The Daily Times

Montana magazine salutes memory of actor Sky King

The January-February issue of Montana magazine features a six-page tribute to the late Kirby Grant, a native of Montana who is best remembered as Sky King on the television series.

Begun as a radio show in 1946, Sky King was popular enough to make the leap to the new medium of television. On radio, different individuals had played the role of Sky but once on television one man, Kirby Grant, stepped into the role full time and was identified with the role the remainder of his life.

The TV show ran from 1951 to 1959 and rerun until 1966. Schuyler “Sky” King, according to the TV show, was a rancher and former Navy pilot who lived with his teenaged niece and nephew on the Flying Crown Ranch near fictional Grover, Ariz. The town had more than its share of villains. Sky’s Cessna, the “Songbird,” played an important part in each show as he ran down the bad guys.

His dark good looks, brilliant, kind eyes, beautiful smile and deep melodious voice made him a hit with audiences.

Born Kirby Grant Hoon in 1911 in Butte, Mont., he was raised in Helena.

Only 72 episodes of Sky King were produced. By 1970, Grant retired and moved with his wife Carolyn and three children to Florida. Attempting to parlay Sky King’s popularity into a living, Grant got involved with a circus and started a non-profit Sky King Youth Ranches of America for orphaned or abandoned kids. He wanted to revive the television show and give the kids roles but the idea never flew.

In 1985, at age 74, Grant died in a car wreck on his way to watch a rocket launch at Cape Canaveral. Before the launch he was going to meet the astronauts who he had inspired as kids.

Sky is buried next to his parents and other relatives in Missoula.

Brooklyn is finally getting a sports dome without Dodgers

A double-page photograph in the February issue of ESPN magazine shows progress on construction of the Nets 18,000-seat arena in Brooklyn. It is only a block from the site of the original dome which a Blount Countian designed for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1955.

As recorded in Volume V of The Daily Times’ “Snapshots of Blount County History,” Bill Kleinsasser was pictured working with Brooklyn Dodgers’ President Walter O’Malley in 1955 on what would have been the nation’s first sports dome. Feeling Brooklyn couldn’t support the Dodgers, O’Malley moved them to Los Angeles.

Kleinsasser, an outstanding athlete, especially in football, could have gotten a football scholarship at any Division I school but instead the Everett High star took an academic scholarship at Princeton.

He was a standout on a strong Princeton football team.

He took post-graduate work in architecture at Princeton following service as an artillery officer in Korea. His instructors referred O’Malley to him and Kleinsasser designed and built a model of the proposed dome before it was decided the Dodgers would move.

The late Bill Kleinsasser, a 1947 Everett High grad, was the son of Ted, longtime head of the U.S. Weather Bureau at McGhee Tyson Airport, and his wife Mabel. His sister Dot Schultz resides in Maryville.

(When I called Dot to check on a fact, I found her grandson Blake Shultz is a senior in business at Auburn where my oldest grandson, Derrick, is a senior in mechanical engineering. Small world.)

Bill served on the faculty at the University of Oregon in Eugene until he retired. Bill died in 2010.

Nearly 600 people completed a series of free western-style square dance classes sponsored by The Times and taught by Ted Kleinsasser in 1956 as recorded in Volume II of The Times’ “Snapshots of Blount County History.”

Magazine mental-floss offers some interesting news tidbits

• Albert Einstein never learned to drive a car. (Neither did Hal Boyle, famous Associated Press columnist who I had as my guest for two different Hillbilly Homecoming events.)

• U.S. Route 66, westbound from Albuquerque, started out as a camel trail.

• No U.S. president was an only child.

• Charlie Chaplin once entered a Charlie Chaplin look alike contest in a theater in San Francisco and lost!

• There are 293 different ways to make change for a dollar

• Even now, Marie Curie’s (1867-1934) notebooks are too radioactive to be picked up by hand. She was the first person to receive two Nobel Prizes, one for radioactivity research in chemistry and one for research in physics.

• Gasoline was once sold in small bottles as a cure for lice.

• When P.T. Barnum, the American showman, fell gravely ill at age 81, he convinced The New York Sun to publish his obituary in advance so he could see it in print.

• Smokey Bear’s original name was Hot Foot Teddy.

History is very valuable

Many who see little value of history might be interested in knowing that researchers are now combing the ship logs of World War I era vessels that were scrapped decades ago.

They are looking for references to weather conditions which will be used to piece together long-range world weather patterns which are likely repeated periodically over the years.

Veterans resting at Arlington

When the last surviving World War I veteran, Army Cpl. Frank Woodruff Buckles, was laid to rest in Arlington National Cemetery on March 15 a year ago, he joined:

• Albert Woolson, the last surviving Union Civil War veteran who died in 1956.

• Lemuel Cook, the last official surviving Revolutionary War veteran who died in 1866.

The current issue of the Air Force Magazine includes a graph of Americans in the U.S. Armed Forces from 1900 to 2010. It reached nearly 3 percent in World War I. The years before and after it were roughly 1 to 3 percent. In World War II (1941-45) it reached nearly 9 percent, just over 2 percent in the Korean War, just under 2 percent in the Vietnam War and is presently about 5 percent.

Dean Stone is editor of The Daily Times.

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