Country Music

Classic Country Music Hits

Chưa phân loại

In 1949, Jimmy Stewart married Gloria McLean and signed the papers that made her two young boys his sons. Twenty years later, one of them—Marine First Lieutenant Ronald McLean—was killed in Vietnam, sending a decorated World War II pilot home from another war as a grieving father. Ronald was five when Stewart entered his life; his brother Michael was three. Jimmy had spent years as one of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors, yet within eighteen months of the wedding, Gloria gave birth to twin daughters and he found himself raising four children. Contemporary accounts noted that Stewart made no distinction between the boys he had adopted and the daughters born to him. He called all four his children. The family name on Ronald’s documents remained McLean, but inside the house he was Jimmy’s eldest son. Ronald grew up and joined the Marine Corps. Stewart had flown more than twenty combat missions over Europe and remained in the Air Force Reserve long after Hollywood resumed. Military service was not an abstraction within their family, though nothing in Jimmy’s own record could make the waiting easier once Ronald was sent to Vietnam. On June 8, 1969, the 24-year-old lieutenant was serving with a reconnaissance unit in Quảng Trị Province. During an enemy attack, Ronald exposed himself to fire while directing his men and was killed by machine-gun fire. He was awarded the Silver Star posthumously. Gloria accepted the medal at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro. Jimmy did not turn his son’s death into a public performance. When he later addressed it, he said the war had been mismanaged but necessary, then added only that the family was proud of Ronald. In the years that followed, Jimmy and Gloria returned regularly to Washington to honor him. Ronald’s name was eventually cut into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Panel 23 West, Line 113. A reporter visiting Stewart’s study in 1980 found framed family photographs covering one wall. Among them was the honorable-service citation sent after Ronald’s death. The Oscar stayed elsewhere. The paper bearing his son’s name remained with the family pictures.

THE SON JIMMY STEWART CHOSE

A reporter visiting Jimmy Stewart’s study in 1980 noticed three walls. Two were lined with books. The third held family photographs and personal mementos.

Among the film citations and military honors was a document that belonged to neither Hollywood nor Jimmy’s own wartime record. It was the honorable-service citation sent to the Stewart family after First Lieutenant Ronald McLean was killed in Vietnam.

Ronald’s surname was different.

The wall made the relationship clear.

The Family He Entered

Jimmy Stewart met Gloria Hatrick McLean after returning from World War II. She was divorced and raising two small boys, Ronald and Michael.

Jimmy was already one of Hollywood’s most recognizable actors, but marriage had eluded him. He was 41 when he and Gloria wed on August 9, 1949.

The marriage brought immediate responsibilities. Ronald was about five; Michael was three. Jimmy formally adopted them both.

He did not enter the household as a visiting celebrity or a man interested only in their mother. The adoption established the boys as his children before he had any biological children of his own.

In a 1980 interview, Jimmy remembered the speed of the transformation with amusement: he had married at 41, and within roughly a year and a half he had four children.

Four Children Under One Roof

Twin daughters Judy and Kelly were born in May 1951. The household now included two older boys and two infant girls.

Hollywood profiles could be overly polished, but even contemporary coverage recognized something important about Jimmy’s conduct at home: he did not separate the children into different ranks. Ronald and Michael were not treated as temporary attachments to Gloria’s previous life.

When asked how marriage had changed him, Jimmy’s answer was direct. He had become the father of four children.

That phrasing carried more weight than “stepfather.” The two boys were already present when Jimmy chose the family. His daughters expanded it; they did not replace what had come first.

Ronald’s Own Uniform

Military service ran deeply through Jimmy Stewart’s life. His father had served in two wars. Jimmy entered the Army as a private in 1941, flew B-24 combat missions over Europe and rose to colonel before returning home.

He remained in the Air Force Reserve for decades and retired as a brigadier general in 1968. The following year, Ronald was serving in Vietnam.

Ronald chose the Marine Corps rather than the Air Force. He became an officer and joined the 3rd Reconnaissance Battalion, 3rd Marine Division.

