RIFLEMAN, O, MAN

When I was a young kid, my television diet was pretty restricted. Kids, it was thought by my family, should be outside every chance they had, not sitting in front of the television.

One thing I was allowed to watch were the black-and-white Westerns that ran all day long on some channel called the Christian Broadcasting Network (which was, because of these shows, rated the most violent network in the country for years). My family thought that it might be good for little me to watch manly shows like The Rifleman and Wagon Train.

If they'd known how I felt about The Rifleman's son Mark, they'd have snatched me away from that television faster than William Conrad could inhale a Twinkie.

Mark McCain was played by Johnny Crawford, who'd been one of the original Mouseketeers beginning in 1953. Crawford was only 12 when the series began in 1958, and during the five years the show was on the air, he grew into a beautiful seventeen-year-old. He seemed to have a good rapport with the star Chuck Connors, but I always thought he seemed a bit short and way too pretty to be that man's son.
After The Rifleman, he had parts in other series like Branded, Mr. Novak, Mr. Ed, and my favourite of the Western series, The Big Valley. In Indian Paint, he was an Indian boy becoming a man. In El Dorado, John Wayne shot him, but then John Wayne was shooting a lot of people in those days. As he got older, he just got better looking. Check him and Kim Darby out here in The Restless Ones.
What I didn't know, though, was that the boy could sing, that he actually had an additional career recording five Top 40 pop songs to give the teenage girls who bought fan magazines one more reason to want him. With one grandfather a former concertmaster and the other a jockey turned music publisher, music was part of his family heritage.
He left acting after more years of working, but he never lost his love for music. In 1998, he began two years of singing with someone else's group, but in 1990 he formed his own, the Johnny Crawford Dance Orchestra, playing the music of the 20s. Now that orchestra is among the most successful dance orchestras in Los Angeles.

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