As kids, we used to make fun of the way Walter Brennan walked. Now I sort of walk like him!
Seeing this Real McCoys opening brought back one memory, but then I noticed where the clip came from and got another one — TNN, The Nashville Network. So this turned into a double reminisce for me: remembering a television show from my childhood through a cable network that itself has now disappeared under that name
The Real McCoys premiered in 1957 with Walter Brennan as Grandpa Amos McCoy, heading up a West Virginia family that relocates to a farm in California. Richard Crenna played grandson Luke, Kathleen Nolan was Luke’s wife Kate, Lydia Reed played Hassie, Michael Winkelman was Little Luke and Tony Martinez was farmhand Pepino. The show was filmed at Desilu and co-produced by Danny Thomas.
And about that walk we used to imitate — apparently Walter Brennan was acting it. A Los Angeles Times account notes that Brennan didn’t actually have the limp himself, although he used that distinctive gait for several of his characters. All these years later, I find out the walk we were copying wasn’t even really his!
Brennan was already a major movie star by then and had become the first actor to win three Academy Awards for acting. Richard Crenna had been the squeaky-voiced Walter Denton on Our Miss Brooks before becoming Luke McCoy, and years later many of us would know him as Colonel Trautman in the Rambo movies. Kathleen Nolan made some history of her own in 1975 when she became the first woman elected president of the Screen Actors Guild.
The show was no minor success either. It reached number eight in the Nielsen ratings during 1958–59 and climbed all the way to number five during 1960–61. After five seasons on ABC, it moved to CBS for one final season before ending in 1963.
Then there’s the second memory in this clip. TNN acquired The Real McCoys in 1999 and aired two episodes every weekday afternoon, actually giving the series its first cable-TV run more than three decades after it ended. TNN itself had started as The Nashville Network, became The National Network, disappeared as a name when it became Spike TV in 2003, and that channel eventually became Paramount Network.
So I started out remembering Grandpa Amos and somehow wound up reminiscing about TNN too
Do you remember The Real McCoys — and how many of you also remember watching those old shows on TNN?
