Chuck Connors: The Mayor of Chinatown Dies, 1913

Chuck Connors 2
Chuck article states that Chuck lived at 6 Doyers Street

Chuck Connors And Doyer Street Tales And Legends

from a Herbert Ashbury article in the 1926 Mercury Magazine
doyers-ashbury

Chuck Connors, A Mayor Of Chinatown

from the Bowery Hall Of Fame

Chuck Connors, born George Washington Connors, had a trait that made him very popular in the press: a willingness to be quoted saying anything.  As a result, Connors is credited with inventing the phrases, “the real thing,” “oh, good night,” “oh, forget it,” and “under the table.”  Connors’ primary claim to fame is his autobiography Bowery Life, ghostwritten by reporter and editor Richard K. Fox of The Police Gazette.Connors was most likely born in Providence, RI, although he claimed to be born on Mott Street. As a child in New York City he worked odd jobs, including a gig as a clog dancer in the Gaiety Museum. He grew up tormenting the Chinese by pulling their pigtails, but eventually learned some Mandarin--earning him his nickname, the Mayor of Chinatown. As an adult Connors worked as a bouncer in a variety of dive bars. He married, in a brief stint at an “upstanding life,” but it ended when his wife passed away. Connors traveled to London to recover, and returned with a new outfit: bell bottomed trousers, a blue-striped shirt, a bright silk scarf, a pea coat, and big pearl buttons. This was known as the Connors look. He even had a song to describe his outfit:
Pearlies on my shirt front

Pearlies on my coat 

Little bitta dicer,
stuck up on my nut

If you don’t think I’m de real t’ing

Why, tut, tut
Connors also became well known as a tour guide for celebrities, prominent authors and royalty. Connors’ reputation as a friend of the Chinese made him a convincing guide to his danger-seeking clientele, who believed him when he identified innocent passers-by as hatchet men.  Connors also created bogus opium dens, where the “fiends” paid no attention to the tour groups passing through. He also capitalized on his fame by throwing galas for the Chuck Connors Association, a charity benefiting Connors himself.

The character of Chuck Connors was played by Wallace Beery in the 1933 film the Bowery

Chuck Connors And Our Lady Of Perpetual Help

Where Chuck Connors was an altar boy. It's a magnificent looking church in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. The inset in the picture above is how the church looked when it was first built in the 1890's. More about the church here
More pictures of the church here

Chuck Connors: Baseball Player

the first page of the docment is from Carl Erskine's biography called Carl Erskine's Tales from the Dodgers' Dugout Seems like Chuck and Cliff have something in common after all.
connors

Publish at Scribd or explore others: Books Fiction quotes words

Chuck Connors: Almost Who's Almost Who..

The actor (the Rifleman) and one time Brooklyn Dodger, Chuck Connors, was born here, 455 61st Street, Brooklyn, in 1921. It's about 5 miles from Knickerbocker Village, so Chuck doesn't make the "almost who" category. If he was Derek Jeter I would make an exception, even if I didn't agree with his politics.

