Back to Kirbyland - The Home of Johnny West   A TWO-YEAR-OLD AND HIS JOHNNY WEST - WHERE IT ALL BEGAN Christmas 1967, Bear Canyon, Montana Who could have known what would become of that two-year-old boy the first time he stripped away the Christmas wrapper to uncover that box containing one caramel-colored cowboy equipped with all the necessities of a rough and ready rider of the range? Who would have foreseen the excitement in his eyes as he grabbed a pencil to use for a rifle because already, at age two, he wanted to make the magic last that much longer by not taking that six-inch-long Winchester '73 from the sprue? Well sir, the years have flown by, but the effect that 1967 Christmas had on little Kirby Jonas is still imbedded in his soul. It was a special Christmas, for it introduced Kirby to what would in effect become one of the best friends of his childhood (which has lasted much longer than his wife thinks is reasonable!). Kirby Jonas and Johnny West became inseparable. But wait! I'm getting ahead of myself. Who is Johnny West? And who is Kirby Jonas?   Kirby Jonas We'll start out with Kirby Jonas. That's me! I am perhaps the biggest thirty-seven-year old kid on the block, standing six feet tall and weighing 215 pounds of flesh now hardened by some eighteen or twenty years of lifting weights. I was born August 6, 1965, in Bozeman, Montana, and my first home was the college housing for Montana State University, as my forty-five-year-old father was attending school there. I always had cowboys somewhere around me-the two-inch variety, which we came to call "little men". I don't remember much of what was on television in those days. I don't even remember if we had a television, but somewhere along the line I decided cowboys were pretty special. (He breaks into singing, "My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys, and they still are, it seems…." And I guess I haven't changed much (except I traded that diaper for Wrangler jeans).   click on an image below to see it enlarged. Johnny West Funny thing is, 1965 must have been a magical year. While my mom and dad had stars in their eyes and were dreaming of their next child, Louis Marx, of the famous Louis Marx Toy Company, of Glendale, West Virginia, was dreaming of his own next child, a "child" who would compete with Hasbro's G.I. Joe but would embody the spirit of the West. That "child" became known as Johnny West-incidentally born at the same time as I came into the world. It must have been destiny. Bear Canyon, Johnny West's "home in the woods" Back to the story … In 1967 we moved out to a house in Bear Canyon, about seven miles outside of Bozeman. The house was built by my father and our friend, Darwin Burnett, who was a school teacher at the time. He had gotten a job in Deer Lodge, Montana, and while he was away he asked us to live in his house and take care of it. Picture this little cabin in the woods. And I mean IN THE WOODS! This place was quaint. A smaller version of the Walton homestead. It sat among the spruce and fir trees, where deer and elk and moose, squirrel and porcupine … and of course, bear, thrived. Bear Creek ran close by, and always in the air was that fresh smell of verdant deep timber that changes subtly with each new season yet never goes away altogether. There were neighbors, but you could not see them from that house, and they were not close enough to want to visit very often. You definitely could not hear them unless they were shooting. We were in the wilderness-at least to a boy of three. What do I remember about Bear Canyon? Just what I described. That, the Carpenters and Paul Harvey on the radio, Marty Robbins and the Sons of the Pioneers on the phonograph, and James "Jewelry" (we later found out it was "Drury") as The Virginian on television. I remember it didn't stay light for very long that deep in the canyon, especially in the dead of winter and at - 48 degrees, but it was hot and humid in the deep timber in the summer. But the creek never failed to freeze your feet, even on my birthday on August 6. Well, the summer came and went, and snow fell heavy in the canyon. And then Santa Claus came, and with him came that little 7 x 12 x 3 inch box disguised in Christmas wrapping, and that bigger box that held the horse of Johnny's dreams: a bay "Comanche." My older brother Jamie received a Chief Cherokee and I believe a black Thunderbolt, and of course sister Kandy got Johnny's wife, Jane, and a palomino "Flame," the Johnny West series' only cantering horse-that's "loping," in Western terminology. She also got "Flick," Johnny's sleek