A photograph preserved from the period shows Jimmy helping pin an officer’s bars onto Ronald’s uniform. The gesture is simple: a father’s hands near his son’s collar, attaching the visible sign of responsibility Ronald had accepted.

Jimmy knew what a uniform could ask from the person wearing it. He also knew that knowledge offered no protection.

June 8, 1969

Ronald was assigned to a reconnaissance patrol in Quảng Trị Province near the Demilitarized Zone. He was 24 years old and serving as a first lieutenant.

On June 8, his unit came under intense enemy fire. Contemporary reporting described Ronald leading the patrol and being struck by machine-gun fire. Accounts associated with his posthumous commendation state that he exposed himself while directing and assisting his men.

He did not survive.

The official language reduced the event to the information military records could hold: name, rank, service, unit, location and date of death.

For the Stewart household, the categories were smaller. One of the four children was gone.

The Medal Gloria Accepted

Ronald was awarded the Silver Star after his death. In September 1969, Gloria attended a ceremony at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro and accepted the decoration for her son.

The medal recognized valor during the patrol that killed him. It also required a mother to stand in a military ceremony and receive an object in place of the young man who had earned it.

Photographs of Ronald’s funeral show Stewart family friend Henry Fonda among the mourners. Jimmy’s Hollywood life remained nearby, but it had no useful part to play. There was no performance capable of altering the event and no line of dialogue that could carry the family through it.

Jimmy largely kept the loss private.

The Sentence He Allowed Himself

Stewart’s own military history made his response politically complicated. He had supported American service and believed deeply in duty. Ronald’s death did not lead him to publicly reverse those convictions.

Years later, Jimmy described the Vietnam War as mismanaged but necessary. Then he turned away from policy and spoke as a father.

The family was proud of Ronald.

It was a restrained sentence from a man known for keeping his deepest experiences out of interviews. Jimmy had rarely discussed his own combat missions in detail. He handled his son’s death with similar privacy.

Silence did not mean Ronald disappeared from the house.

The Citation Among the Photographs

When The Washington Post interviewed Stewart in 1980, the reporter was admitted into his study. The room contained evidence of a long public life: bookshelves, acting honors, service awards and the New York Film Critics recognition for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

Ronald’s honorable-service citation was displayed there as well.

Its placement matters because Jimmy had accumulated enough awards to fill entire rooms. He could have treated the citation as another military document or stored it with official papers.

Instead, it remained among framed photographs and family objects.

Ronald had died in uniform, but the document was kept in a father’s room.

The Trips to Washington

Jimmy and Gloria continued to honor Ronald in the years after his death. TIME later reported that the couple made an annual trip to Washington to pay tribute to him.

After the Vietnam Veterans Memorial opened in 1982, Ronald’s name had a fixed location: Panel 23 West, Line 113.

The Wall lists service members without explaining the families that carried them there. Nothing beside Ronald’s name identifies the famous actor who adopted him at five, the mother who accepted his Silver Star, the brother with whom he entered the Stewart household or the two sisters born after him.

Visitors see RONALD W McLEAN.

The different surname can conceal the relationship unless someone knows where to look.

What Ronald’s Story Really Leaves Behind

Jimmy Stewart’s public image was built around men whose decency appeared natural. His private life required choices less visible than anything performed before a camera.

He married a woman with two young sons. He adopted them. He called himself the father of four. When one of those sons died, Jimmy did not place his own name over Ronald’s or turn the loss into part of the Stewart legend.

Ronald remained Ronald McLean—in Marine Corps records, on his citation and on the wall in Washington.

Inside Jimmy’s study, however, official names and public categories lost their importance. The citation occupied the same wall as the family photographs.

Anyone entering the room could understand where Ronald belonged.