Chuck Connors (April 10, 1921 – November 10, 1992) was an American actor and a professional basketball and baseball player, best known for his starring role in the 1950's ABC hit western series The Rifleman.
Connors was born Kevin Joseph Aloysius Connors in Brooklyn, New York, a son of Allan and Marcella (Lundrigan) Connors, immigrants from the Dominion of Newfoundland. His father was a longshoreman and his mother a homemaker. He was reared Roman Catholic and served as an altar boy at the Basilica of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Connors's athletic abilities earned him a scholarship to the private high school Adelphi Academy, and then to the Catholic college, Seton Hall University in South Orange, New Jersey. He left college after two years, and in 1942 enlisted in the Army at Fort Knox, Kentucky. He spent most of the war as a tank-warfare instructor, stationed at Camp Campbell, Kentucky, and later at West Point, New York.
During his Army service, Connors moonlighted as a professional basketball player. Following his military discharge in 1946, he joined the newly-formed Boston Celtics of the Basketball Association of America. Connors left the team for spring training with Major League Baseball's Brooklyn Dodgers. He played for numerous minor league teams before joining the Dodgers in 1949, for whom he played in just one game; and the Chicago Cubs in 1951, for whom he played in 66 games as a first baseman and occasional pinch hitter.[1] In 1952 he was sent to the minor leagues again, to play for the Cubs' top farm team, the Los Angeles Angels. Connors was also drafted by the Chicago Bears, but never suited-up for the team. Connors is one of only 12 athletes in the history of American professional sports to have played for both Major League Baseball and in the NBA. He is credited with being the first professional basketball player to break a backboard. Connors jumped center and smashed the wooden backboard during warm-ups in the first-ever Boston Celtics game on November 5, 1946 at Boston Arena
Connors realized that he would not make a career in professional sports, so he decided to become an actor. Playing baseball near Hollywood proved to be fortuitous, as he was spotted by an MGM casting director and signed for the 1952 Tracy-Hepburn film Pat and Mike. In 1953, he starred opposite Burt Lancaster, playing a rebellious Marine private in the film South Sea Woman. Connors starred in 1957's Old Yeller as Mr. Sanderson. That same year he co-starred in The Hired Gun.
Although he was in feature films, such as The Big Country and Soylent Green, with Charlton Heston, Connors was best known for his television work. He appeared in a 1954 episode of Adventures of Superman titled Flight to the North, in which he played a good-natured (and very strong) backwoodsman named Sylvester J. Superman. He was featured in an episode of the syndicated crime drama, City Detective starring Rod Cameron, and a segment of CBS's fantasy drama, The Millionaire. In 1956, he appeared with Regis Toomey in the episode "The Nevada Nightingale" of the NBC anthology series, The Joseph Cotten Show. He portrayed George Aswell in the 1960 episode "Trial by Fear" of CBS's anthology series, The DuPont Show with June Allyson.
He achieved stardom when cast as "Lucas McCain" in the ABC television Western series The Rifleman (1958-1963), with Johnny Crawford as his son, Mark. Connors portrayed a veteran of Berdan's Sharpshooters, a special unit of marksmen in the Civil War, who used a Winchester carbine with an enlarged trigger guard (like that of Rooster Cogburn, in the 1970 film True Grit) to serve up justice to lawbreakers in every episode, helping Sheriff Michah Torrence (actor Paul Fix) as part of his civic duty. The Rifleman was a creation of Dick Powell's Four Star Television.
Connors next starred in NBC's post-Civil War-era series Branded (1965-1966) and the 1967-1968 ABC series Cowboy in Africa, alongside British actor Ronald Howard and Tom Nardini. In 1973 and 1974 he hosted a television series called Thrill Seekers. He had a key role as a slaveowner in the 1977 miniseries Roots.
The actor achieved notoriety for an incident on an NBC prime-time baseball telecast in the 1970s. The network regularly invited a celebrity commentator to join the regular play-by-play crew in the broadcast booth. Connors accidentally said the "f-word" during the live national telecast, stunning both the announcers and the audience.
Connors hosted a number of episodes of Family Theater on the Mutual Radio Network. This series was aimed at promoting prayer as a path to world peace and stronger families, with the motto, "The family which prays together stays together."
In 1983, Connors joined Sam Elliott and Cybill Shepherd in the short-lived NBC series The Yellow Rose, about a modern Texas ranching family. In 1985, he guest starred as "King Powers" in the ABC TV series Spenser: For Hire, starring Robert Urich. In 1987, he co-starred in the FOX series Werewolf, as drifter Janos Skorzeny. In 1988, he guest starred as "Gideon" in the TV series Paradise, starring Lee Horsley.
In 1991, Connors was inducted into the Western Performers Hall of Fame at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.
Connors was a supporter of the Republican Party and attended several fundraisers for campaigns of U.S. President Richard M. Nixon.
Connors was introduced to Secretary General Leonid Brezhnev of the Soviet Union at a party given by Nixon at the Western White House in San Clemente, California, in June, 1973. Upon boarding his airplane bound for Moscow, Brezhnev noticed Connors in the crowd and went back to him to shake hands, and jokingly jumped up into Connor's towering hug. The Rifleman was one of the few American shows allowed on Russian television at that time; that was because it was Brezhnev's favorite. Connors and Brezhnev got along so well that Connors traveled to the Soviet Union in December 1973. In 1982, Connors expressed an interest in traveling to the Soviet Union for Brezhnev's funeral, but the U.S. government would not allow him to be part of the official delegation.
Connors died in Los Angeles at the age of 71, of pneumonia stemming from lung cancer. He had been married four times and was survived by his four sons.
The book Carl Erskine's Tales from the Dodgers Dugout: Extra Innings (2004) includes short stories from former Dodger pitcher Carl Erskine. Connors is prominent in many of these stories.
Stephen King's series "The Dark Tower" featured a gunslinger named Roland Deschain as the main character. King mentions in the foreword that Roland was modeled on Chuck Connors and the illustrations in the book that show Roland bear this out.

