, and he makes appearances at western TV autograph shows.

My brother, Randall, met him in Branson when he was working there in a show in 2005. He had a friend who was named Clint after Clint Walker, and the two of them had a chance to talk to him for awhile when there were no crowds. Walker advised them to do good, clean, wholesome, family oriented entertainment rather than the sexually provocative stuff. In fact, that is evident in the movies and TV shows he made.

In Cheyenne there are many shows where reference is made to the Bible and Christian values. In one episode he recovers a gold cross stolen long ago from a Catholic Church and insists it must be returned to respect the church. Talking with an orphaned boy in another episode he tells the boy he has read the entire Bible. And in an episode with James Coburn, he is arrested on trumped up charges, but when they take his gun and wallet, they allow him to keep a small Bible he has in his shirt pocket, after laughing at him for having a Bible. When bail is set he pulls the money out of the Bible where he had it hidden and tells Coburn, "There's a lot of interesting things in the Bible. You ought to read it sometime." Night of the Grizzly is probably one of the best family films ever made. Twice in the movie the family gathers around the table while Walker says grace for the meal. In real life he's also a patriot. Back in about 1982 he made a pro-Second Amendment infomercial for The National Rifle Association. (That's actually what convinced me to join the NRA!) He spoke out against communism in the day and he holds strong conservative positions still.

Everybody knows what a great John Wayne fan I am, but before there was John Wayne, there was Clint Walker. And honestly, if there were more Clint Walker movies to rave about, I would be raving about them. His personal character and morality is much more Christian in nature than that of John Wayne (although that doesn't make me any less of a Duke fan!).

Clint Walker was my first and longest cowboy American hero. When I took a Creative Writing class in college we had an assignment to write a short story. I wrote a western about a mysterious frontiersman named Walker. I knew of Clint Walker long before I knew of Bobby Richardson. Richardson is my number one hero, and on my Bobby Richardson page I made the comment that if there is anybody I could meet before I die, I would want it to be him. Well, I haven't updated that page yet, but last year I met him, as is shown by the picture on the blog. Today I would say if there is anybody else in the world that I would like to meet before he dies or I do, it would be Clint Walker.

Looking back at my life one of the things that still makes Cheyenne so appealing to me are the lyrics of the song. They seem to describe me. I wandered through a number of things before settling in the military, and then I didn't get married or settle down until I had traveled the world and was 36 years old. And now I'm a missionary still following the winds of God's call to various parts of the world. I don't suppose I'll ever really settle down until I'm in heaven.

God bless you, Clint Walker. Thanks for wonderful memories.

Cheyenne, Cheyenne,
Where will you be camping tonight?
Lonely man, Cheyenne,
Will your heart stay free and light?
Dream, Cheyenne, of a girl you may never love;
Move along, Cheyenne, like the restless clouds up above.
The wind that blows, that comes and goes, has been your only home,
But will the wild wind one day cease and you no longer roam?
Move along, Cheyenne,
Next pasture's always so green.
Drifting on, Cheyenne,
Don't forget the things you have seen.
And when you will settle down, where will it be?
Cheyenne, Cheyenne.