Playing Cowboy

Playing Cowboy. I’m Greg Martin with today’s Line On Agriculture.

I know this next story isn’t really ag related but I just can’t resist. What do Tarzan, Gilligan’s Island and Wagon Train have in common? Yes they were all classic TV shows but if you guesses actor Denny Miller, you’ve hit the bull’s-eye. I recently ran into Denny at the Santa Clarita Cowboy Festival in Southern California and had a chance to sit down for a chat. Miller owes his fame to a “happy accident.”

MILLER: I was a student a UCLA playing basketball for Coach John Wooden and I was walking down Sunset Boulevard pushing a desk chair and I heard some guy yell from a Karmann Ghia parked by the curb, “Hey, come here and let me see your hairline.” Now I’ve met a lot of weird people in Hollywood but that was one of the strangest beginnings of a relationship.

The man turned out to be a theatrical agent. But Miller says he wasn’t interested and tossed the man’s business card.

MILLER: (I) went back to work the next day and the dispatcher said there’s a guy called, he wants you to call him, here’s his number and I threw it away. I had my mind set on being a basketball coach. The next day the same thing happened and the third day the dispatcher said if you don’t call this guy and get him off my back, you’re fired.

So after working really hard not to be an actor, Miller found himself in the acting business with a seven year contract and now a career that includes 138 TV commercials, 234 TV episodes and 20 films. Us Old West buff’s can pick Miller out of many TV westerns including Have Gun Will Travel, Laramie, the Rifleman, Death Valley Days and of course as Duke Shannon on Wagon Train.

MILLER: Thank goodness I got on Wagon Train because that was back in the days of black and white television and this new ugly kid on the block called television was taboo for big name film stars until Wagon Train and they gave them so much money and named the episode after their character. People like Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck and Rhonda Fleming and Franchot Tone and Robert Ryan and Ronald Reagan and John Wayne, and that was my school.

Miller did 107 episodes of Wagon Train but he says that that almost didn’t happen.

MILLER: I was so bad the first one I heard later that they were going to let me go and Ward Bond and I had kind of a bond because he had been a jock as well and he said give the kid another chance and so 107 episodes later I was at least baptized under fire.

More tomorrow with actor and author, Denny Miller.

That’s today’s Line On Agriculture. I’m Greg Martin on the Northwest Ag Information Network.