The Rifleman

I wonder whether Cliff's fascination with rifles coincided with this show's popularity. I doubt it, Cliff was already 18 when this show began. I never watched it and it wasn't because I was aware that Chuck Connors was a right winger. This site has everything you ever want to know, if you cared, about the Rifleman

The Rifleman is an American Western television program that ran on ABC, from September 30, 1958 to April 8, 1963, a production of Four Star Television
According to network publicists, the series was set in the 1880s. There are also numerous episodes where the date is given in the 1880s. A wooden plaque next to the home stated that it was rebuilt by Lucas McCain and his son Mark in August 1881.
Westerns were popular when The Rifleman premiered, and producers struggled to find gimmicks to distinguish one show from another. The Rifleman's gimmick was a modified Winchester Model 1892 rifle with a trigger mechanism allowing for rapid-fire shots. Query how he could have had a Model 1892 in the 1880's, nevertheless Connors demonstrated its rapid-fire action during the opening credits as McCain dispatched an unseen bad guy on North Fork's main street. Although the rifle may have appeared in every episode, it was not always fired, as some plots did not lend themselves to violent solutions, e.g., a cruel teacher at Mark's one-room school. There were several episodes where McCain dispatched the bad guys without the use of the rifle at all and he once threw the rifle to knock the bad guy off his horse instead of killing him because he was a friend. In one episode McCain even "spiked" the barrel of his own gun when he knew it was going to fall into the hands of the villain so that it would backfire. McCain was also well versed in the use of a six gun although he did not own one and this aspect was rarely shown.
The various episodes of The Rifleman promote fair play toward one's opponents, neighborliness, equal rights, and the need to use violence in a highly controlled manner ("A man doesn't run from a fight, Mark," McCain tells his son, "But that doesn't mean you go looking to run TO one!"). In other words, the program's villains tend to be those who cheat, who refuse to help people down on their luck, who hold bigoted attitudes, and who see violence as a first resort rather than the last option. Indeed, a curious aspect of the program is that when they meet African-Americans, the people of North Fork are truly color-blind. In "The Most Amazing Man", a black man (played by Sammy Davis, Jr.) checks into the only hotel in town; for the entire show, no one notices his race. Not only is this noteworthy for the 1880s setting, it was radical for Hollywood of the early 1960s. While the message was clear, it was neither heavy-handed nor universal. A certain amount of xenophobia drifts around North Fork, however, forcing McCain to defend the right of a Chinese immigrant to open a laundry ("The Queue") and the right of an Argentine family to buy a ranch ("The Gaucho"). This racial liberalism does not extend to villains, however. The Mexicans in "The Vaqueros" are portrayed as indolent, dangerous, and speak in the caricatured way of most Mexican outlaws in Westerns of the time.
Another fundamental value of the series is that people deserve a second chance. Marshal Micah Torrance is a recovering alcoholic. Similarly, McCain gives an ex-con a job on his ranch ("The Jailbird"). Royal Dano appeared as a former Confederate States of America soldier, given a job on the McCain ranch, who encounters the Union soldier who had cost him his arm in battle. The soldier, now a general, arranges for medical care for the wounded former foe, quoting Abraham Lincoln's orders to "Bind up the nation's wounds." (Dano also appeared as a wealthy tanner who mistakenly believes Mark is his lost son and again as a preacher with a haunting gunfighter past in an episode where Warren Oates and L. Q. Jones, as unsavory brothers, try to goad him into a gunfight and attempt to bushwhack him.)
The show was created and initially developed by a young Sam Peckinpah, who would go on to become the director of classic Western movies (The Wild Bunch, Ride the High Country, etc.). Peckinpah, who wrote and directed many of the best episodes from the first season, based many of the characters and situations on real-life scenarios from his childhood growing up on a ranch. He also used many character actors such as Warren Oates and R.G. Armstrong (the marshall in two early episodes who was killed by James Drury before Paul Fix joined the cast) who would later feature prominently in his films. His insistence on violent realism and complex characterizations, as well as his refusal to sugarcoat the lessons he felt that the Rifleman's son needed to learn about life, soon put him at odds with the show's producers at Four Star. He left the show and created another classic TV series, The Westerner, starring Brian Keith, which was short-lived.
The black-and-white program starred former athlete Chuck Connors as Lucas McCain, a widower, Union veteran of the Civil War (lieutenant in the 19th Indiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment), and a homesteader. McCain and his son Mark (singer Johnny Crawford) lived on a ranch outside the fictitious town of North Fork, New Mexico Territory.
The pilot episode was telecast on CBS on Dick Powell's Zane Grey Theater. Regulars on the program included Marshal Micah Torrance (Paul Fix) (R. G. Armstrong was the original marshal for two episodes, the first and the fourth), Sweeney the bartender (Bill Quinn), and a half-dozen other denizens of North Fork (Hope Summers, Joan Taylor, Patricia Blair, John Harmon, and Harlan Warde were regulars). Fifty-one episodes of the series were directed by Joseph H. Lewis, the director of the classic film noir Gun Crazy (1950), which accounts for some of the show's virtuoso noir lighting and dark, brooding quality. Ida Lupino directed one episode, "The Assault". Connors wrote several episodes himself. Robert Culp of CBS's Trackdown, wrote one two-part episode.
The February 17, 1959, episode of The Rifleman proved to be a spin-off for an NBC series, Law of the Plainsman starring Michael Ansara in the role of Marshal Sam Buckhart. In the story called "The Indian", Buckhart came to North Fork to look for Indians suspected in the murder of a Texas Ranger and his family.

