No, it’s not Tuesday.
But Monday, January 4th, I have the Male on Monday slot at The Pink Heart blog, and I wrote about one of my very first heroes who came into my life every Tuesday night for four years between 1959-1963.
The hero was Jess Harper, the cowboy-drifter who turned up on Laramie in the very first episode and, while he was always a threat to go, never ever left.
He was played by handsome, talented Robert Fuller — he of the lean hard body, the piercing blue eyes (though the first two years were in black-and-white so who knew?), the unruly dark hair, the unforgettable rough baritone voice and the mix of wry humor and fi
erce intensity — who has colored all my heroes to this very day.
If ever a man was perfect for a part, Bob Fuller was Jess.
Even he said that. Back in 1992 when writer Jessica Douglass and I were putting together a workshop on My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys for the RWA conference, we asked him.
It was one of those times when research is more fun than you can imagine — and you learn that your childhood heroes can sometimes be as memorable in person as they were in your imagination.
I wrote about Bob Fuller and Jess Harper and the impact they had on my life and my books in a piece called ‘Jess Harper — My Kind of Hero’ that I did my first year writing this blog. I won’t rehash it here. If you want a look, click on the link above.
Suffice to say, he inspired either directly or indirectly a lot of my heroes — but especially Jess Cooper in A Cowboy For Christmas and Robert Tanner in Cowboys Don’t Cry. They
were both tough, intense, quiet, lone wolf sorts of men, men who struggled to do the right thing.
They had flaws, but fortunately for them — and for my books and heroines — not fatal flaws. Life wasn’t easy for them. They had tough decisions to make, and while they were busy being noble, sometimes they got it wrong the first time. Happily they got it right in the end.
Who were your earliest heroes?
Tell me and what inspired you, and you could win a copy of A Cowboy For Christmas. Micah and Mitch will be picking a winner (with my help) on Friday.