German shepherd. Oh-and of course this was the first year we were introduced to Hartland's line of Western toys and Lego Blocks as well. Hey-how could Christmas get better? And where the heck were the camcorders back then!?!   click on an image below to see it enlarged. Untimely death of Johnny #1 I guess I don't need to mention the excitement of being introduced to Johnny West. You can see that in these old photos. But the excitement was short-lived. The following day Jamie's Chief Cherokee, in a fit of jealous rage, slammed poor Johnny so hard he flew across the room, struck the leg of the piano, and completely lost his head. Alas, Jane West became a widow for the first time in Jonas history. Unfortunately, Daddy wasn't too concerned about a two-year-old's toy, and Johnny went over the Great Divide-which for him was the trash. I guess his entire set of 24 accessories must have gone with him, as I have no memory of them after that.   Jay West But that didn't dim the vision that had been put in the little boy's head. I kept on craving Johnny West toys, and that's what we kept on getting for Christmas-and birthdays. My fourth birthday I was introduced to the fairly new "Jay" West, Johnny's blond son. Daddy had carved me a little wooden pistol, and it fit just right in his hand, so he became a "two-gun-kid." Well, I could go on and on about Johnny West. I can name dozens of different stories we "acted out" as children, some of which became Western novels when I started writing years down the road. Little Jay took a fall off the top of our staircase a couple of years later when we lived in Virginia, snapping off both of his legs at the knee. Luckily, Daddy was a trained doctor by then, and Jay wore permanent splints from that day forth. Living in Virginia, near the home of Johnny West Did I say Virginia? Oh yeah. How could I not delve further into this one. Here I was next door to the very birthplace of Johnny West, and although I had been told that, it didn't have the significance that it should have. But lo and behold, when we took a trip to the city and walked into Toys R Us, the magnificent toy store they had there which until that day I had never heard of, our hearts almost stopped. There, on those toy store shelves, was a sight straight out of Toy Story: stacks upon stacks of Louis Marx twelve-inch figures, pristine in their boxes. All brother Jamie and I could do was stare. We had to have one, of course, so we started scouting them out. There were Vikings and knights, Indians, horses, cavalrymen … wait! Cavalrymen? We loved the Vikings and knights, but hey-cavalrymen? How do two boys enthralled with the West pass that up? To Jamie fell a brand new General Custer (who was really not a general when he died at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, but who's being picky?), and my choice was the handsome Captain Tom Maddox. Wow! What a couple of dreams come true! Captain Maddox taught me to read Captain Maddox went straight to his brand new home on top of the fridge, where if I read enough out of my Dick and Jane reader I could play with him for a certain amount of time every day. I've always maintained that Captain Maddox taught me to read. (Later he was translated, taken through another dimension to that Great Beyond; if you'll stick with me long enough you'll get to hear that story, too, a tale right out of The Twilight Zone.) Now, in Virginia we lived in an even more remote place than Bear Canyon, if you can believe that. This further reinforced my being a loner and treating Johnny West as my best friend. It is also here that Jamie threw our Geronimo out of the hayloft, and poor Geronimo lost his legs. We never could find the leg spring, or we could have saved him. Mom, always a better doctor than Daddy, had taught us how to put these guys back together with a simple little steel crochet hook-the perfect tool! But no spring-no fix. Geronimo died there on the floor of the old two story Civil War era barn-in the midst of Civil War battlefield country, no less. Who would ever have believed it? I didn't mention the fact that my mom paid us at least one Sunday in Virginia to stay home from church. Yes, it's true. She gave me and my seven-year-old brother each a quarter so she wouldn't have to bother getting us ready, because we were too slow. Yeehaw! The fun raged on! Two kids, seven and five, and we were having so much fun with Johnny West we were too enthralled to be scared. I took that quarter I made, and on that first trip to Toys R Us, which in memory looks big enough to be two warehouses stuck together, I made my very first purchase with my own hard-earned money, a bag of "little men." It cost me exactly one quarter.   