The Day We All Met Johnny Crawford

This is not the story of the first time I met Johnny, for that I hold dear in memory as the first thread in an old-fashioned friendship sampler, begun before this day. 

However, the word “met” can be, itself, a thread of many colors, from first introduction to a moment which the dictionary defines as “to experience.”

 Probably everyone who meets Johnny has some sense of familiarity with him, having known him through his acting and his music over a lifetime. When they meet him, it isn’t really introduction; it is question:  “Is he who I thought he was?” And, on some deeper level, in their eyes, I’ve seen another question: “Will he know me?”

Of course, this later intuition is impossible.  Or, is it?  We know him; by sheer numbers he cannot know us.  We have experienced him in art.  But does that empathetic thread of music or story run, however magically, both ways?

This is the account of standing witness to a moment, a single thread in the whole tapestry that is his career and, if I may be so bold to say, his nature.  It is a stitch in a warp of empathy upon which those who come to meet Johnny Crawford, in person or through a performance, form the weft.  It is a stitch where he is met--both introduced and experienced as a genuine person whom we are already blessed to know and who, somehow unseen, knows us.

At the time, I noted only fragments, the way one does with a movie plot entered into midway, and can only comprehend its beauty near the ending. 

In search of spring escape from the only too real cold Kentucky rain, I’d gone to Festival of the West in Phoenix, a happy, if almost unreal, gathering of howdy, of bustle skirts and spurs and button-up boots; and folks who formed a long, long line of homage saved up since long past childhood, homage they would pay to Johnny Crawford-- to them, mostly, Mark McCain.

A grandmother approached Johnny’s table with her grandson.  Her grandson was blind, and carried a white cane nearly his own size.  He may have been 10 or 12.  He himself reminded me of Mark McCain. 

When Johnny spoke to him, the boy’s ever-present half-smile broadened out like a New Mexico Territorial horizon.  It was a voice familiar to him.  He had met Johnny, through that voice alone, many times.  He had met The Rifleman through darkness and found in it, real light. 

After some conversation, the grandmother asked for a photograph of the boy with Johnny.  Obliging, Johnny stepped out from behind the table to pose with him, and his grandmother began to move back down the long aisle mixing with the passers-by to get the best picture.

Accustomed to moving in tandem with his grandmother, the boy froze for half a moment.  The stitch of experience was hung up on crowd commotion, and jingle of spurs, and those happy sounds of a dozen passing howdy’s, unfamiliar, unmet, not seeing the boy and his hero, and lost to the child in a maze of darkness.

It was then I saw something I thought extraordinary, something I knew instinctively it was important to note.  It was then that I knew I had met Johnny Crawford. 

Johnny put a gentle hand on the boy’s slim shoulders and they eased, uncertainty and tension surrendered.  Johnny began to speak to the boy as if the two of them were the only ones for a hundred desert miles, in a place of silence instead of cowboy chaos.  With a reassurance we would have expected from Pa near the end of any Rifleman, Johnny handed the boy every detail, every scene, every vision.  Johnny, whose eyes we all knew became the eyes of a boy, seeing more with than for him.  (Again?)  He became the voice familiar.  He had already been met.

As the grandmother took the picture, no detail was lost to the boy thanks to Johnny’s vision. He had not seen The Rifleman, but that day, he had been guided tenderly within a scene.  He knew exactly where he was, and with whom.  The boy’s proud, broad smile answered those same two questions I’d seen time and time again in people‘s sighted eyes:  Johnny was someone he had always known and more, somehow, Johnny knew him.  The boy met Johnny.  Moreover, Johnny met the boy. 

I remembered hearing stories of how Laura Ingalls Wilder learned to see for her blind sister, Mary.  With this skill, she became a story-teller, seeing not for, so much as with her readers.  Through his threads of sight and insight Johnny has often described to us a way through the bungling happenstance of life.  We stand as children blinded by fear and hear him call out to Pa, who always comes in time.  We grow weary in a grown-up world so sadly bereft of romance, and hear musical solace sweeping clouds away, bespeaking dreams we cannot see---yet have already experienced.  When we see his art on film, when we hear his music, we meet him and we are, each time anew, introduced and reintroduced, yet always familiar.

Even if we never see him face to face, even if we never have a picture taken with him, we are known.  Even if we never receive a letter, he has written to us, time and time again.  What we see of Johnny Crawford is ever real, ever present tense---and met. With him, that thread of creative intuition runs both ways, and is secured with a perfect knot of genuine kindness.

That one given day (for yes, it was a gift), a friend, another child of Northfork who was standing witness to this lovely thread, leaned over to me, and taking in that same picture, suggested in his honest to goodness Arizona cowboy drawl, “Pa’d be kinda proud, wouldn’t he?” 

I could only slowly nod my head and half-whisper, tears welling and perhaps worthy of Mark McCain, “He is,” I assured him, “he is……” 

     ~Dorothee