hula hoops – Lee Duigon

Davy Crockett: King of the Wild Frontier (film) - Wikipedia

Many fads swept through America’s popular culture when I was a boy–remember hula hoops?–but Walt Disney ignited the biggest fad of them all in 1954-55: the Davy Crockett fad.

Actually, that was only the second Davy Crockett fad. The first was during Crockett’s own lifetime, in the 1830s and 40s. Congressman Crockett was one of our first celebrities. All sorts of rubbish was published about him, some with his consent, some not.But Disney’s Davy Crockett fad–wow!

It was huge. Coonskin hats. T-shirts. Color comic strips in the Sunday paper. My Grandma bought me a Crockett marionette–well beyond my boyhood skills. And these chintzy cardboard log cabins: send in a zillion proof-of-purchase labels, and the company sent you a cabin. It fell well below our expectations. Who needs cardboard cabins when you’ve got Lincoln Logs?

And everybody knew and sang the Disney series’ theme song: “Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, greenest state in the Land of the Free./ Raised in the woods where he knew every tree, and killed him a b’ar when he was only three…” Etc. I wish I still had that record. I think it was by the Rhythmaires.

Don’t get me wrong. Crockett was an admirable man. He’s still one of my heroes. But in 1954 he was everybody’s hero! All this and President Eisenhower, too.

Nowadays the Internet swallows fads whole. I was a kid and I thought fads were fun. The teen next door swirling his hula hoop around his hips while he walked up and down the porch stairs. But the Crockett fad was even bigger than hula hoops.

It took me most of my life to learn how to throw a boomerang so it’d come back to me; and I had no sooner mastered the art than my boomerang disappeared. But then the local playgrounds in our town have all disappeared, too.

I don’t know if the boomerang ever matched the national impact of other summer fads, like the hula hoop, yo-yos, cracker balls–and we had local fads for pea shooters, pop rocks, and punks. Mr. Bruno across the street had a heavy wooden boomerang. He’d take it out to the schoolyard now and then and play with it, and all of us kids stood in awe of his expertise: the thing always came back to him. When I finally got a chance to try it–Mr. Bruno wasn’t home, his kids found the boomerang and sneaked it out of the house–it never even thought of coming back to me when I threw it. Heavens, no. The blasted thing sought out the nearest school bus window and crashed right through it. So much for that.

What touches off a fad? It can be something as utterly senseless as pet rocks, or something that takes a fair amount of skill and practice, like learning yo-yo tricks. (I still have my yo-yo. The cats like me to use it.) And then the fad disappears as suddenly and as mysteriously as it first rose up.

Hula hoops are back, though; and a few days ago, the kid across the way was banging cracker balls off the sidewalk.