Buckskin Buddy

On a sweltering day in 1956, Mom packed me into our Plymouth station wagon and drove me deep into the New Jersey woodlands in search of Buckskin Buddy.

Buckskin Buddy was a trading card. It was the #1A card in a series of cards on the adventures of Davy Crockett, King of the Wild Frontier. In 1956, the country was in the midst of a Davy Crockett craze, and I was as crazed as any 8-year-old American boy. Two years before, the television show Disneyland had aired three hour-long shows about the famous Tennessee frontiersman. The first, my favorite, was called Davy Crocket, Indian Fighter. Davy, played by Fess Parker, was a volunteer in Andrew Jackson’s Indian Wars, and this show was about the battles with the Cree Indians, led by Red Stick. Red Stick didn’t wear a feather headdress; he wore a hat made out of a buffalo head, with horns. And Davy of course wore his famous coonskin cap.

The coonskin cap was the most coveted item from the marketing blitz that Disney launched in ’56. Every kid wanted one. I didn’t have a coonskin cap, but my best friend Paul Karaitis did, and I got to wear it sometimes. We didn’t have much money back then, and a coonskin cap was a luxury; I focused instead on what we could afford: the trading cards, which Paul collected too.

There were two series of cards, the first with orange backs and the second with green backs, and each had 80 cards. The Topps Chewing Gum Company sold them five cards to a packet, with a pink slab of gum, for a nickel. Every time I had a nickel, I would walk to the general store a couple blocks away and buy a pack. Each series was sequential, following Davy’s story from the Indian Wars to his stint as a US Congressman (my least favorite part) to his last stand at the Alamo. The idea was to collect all 160 cards.

I can still picture some of these cards in my brain today. The #3A card was called Catching a Bear, and it was a movie still of Fess Parker in his buckskins, a close-up of him grinning widely. That was the legend, that he was capable of grinning bears into submission. The theme song for the Disney shows told this tale as well: “Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee/Greenest state in the land of the Free/Raised in the woods so he knew every tree/Grinned him a bear when he was only three.”

I also remember a few of the Alamo cards vividly. There was one called Looking for Trouble, and it was again a close-up of Fess Parker, staring out from the ramparts of the Alamo, looking for Santa Ana’s troops. I remember this one because Mom and I would laugh at the title Looking for Trouble. It meant Davy was on guard duty, but “looking for trouble” also meant misbehaving in our house. One of Mom’s favorite lines was: “You’re looking for trouble, Mister.” There was also a card called We’ll Never Surrender, which showed Jim Bowie in his bed. He was dying of something and too weak to fight, although he did take out a few unlucky Mexicans with his pistols before he was killed.

Buckskin Buddy was the first card in the green series, and it was rare. The card was a movie still of Georgie Russell, Davy’s pal and chronicler, played by a young Buddy
Ebsen. My guess is that Topps printed fewer of certain cards like Buckskin Buddy to get kids to buy more and more packs, which I did. I finally had every card except Buckskin Buddy, but I had to keep buying cards. I would rip them open right at the store, and toss them in the trash as soon as I saw that none was Buckskin Buddy. This went on for weeks, and I complained about it incessantly.

One day Mom got this idea that maybe there would be a better chance of finding Buckskin Buddy if we went to a different store. Not only a different store, but a different region. That’s why we found ourselves driving inland that summer day. We drove maybe half an hour or so. I had no idea where we were, but she seemed to know where she was heading. We finally stopped at a run-down general store out in a woods, which I can still picture in my mind, and bought five packs of trading cards. We didn’t need five, because Buckskin Buddy showed up in the very first pack I opened.

I was obviously gleeful over my good luck, but for some reason that I still don’t understand, I decided that I would give the card to Paul Karaitis rather than keep it. We were still driving back toward the shore when I thought of this, and when I told Mom she didn’t miss a beat. She half turned to me, looking as stern as Mom could ever look, and said: “You’re looking for trouble, Mister.”