Video

Related Post

Chưa phân loại Country Music

Donna Reed Was Never Only the Woman Hollywood Asked Her to Play At seventeen, Donnabelle Mullenger left an Iowa farm for Los Angeles because her family could not afford the college education she wanted. She stayed with an aunt, enrolled at Los Angeles City College and supported herself by washing dishes and performing clerical work. A campus beauty contest led to a screen test. MGM signed her, changed her name to Donna Reed and placed her in a succession of wholesome supporting roles. During World War II, servicemen wrote to her from barracks, tunnels and battlefields; she personally answered many and kept 341 of their letters. In 1946, Reed played Mary Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. The film was not immediately the American institution it later became, but Mary’s steadiness fixed Reed inside the public imagination as the woman who could hold a home together. Reed spent years trying to move beyond that image. In From Here to Eternity, she played Lorene, a nightclub hostess living far from Bedford Falls. The performance earned her the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. Her greatest popular success came through television. The Donna Reed Show ran from 1958 through 1966, placing a mother rather than a father at the center of a family sitcom. Behind the camera, Reed exercised substantial creative control, studying lighting and cinematography while working as an uncredited producer. When the series ended, she stepped back from regular acting, raised her children and became active against the Vietnam War. She served as a leading figure in Another Mother for Peace, opposed nuclear power and campaigned for Eugene McCarthy in 1968. Her final major role came in 1984 when she replaced Barbara Bel Geddes as Miss Ellie on Dallas. When the producers brought Bel Geddes back and removed Reed, she sued, arguing that she had been hired as the character—not as a temporary stand-in. The case was settled in 1985. Reed received her contracted salary and the freedom to work elsewhere. That December, doctors discovered pancreatic cancer. She died at home on January 14, 1986, thirteen days before her sixty-fifth birthday. Her final professional dispute had not concerned applause or nostalgia. It concerned whether a woman with four decades of work could still insist that her name on a contract meant exactly what it said.

Chưa phân loại

James Garner’s mother died when he was four. He and his brothers were passed among relatives before returning to a home where a stepmother later subjected them to physical and verbal abuse. By sixteen, Garner had left Oklahoma and joined the Merchant Marine. The ease audiences eventually saw in him had not come from an easy life. He served as an infantryman during the Korean War, was wounded twice and received two Purple Hearts. Yet when Hollywood began placing him in westerns, Garner showed little interest in playing men who proved themselves by absorbing punishment without complaint. Bret Maverick preferred talking his way out of danger. He gambled, calculated the odds and regarded a gunfight as evidence that a better plan had failed. When Maverick made Garner a star in 1957, television westerns were filled with lawmen and solemn heroes. Garner gave audiences a man who could be brave without pretending to enjoy being shot at. That temperament followed him into The Great Escape, The Americanization of Emily, Murphy’s Romance and, most completely, The Rockford Files. Jim Rockford lived in a trailer, worried about unpaid bills and attempted to avoid fights because fights hurt. Garner’s body knew that better than viewers realized. The weekly production schedule left him with damaged knees, back trouble and surgeries before he finally stopped the original series in 1980. His refusal to be pushed extended offscreen. Garner successfully challenged Warner Bros. when the studio suspended his pay during a writers’ strike. Years later, he sued Universal over profits from Rockford. He did not reject the characters; he rejected agreements he believed were dishonest. At home, another decision lasted longer than either series. Garner married Lois Clarke in 1956, two weeks after meeting her. They remained married until his death fifty-eight years later. Hollywood repeatedly cast James Garner as the man who made difficulty look manageable. The calm was convincing because he had spent a lifetime deciding which battles deserved him.

