Amos Mccoy Quotes

Even away from the set and in Joseph, Walter Brennan continued to police his performances—as Louise Kunz observed when he visited his wife in the hospital, where she was recuperating from an operation. At the only television set in the hospital, everyone gathered around to view The Real McCoys. Louise and a group of teenage kids watched as Walter said, “Oh, I did that okay. Oh, I’ve got to work on that, that’s terrible.” When the episode ended, a boy asked him how he remembered to limp. Walter said he put a tiny pebble in his shoe; otherwise he limped on the wrong foot. Diane Turner remembers the times Walter would enter the local drugstore, sit down at the soda fountain, and entertain everyone with his Grandpa Amos routines. When his granddaughter Tammy Crawford watched The Real McCoys, she would get upset because every episode the characters would get mad at her Grampy—although by the end of the show he would have learned his lesson.

When Walter Brennan was asked how close in character he was to Amos McCoy, he replied, “Sure, I’m a mean old so-and-so.” More to the point, though, Brennan believed in Grandpa’s “godliness, a reverence for his family.” It was a good description of himself, although he did not discuss his faith or philosophy with his fellow actors. When I asked Kathleen Nolan if she knew that Brennan was a devout Catholic, she was startled. “We never, ever, talked about religion,” she said.

A pilot for Mr. Tutt, a series produced by Desilu and based on a Saturday Evening Post story about a curmudgeonly lawyer, was not made into a series, but it was broadcast on Colgate Theatre (September 10, 1958). The Variety reviewer considered Brennan excellent in the part, even though the script for the pilot was subpar. Brennan’s subsequent career on television might have been quite different if this role had made the same indelible impression as Amos McCoy, a part that made it difficult for audiences to accept Brennan as a sophisticated character in a series that did not have rural aspect to it.