click on an image below to see it enlarged. Stealing Christmas While in Virginia we had an exciting Christmas. Jim, my half brother I had never met who lived in California, came to visit. He was in his twenties, I believe. But more exciting than that was…Johnny West! Of course, for Christmas, a brand new Johnny West for me, and another for Jamie. What else? The funny part is, I don't remember opening them on Christmas day. Maybe because by then we had already played with them. Mom made the mistake of thinking she could hide Christmas from us boys, who never did believe in Santa Claus. She hid both Johnny West boxes on end in Daddy's bookcase, and on another of those infamous days when she left us home alone, guess what. We discovered Christmas. We took down the dolls and played with them freely until we knew it must be getting close to time for Mom to come home, since it was getting dark. Then we put them away and went on about our business, tiny lips sealed tight. No one ever knew. Just me and Jamie … and our Johnnies. By then we had several, I'm not sure how many. But enough that the old guys stole the accessories from the new guys and got to see what it was like to wear fresh duds again. Ah, the Christmasy smell of Johnny West By the way, lest I forget: do you children of the sixties remember that fresh vinyl smell Johnny West had when you first opened the box? Mmmmm. I'll never forget that. To this day I can smell it, and every time I smell new vinyl, like beach balls sealed in plastic, it takes me back to yesteryear. The reproduction Johnnies of the early part of this century had it, but not as strongly, since they were no longer sealing their accessories tightly in a bag. Well, there we were in Virginia. And never once did we lay eyes on the home of our beloved Johnny West in Glendale. In 1971 we moved back west to Idaho, where I spent all of my childhood, and left the kingdom of Johnny West behind. When I say "kingdom" I mean THE kingdom, the birth place, the place where you could go in any store and get any figure, any horse. Out west it was not like that. They always had Johnny and Thunderbolt, Geronimo, Jane, the kids. But pickings were usually slim. Vikings? Knights? Right! We never saw those again. Never laid eyes on a Princess Wildflower or a Jed Gibson, only when they would do those cool little commercials during the Saturday morning cartoons. On and on my childhood went, surrounded by Johnny West. We had over thirty of them at one time, many of them pieced together from different parts. Geronimo seemed to be so numerous (since he was made from a tougher mold) that we actually took his bodies and gave them to Johnny West and Custer from time to time. We built several towns and a number of ranches around them. I even built a gallows, a water tower, a livery stable out of an old dog house. Johnny West? Yeah. He was life itself.   click on an image below to see it enlarged. Bad things on the horizon-Best of the West series, 1974 Things began to change for the worse in 1974, the same year we started shoveling sidewalks around town (for a quarter each!) to be able to afford more Johnny Wests. They came out with what was called the Best of the West series, where "Best of the West" was actually written on the box. They changed the look of the box so that they were mostly the same, all pretty bad pictures of the dolls (in my not-so-humble opinion). They took away the variety, who knows why? Johnny's great "Cactus box," which had lasted only two years, disappeared, along with Jane's and Sheriff Garrett's, also Cactus boxes. Sam Cobra, the Renegade Badman's cool red and white box was gone, and the really neat Fort Apache Fighters series also bit the dust, all replaced by these horribly ugly brown and yellow boxes with crappy pictures of the individual dolls on front. But that wasn't the worst of it. Worse than that was the changes in accessories, at least for Sheriff Garrett and Johnny West, who shared the same accessory molds in different colors. The accessories came in hard plastic and soft vinyl. The hard-dark brown, in Johnny and Jane's case-survived. It was the soft accessories, particularly those of Johnny and of Sheriff Garrett, which paid. They became really thick, the hats horribly ugly, and the holsters so thick the pistols never would seat fully into them again. (But not even close to as bad as the later Mexican productions of the dolls!) The springs inside the shoulders also became very thick, and the