Chưa phân loại

Richard Kimble Was Almost Left Running Forever When David Janssen told ABC he would not return for a fifth season of The Fugitive, the network prepared to let the series end without clearing Richard Kimble’s name. For four years, viewers had watched Kimble move from town to town under borrowed identities. He had been convicted of murdering his wife and sentenced to death, escaped custody and devoted his life to finding the One-Armed Man he had seen leaving the crime scene. Lieutenant Philip Gerard remained behind him, certain that duty required bringing Kimble back. The weekly episodes usually told complete stories. Kimble entered another person’s trouble, helped where he could and left before Gerard arrived. But the larger promise remained open: someday, the running would have to lead somewhere. That was not how television normally worked. Series were expected to preserve their basic conditions for reruns. Resolving Kimble’s case could make earlier episodes appear less urgent in syndication. When production ended in 1967, ABC initially intended to broadcast the final regular episode and stop. Network executive Leonard Goldberg objected. Friends kept asking him whether Kimble would find the One-Armed Man. Goldberg argued that a television network claiming the medium could command viewers’ loyalty could not then behave as though that loyalty meant nothing. ABC approved a two-part conclusion. In “The Judgment,” Gerard finally captures Kimble but gives him time to pursue new evidence. The chase ends at an abandoned amusement park, where Gerard shoots the One-Armed Man before he can kill Kimble. A surviving witness confirms the truth, and Kimble is exonerated. The second part aired on August 29, 1967. More than 78 million people watched, representing 72 percent of the television sets in use that night—a record at the time. The final moment was quiet. Gerard passed Kimble outside the courthouse, hesitated and offered his hand. Then Kimble walked away beside Jean Carlisle without checking the street behind him. For 118 episodes, the series had been built around one man’s inability to stop. Its most important decision was allowing him to.

You Missed

Country Music

The Familiar Stranger Who Kept Appearing Beside James Garner Across more than sixty episodes of The Rockford Files, the same broad-faced man kept turning up in the edges of James Garner’s world. Sometimes he was a policeman. Sometimes a bartender, a gas-station attendant or merely a stranger standing in a public restroom. Later, he settled into the recurring role of Captain McEnroe. The credits identified him as Jack Garner. James knew him by the name he had carried long before Hollywood: his older brother. Jack and James were still boys when their mother died. James was four. Their father struggled to keep the household together, and the three Bumgarner brothers were sent to live with different relatives. They were eventually reunited, but the home that followed was unstable and, according to James’s later account, often abusive. The brothers reached adulthood by separate routes. James went through military service in Korea before drifting into acting. Jack played minor-league baseball in the Pittsburgh Pirates organization, worked as a golf professional and sang with the house band at Los Angeles’s Coconut Grove. Jack began collecting small television roles during the late 1960s. He appeared on Gunsmoke, Daniel Boone, The Doris Day Show and The Bionic Woman. Then James brought him into the working family surrounding The Rockford Files. Jack was rarely asked to command an episode. He supplied something less visible and more useful: a dependable face who could step into a scene, deliver a few lines and make Rockford’s Los Angeles feel inhabited. He continued appearing beside James in Bret Maverick, feature films and the later Rockford reunion movies. Jack died in 2012 at eighty-five. His obituary listed the many characters he had played, but also preserved one detail no television credit ever carried. The older brother who had shared James Garner’s unsettled Oklahoma childhood never called the famous actor “Jim,” “James” or “Rockford.” To Jack, he remained “Babe.”

Chưa phân loại

In 1949, Jimmy Stewart married Gloria McLean and signed the papers that made her two young boys his sons. Twenty years later, one of them—Marine First Lieutenant Ronald McLean—was killed in Vietnam, sending a decorated World War II pilot home from another war as a grieving father. Ronald was five when Stewart entered his life; his brother Michael was three. Jimmy had spent years as one of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelors, yet within eighteen months of the wedding, Gloria gave birth to twin daughters and he found himself raising four children. Contemporary accounts noted that Stewart made no distinction between the boys he had adopted and the daughters born to him. He called all four his children. The family name on Ronald’s documents remained McLean, but inside the house he was Jimmy’s eldest son. Ronald grew up and joined the Marine Corps. Stewart had flown more than twenty combat missions over Europe and remained in the Air Force Reserve long after Hollywood resumed. Military service was not an abstraction within their family, though nothing in Jimmy’s own record could make the waiting easier once Ronald was sent to Vietnam. On June 8, 1969, the 24-year-old lieutenant was serving with a reconnaissance unit in Quảng Trị Province. During an enemy attack, Ronald exposed himself to fire while directing his men and was killed by machine-gun fire. He was awarded the Silver Star posthumously. Gloria accepted the medal at Marine Corps Air Station El Toro. Jimmy did not turn his son’s death into a public performance. When he later addressed it, he said the war had been mismanaged but necessary, then added only that the family was proud of Ronald. In the years that followed, Jimmy and Gloria returned regularly to Washington to honor him. Ronald’s name was eventually cut into the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Panel 23 West, Line 113. A reporter visiting Stewart’s study in 1980 found framed family photographs covering one wall. Among them was the honorable-service citation sent after Ronald’s death. The Oscar stayed elsewhere. The paper bearing his son’s name remained with the family pictures.