Verse 1. HE IS NO STRANGER TO THE SETTLERS
AND THE BAD MEN KNOW HIS FAME
THEY SPEAK OF HIM IN WHISPERS
BUT THEY NEVER USE HIS NAME

Chorus: THEY CALL HIM THE RIFLEMAN,
THE STRONG, COURAGEOUS RIFLEMAN
A GREAT BIG MOUNTAIN OF A MAN.

Verse 2. HE NEVER REACHES FOR HIS RIFLE
EXCEPT WHEN HE'S ATTACKED.
HE RECKONS THERE'S A TIME TO SPEAK
AND THERE'S A TIME TO ACT.

Chorus: THEY CALL HIM THE RIFLEMAN
THE STRONG, COURAGEOUS RIFLEMAN
A GREAT BIG MOUNTAIN OF A MAN.

Verse 3. THEY KNOW THAT WHEN IT COMES TO
MARKSMANSHIP
HE'S BETTER THAN THE BEST.
STILL, SOME-ONE'S ALWAY FOOL
ENOUGH TO PUT HIM TO THE TEST.

Chorus: THEY CALL HIM THE RIFLEMAN
THE STRONG, COURAGEOUS RIFLEMAN
A GREAT BIG MOUNTAIN OF A MAN.

Verse 4. TO EVERY LAD WHO COMES TO HIM
TO LEARN THE SECRET OF HIS ART
HE TELLS THEM THERE'S NO MEDICINE
TO HEAL A COWARD'S HEART.

Chorus: THEY CALL HIM THE RIFLEMAN
THE STRONG, COURAGEOUS RIFLEMAN
A GREAT BIG MOUNTAIN OF A MAN.

Verse 5. THERE IS A MORAL TO HIS EXPLOITS
AND HE'S TAUGHT IT TO HIS SON
SPEAK SOFTLY TO YOUR ENEMY
BUT LET HIM SEE YOUR GUN!

Chorus: THEY CALL HIM THE RIFLEMAN
THE STRONG, COURAGEOUS RIFLEMAN
A GREAT BIG MOUNTAIN OF A MAN.