This Week in Texas History
by BARTEE HAILE
A future television star played linebacker for Sul Ross State Teachers College in the Lobos’ 21-21 tie with Murray State in the Tangerine Bowl on New Year’s Day 1949.
If Bobby Don Blocker was not the biggest baby ever born in Bowie County, as relatives swore, the record holder must have been a whopper. The future “Hoss” began life in 1928 as a 14-pound pony.
Blocker stood six feet tall and tipped the scales at 200 pounds, when he entered a San Antonio military academy at age 12. The boy’s prodigious proportions inspired his father to joke, “He’s too big to ride and too little to hitch to a wagon.” After the extra-large lad added four more inches and another 75 pounds, college football recruiters came knocking on the door.
Blocker picked Sul Ross, the public teachers college at Alpine. During his three years of varsity competition, the football team did not lose a single game.
Blocker was not, however, the stereotypical jock. As a favor to a girlfriend, he reluctantly appeared in a campus production of “Arsenic and Old Lace” and fell in love with the theater. He switched majors from physical education to drama and directed his own rendition of “Mister Roberts” with a cast completely composed of obliging teammates.
After graduation Blocker turned down professional football and boxing offers to act in summer stock in Boston. His thespian adventure was rudely interrupted in 1950, when he was drafted into the Korean War.
The infantry sergeant survived the Asian stalemate and returned to Texas to marry his college sweetheart. For the next few years, he taught school while studying for a master’s degree at his alma mater. Deciding to pursue a Ph.D. at UCLA, he moved his family to southern California in 1956.
Blocker turned to acting to make ends meet and played bit parts in such TV horse operas as “Gunsmoke,” “Maverick” and “Cimarron City.” He found steady work as a continuing character on the short-lived “Restless Gun” and impressed producer David Dortort with his ability to adapt to any script.
Dortort, whose motto was “entertainment must not be entirely a mirror of life,” soon turned to his next small-screen project, a wholesome family western he called “Bonanza.” He created characters who were “not just drinking, fighting, carousing, shiftless cowboys” but instead epitomized clean-cut virtues like “faith, hope and morality.”
“Bonanza” was set in post-Civil War Nevada, where three-time widower Ben Cartwright had staked his claim to a three thousand-square-mile domain named the Ponderosa. The story line pitted the silver-haired patriarch and his three sons against an endless variety of villains bent on plundering the private paradise.
Producer Dortort consciously cast the four central characters with specific segments of the viewing public in mind. Father figure Lorne Greene, a former radio announcer once known as the “Voice of Canada,” was the ideal choice for Ben. The role of eldest son Adam went to Pernell Roberts, a serious Shakespearean with whom young marrieds were supposed to identify. Good looks that hopefully would keep young adolescents glued to the tube landed 21-year-old Michael Landon, whose real name was Eugene Maurice Orowitz, the part of Little Joe.
For Hoss, the gentle giant with a heart of gold, Dortort wanted a larger-than-life actor with a natural appeal to “children of all ages.” He immediately thought of Blocker, who jumped at the chance to appear in a weekly television program.
“Bonanza” premiered on Sep. 12, 1959 to less than rave reviews. Although Hoss quickly took center-stage as the most popular Cartwright due to Blocker’s endearing personality and surprising versatility, the show was generally panned by critics.
“Another western is just what Saturday night television needs least,” wrote the Variety reviewer, “and that’s what ‘Bonanza’ appears to be – just another western.”
But the network gave the much-maligned series, the first western telecast in color, the opportunity to attract an audience. “Bonanza” broke into the Nielsen Top 20 in its second season, climbed to second place in the third and reigned supreme from 1964 through 1967.
The 1965 defection of temperamental Pernell Roberts, the show’s harshest critic, had no detrimental effect on the high ratings. But “Bonanza” could not endure the tragic loss of the best loved member of the Cartwright clan.
The thirteenth season was in the can, when Blocker underwent gall bladder surgery in May 1972. The routine operation seemed to go smoothly, but a few hours later unexpected complications claimed the life of the 43-year-old patient.
“Bonanza” was not the same without Hoss, and the network put the show out of its misery halfway through the next season.
However, reruns offer a nostalgic kind of immortality. Dan Blocker lives on in syndication riding the Ponderosa range and winning the hearts of new generations.
Bartee Haile welcomes your comments, questions and suggestions at [email protected] or P.O. Box 152, Friendswood, TX 77549. And come on by www.twith.com for a visit.