dolls consequently were hard to "operate on" when you wanted to trade heads. The only good change was the bandanna, or "scarf," as we called it, which began to be made in a really cool red. Just when you think it can't get worse-Johnny West Adventure series But it got worse. The following year they changed again, trying desperately with vivid color to keep this toy alive. They brought out the Johnny West Action series. These, to the eyes of a purist like me, were almost a sin. Johnny shed his brown clothes and put on light blue, along with accessories of cream to go along with the brown. They still wore the red scarf, which of course was still cool. The bad part was Johnny now came in what was called a "Quickdraw" version. He had a white lever in his back and a little hole in the palm of his right hand, into which fit a peg sticking out the right side of his Colt pistol grip. His holster was ridiculously long, hanging down to his knee, and open in the front. You would put the gun in his hand and depress the white lever, which made his arm shoot up and made this little clicking sound that was supposed to simulate the sound of a gun, although it never did sound anything like one. To accommodate all these changes, Johnny West was shamed into becoming this big, barrel-chested looking fat boy. He was also doomed, as it turned out. Jane became coral colored with white and blue and silver accessories, Josie green, Janice red with white and yellow; Jay chocolate brown with yellow; Jamie blue like his dad, with brown clothes; Garrett went back to the royal blue he had been in his original production but adopted all white soft vinyl accessories and all dark blue hard ones. Custer for some reason stayed royal blue, and Maddox became royal blue, but both got navy blue vinyl accessories and hard silver accessories. Geronimo, if you want to get a good laugh, got orange clothing with yellow and brown accessories. The Chief got a cream-colored body, which was okay, and cool red and brown accessories. Fighting Eagle, whom we never laid eyes on in real life, got bright green vinyl stuff. The horses all got different colored saddle blankets, but otherwise mostly survived all of the embarrassing changes. Sam Cobra, oddly enough, was the only one who survived all of the changes, staying the same old black plastic with all black plastic accessories. That was one stereotype even Marx could not do away with. But no one survived the pathetic pictures they put on the box covers, painted by some "modernist" who did not care one whit about the Johnny West legacy. Like I said, Johnny West was doomed. And that year he died. A personal letter from Marx Toy Company: Johnny West is dead I didn't like the changes in Johnny West. But to find out that he was dead … well, that nearly broke a twelve-year-old boy's heart. Yes, you're right. I was too old to play with dolls. But Johnny West was not just a doll! He was my best friend. When I could no longer find them in the stores, with no sign that they would ever be there again, I found the Marx company address on the side of one of my old boxes and wrote them a letter asking if they were going to be in stores again and if maybe I could order some from them. Some time later, perhaps a week (it seemed like a year), I got a big thick letter back. I was picturing brochures full of great Johnny West items I could beg Mom to buy me. I was in Heaven again. They had written back! Know what it said on the outside of the envelope? These two things: "I tried to call." And "discontinued." Nothing more. A twelve-year-old boy does not know what "discontinued" means. I opened up the envelope only to find it was all of what I had sent them, come right back to me. I turned it all over, went through every page. Then I went to Mom, my heart thudding anxiously, all the time thinking the words on the envelope had been written by none other than Louis Marx himself. "Mom, what does this mean?" I asked. She looked at me, and I think her heart almost broke for her little boy who didn't seem able to grow up. "It means they stopped making them," she said. Well, a mule could have kicked me in the guts and it wouldn't have hurt much worse. I was devastated. If I had only had access and knowledge of thrift stores I could have picked up all kinds of Johnny Wests, but I knew nothing of such things, and they wouldn't have had that new vinyl "Christmasy" smell anymore, anyway. No, to little Kirby Jonas, his childhood had ended. Johnny West had died.     Back to Kirbyland - The Home of Johnny West

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