Swan Dive

For the first half of the 20th century, hats were for adults. All that changed on December 15, 1954, when the Disneyland TV show premiered an hour-long special called “Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter.”

Born on a Tennessee mountain top, the southern fried cowboy (played by actor Fess Parker) fought Indians with a rifle called Betsy and wore a coonskin cap.

Faster than you can say “king of the wild frontier,” every boy in America wanted a hat just like Davy’s. In 1955 alone, over $100 million worth of the furry things were sold. Life magazine asked, “Which will be exhausted first – the supply of raccoons or the parents who have to buy the caps?” Actually it was the rabbit, not the raccoon, who had population worries; his pelt, dyed and stitched, made the cap.

The Davy Crockett phenomenon – dubbed “haute cowture” – went beyond caps, with his image emblazoned on everything from lunchboxes to jigsaw puzzles to jockey shorts.

By the late 50s, the coonskin cap was an extinct fad, never to be seen again.

How did it feel to be Bobby Pickett whenever October rolled around?

The eleven-month wait for the coffin lid of your career to creak open and release your one cobwebbed hit. A hit resistant to each decade’s trends, whether Bee Gees or Nirvana or Coldplay. A hit that sold over four million copies.

That must’ve felt pretty good, royalty check-wise.

But year after year, to be on stage wearing a blood-smeared lab coat and singing in a hammy Karloff accent about “Dracula and his son?”

That must’ve gotten old.

Pickett kept a good sense of humor about it though. He called himself “the Guy Lombardo of Halloween.” He welcomed visitors to his website with: “Bobby ‘Boris’ Pickett is available year round and can be dug up to appear and sing a medley of his hit.”

Pickett never wanted to be a singer. When he moved to Hollywood in the early 1960s, it was to become an actor. His resume included a knack for impersonations – the best of which was horrormeister Boris Karloff.

As Bobby hustled for acting jobs, he picked up extra cash on weekends singing at an Italian restaurant with a group called the Cordials. One of the tunes they covered was “Little Darlin’” by the Diamonds. For a lark, in the middle of the song, Pickett recited a monologue in the Karloff voice. Audiences loved it. So much so that fellow band member Lenny Capizzi convinced Bobby that they should write a rock ‘n’ roll song about monsters.

Pickett recalled, “We wrote about a monster who gets up off his gurney and does the latest dance craze, which I thought was the Twist. Lenny said, ‘The Mashed Potato’ is number one.’ So we called it ‘The Monster Mashed Potato.’ We shortened it later, but that was the original title.”

Pickett and Capizzi finished the song in two hours, then cut it with producer Gary Paxton, of “Alley-Oop” fame. The backing band – dubbed The Crypt Kickers – included a young pianist named Leon Russell.

Eight weeks later, in October 1962, the song was Number One.

Strangely, it reached its peak at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis. “It relieved people of the tension,” Pickett reckoned.

The spooky smash has been a perennial, charting again in 1970 and 1973, and getting steady airplay every October. Pickett had a #29 hit with the Christmas follow-up, “Monsters’ Holiday,” but later singles like “Monster Swim,” “It’s Alive” and “Monster Rap” failed to scare up any action. As for his acting career, his main credit was a low-budget cult film called, appropriately, Frankenstein Sings!

Pickett died in April 2007 at age 69, but he stayed active until his final months. An environmentalist, he even wrote two spin-off tunes – “Monster Slash,” protesting exploitation of forests, and the global warming-related “Climate Mash,” which envisioned Bush and Cheney getting down with zombies and vampires at a party thrown by Exxon Mobil.

Pickett’s official website still peddles souvenirs, including a posthumous autobiography called Monster Mash: Half Dead in Hollywood. His myspace page boasts friends from Weird Al to Rob Zombie to Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

In the end, his song was the trick that kept treating. As Pickett said in 2006, “Monster Mash’ paid my rent for forty-four years.”

This photo archive is one of my favorite weekly stops on the web.

If Charlie Parker

It was the most famous sip of coffee ever taken.

According to legend, when President Theodore Roosevelt was served Maxwell House coffee during a visit to the Hermitage in Nashville on October 22, 1907, he drained his cup then said, “It’s good to the last drop.”

Is the story true or just java jive?

A Nashville Banner article from that evening quoted the president as saying of the coffee, “This is the kind of stuff I like to drink, by George, when I hunt bears.”

In fact, Roosevelt had arrived at Union Station to a crowd of 150,000 well-wishers after a weekend hunting trip in Mississippi, where he shot a bear. He made a speech at the Ryman Auditorium, stopped at Peabody College, then drove on to the Hermitage, where he pledged funds to help restore it. In a letter to his son, written on the train back to Washington, Teddy goes on at length about the bear, without mentioning Nashville or the famous cup of joe.

Nor is there reference to Maxwell House coffee in the scores of biographies on Roosevelt or in his autobiography. Maybe Teddy was modest. Or he forgot he said it.

There’s also the question of which brand of coffee he actually drank. Three days after his visit, H.G. Hill ran an ad in the Banner, suggesting that it was their Fit For A King brand that Roosevelt had raved about. The next day, the Cheek-Neal Company posted an ad that it was their Maxwell House coffee which had “pleased the palate of the head of the Nation.”

In 1917, Cheek-Neal started using the slogan in print ads, with no claim of a Teddy link. Could it have been founder Joel Cheek who invented the slogan? When Cheek died in 1935, the Roosevelt story was repeated in obituaries across the country.

In a October 31, 1939 letter, Cheek’s son Robert, who ran the company, said: “We did not have [Roosevelt’s] permission to use the statement for advertising purposes, as we did not ask for it. He was a great lover of good coffee . . . especially while on his hunting trips.”

In the early 1930s – Roosevelt died in 1919 – Maxwell House, then owned by General Foods, started running ads featuring an illustration of a smiling Teddy surrounded by Gibson Girls, along with the story of how he coined “good to the last drop.”

A few years later, General Foods president Clifford Spiller took credit for penning the slogan. The company stood by Spiller’s claim for decades, then in the 1980s, reintroduced the Roosevelt legend. When I called Kraft General Foods to inquire about the slogan, the customer service rep read from a prepared blurb about Teddy in Nashville.

While there’s no question that “Good to the last drop” helped build Maxwell House into one of America’s leading coffee brands, we may never know its origin. One thing’s for sure. It’s catchier than “Good to drink when you’re hunting bears.”