Country Music

When Eddie Rabbitt’s children were babies, they kept asking him to repeat the little songs he invented beside their beds. Because they wanted the same words the next night, the man who had written hits for Elvis Presley and Ronnie Milsap had to begin memorizing his own nonsense. The songs belonged to a part of Eddie’s life that country radio never heard. He made up stories about ducks, pigs, puppies and a squirrel named Andrew. Some lasted several minutes. Others were little more than a joke, a rhyme or a final instruction to close tired eyes. By 1996, his children were nine and fourteen, but the bedtime material was still in his head. During an interview before a Nevada engagement, Eddie began singing pieces of it aloud. He explained that he wanted to gather the songs into an album for children. If families responded, he imagined performing afternoon concerts at three or four o’clock—early enough for young listeners to attend. The project was already taking shape before illness entered the story. In March 1997, Eddie was diagnosed with lung cancer. He underwent radiation treatment and surgery that removed part of his left lung. He continued recording, releasing Beatin’ the Odds that September. Then, in April 1998, the quieter project finally appeared. Songs from Rabbittland contained seventeen songs, jokes and stories Eddie said he had written while his children were growing up. There was “Andrew the Squirrel,” “Puppy,” “26 Sheep Story” and a fifty-one-second bedtime piece called “Sleepy Deepy Do.” There were no radio singles and no attempt to reshape the material into adult country songs. The arrangements used guitars, keyboards and sound effects, while Eddie addressed children simply as “Mr. Eddie.” Four weeks after the album’s release, Eddie Rabbitt died at 56. The timing can make Rabbittland resemble a deliberate farewell, but the surviving record shows something quieter. Eddie had discussed the project publicly a year before his cancer diagnosis. These were not songs written because his life was ending. They had begun years earlier, when two children asked their father not to leave the room until he sang them one more. His final studio album opens with a nine-second track. Its title is “Hi Kids.”

Country Music

In June 1986, Eddie Rabbitt walked into Vanderbilt Children’s Hospital with an acoustic guitar and helped dedicate a playroom to the two-year-old son he had lost the previous summer. Only a few years earlier, Eddie’s life had been moving at the speed of his biggest records. “Drivin’ My Life Away” and “I Love a Rainy Night” had carried him beyond country radio, while “You and I,” his duet with Crystal Gayle, became one of the defining love songs of the early 1980s. Then his son Timothy was born with biliary atresia, a rare disease that prevented his liver from functioning properly. Eddie began removing himself from the road. Against the advice of people managing his career, he reduced his recording and concert schedule and spent as many as four hours a day, six days a week, at Vanderbilt. Timmy underwent four operations while the family waited for the liver transplant that represented his best chance of survival. The transplant finally took place in Minnesota in July 1985. Timmy died less than two days later. He was twenty-three months old. Eddie stayed home with his wife, Janine, and their young daughter, Demelza, who could not understand why her little brother had disappeared. He later remembered the family talking with her about God and heaven while trying to answer questions for which the adults had no easy language. Nearly a year after Timmy’s death, memorial donations were used to furnish and refurbish a playroom at Vanderbilt, where the boy had spent much of his life. Eddie and Janine returned for the dedication. Then Eddie took out his guitar and played for the children inside the hospital. His full return to country music came later. A new son, Tommy, brought laughter back into the house, and in 1988 Eddie reached No. 1 again with “I Wanna Dance with You.” But one of the first rooms to receive his music after the family’s long silence was not a recording studio or concert hall. It was the hospital playroom carrying Timmy’s name, filled with children who needed somewhere to be children between treatments. More from the years Eddie Rabbitt stepped away from the road—and the quiet way he entered public life again—is explored below.