By Wesley Harris
The stars came out for the peach festival, but I missed the only one I wanted to see.
One of the big draws to the Louisiana Peach Festival in Ruston for a time in the 1960s was the presence of well-known TV celebrities who served as parade grand marshals. The stars made appearances and posed for photos and generally added to the excitement of the festival which often stretched to nearly two weeks in length.
I don’t know if there was an arrangement with CBS but it seems all those who appeared in Ruston were stars of CBS television shows. The other networks may have done the same thing to promote their shows. I don’t know.
Friends tell me Ken Curtis of Gunsmoke and Tom Lester who played Eb on Green Acres made Peach Festival appearances. Meredith McRae, who played Billie Jo, one of the sisters on Petticoat Junction, appeared at the 1967 Peach Festival.
Linda Kaye Henning also starred on Petticoat Junction as Betty Jo Bradley. Her father Paul Henning produced the show as well as Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies. In addition to playing Betty Jo, Henning performed the voice of Jethrine Bodine on The Hillbillies, who was simply Max Baer (Jethro) dressed up as a girl.
I don’t recall how I learned Betty Jo was going to be the grand marshal of the 1968 parade, but I decided I had to be there. She was one of my favorite actresses at the time, not that I ever had a favorite before then but in 1968, I was beginning to think about things like that.
I don’t know how many of you ever noticed, but it was the tomboy Betty Jo who had the feminine name and the taller blonde and brunette sisters, Billie Jo and Bobbie Jo, who had the boyish names.
Betty Jo’s sisters seemed more sophisticated than Betty Jo who occasionally wore her flaming red hair in pigtails or a ponytail. She wore that red hair so much better than my two brothers and I wore ours. I sensed she liked hers a whole lot better than I liked mine.
Betty Jo seemed like she would be more approachable than the other two sisters, not that I would ever get that close. She still played a little baseball and worked on cars, but could dress up as nice as the other two.
I pictured her as the one you could get to come outside and climb trees or collect bugs.
So I set my sights on that Saturday afternoon parade. The peach festival parade was a really big deal in the sixties when entertainment offerings were few outside of ball games and picture shows. The parades were huge, usually with numerous marching bands, Shriners with tiny cars and motorcycles and crazy costumes, and plenty of homemade floats.
What I did not know was that Betty Jo got to Ruston on Thursday before Saturday’s parade. Decades later, I read newspaper articles about that year’s festival. Betty Jo was picked up by private plane in Dallas by Ruston businessman Sam Thomas and brought to Ruston. Many years later, I learned she appeared at a big autograph party at Railroad Park that Thursday evening where I could’ve gotten an autographed photo and actually met her. Scores of my friends obtained those autographs, I learned many years later.
Betty Jo spent all day Friday making the rounds to all kinds of events, both public and private.
But I didn’t know that at the time so I was anticipating the parade on Saturday afternoon.
I can’t remember what else we had going on that Saturday, but I was tied up with my mother most of the day. It may have been a 4-H Club event. I cannot remember. But that obligation led to great disappointment.
The parade started at 3:00 Saturday afternoon. We got there late, very late, maybe 4:00 p.m. In fact, as we drove into downtown Ruston, I could see the tail end of the parade. The last car was a white convertible and I could see Betty Jo sitting up on the top of the back seat, her hair redder than it seemed on TV.
There was no place to park, not that it mattered because we had driven into an intersection of gridlock. No way I was going to get any closer. I could have jumped out of the car and simply walked fast and could have caught up to the convertible within a couple of blocks. But no, I wasn’t that bold.
Within moments, the white convertible made a turn and Betty Jo disappeared from sight. All I had seen during her three-day visit was her back and her red hair from a block away.
That disappointment is a vivid memory 57 years later. Linda Henning—Betty Jo—is still alive, one of the few left from Petticoat Junction. She still makes appearances around the country but the fervor that seized that 11-year-old boy is no longer. Although later that summer, I saw The Parent Trap with Hayley Mills who played twin 13-year-old sisters. We were only two years apart! Again, a disappointment. That 1968 showing was a re-release of the original 1963 film. Mills was already 20 when I was 11. My daughter is named Hayley if that provides any insight to how well the young actress captured my imagination.
So if you’re raising a preteen boy, and he develops an interest, indulge him for a moment. Don’t leave him with a lifelong disappointment.
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