The Time Capsule: Villisca actor should be recognized
The other day I asked Susie Enarson, a cousin of Judd Holdren and someone who knows Villisca as well as anyone, why the town has so completely overlooked him. Clarinda hosts a festival for Glenn Miller. Corning celebrates Johnnie Carson, Shenandoah has the Everly Brothers, and in Stanton there’s the ever-present Olson woman.
Villisca is the hometown of Judd Holdren, but the statue they erected is that of a pig.
We love the pig. It reminds us of a time, not that long ago, when a person could drive from Clarinda to Atlantic and see pigs on both sides of the road, pigs on every farm, hundreds of pigs. Now a traveler taking the same highway might drive from Minnesota to Missouri and see only one—Villisca’s black and white fiberglass girl piggy named Willard.
If not equal treatment, Holdren at least deserves something. His story is remarkable. From the family farm between Nodaway and Villisca he was relocated, by World War ll, to California. He hung around Hollywood after the war, appeared in a few movies, one of which (a co-starring role in “The Man in the Iron Mask”) was almost good. Another, “All the King’s Men,” actually was. He had the looks and voice to become a star, then signed with Republic Studios and was cast in a science fiction role. He became “Captain Video” of movie serials, then “Commando Cody,” “Rocket Man,” and other space explorers. He was type-cast, in a rut he couldn’t escape.
Similar roles today would be handled differently, but science fiction involving space travel was, in the 1950s, viewed by Hollywood as kid stuff. Serials were movie soap operas, ongoing cliffhangers designed to send the heroine—even our entire planet—to the brink of destruction in order to bring youngsters back the next week to see their hero save the day. Holdren wasn’t given a decent script to work with. He was expected to fly to Mars in a contraption that looked like a modified dumpster. His console and command post was a kitchen table and chair. He walked on the moon with telephone poles in the background, was asked to draw a two-bit water pistol and convince the audience he was firing vaporizing death rays. No actor could overcome plots and effects this bad.
Cheap and quickly made, Hollywood producers didn’t take them seriously. Holdren died young believing his career had turned to dust. Kids, however, loved him. They crowded the front rows of theaters across this country and others to watch him fight the good fight, taking on alien foes in “Zombies of the Universe,” “The Lost Planet,” and dozens of other films. In “Stratosphere” he battled Martians, one of which was played by Leonard Nimoy. Youngsters watched and dreamed of traveling to distant planets, of expanding the boundaries of the space we’ve explored. Youthful moviegoers of the 1950s who idolized space adventurers like Judd Holdren grew up with a dream, and they went to work.
Their manned flights into outer space fizzled; ultimately too expensive and deemed a lower priority than welfare and weapons, but they tried and in doing so made advances in science and technology that changed the world.
Enarson, life-long resident of the Villisca community, six-time mayor and perennial volunteer, remembers her cousin. She remembers the thrill of going to the theater to see him appear in “Francis the Talking Mule,” and she has collected many of his outer space adventures.
Why hasn’t Villisca painted the water tower to look like a space ship? Or done a mural, or put up a plaque? Enarson isn’t sure. “Maybe,” she said, “it’s because hardly anyone today knows who he was.”
Then we should tell them. Tell them by launching a space mission with Captain Video at the helm and the vivacious Ms. Spock, played by Willard, at his side.
All right; that’s not practical. Willard doesn’t fly. How about a saucer in the park? Or a showing of his films as part of the annual celebration—films so awful they’re sure to draw a crowd? Actually, I’m confident creative Villiscans can come up with a better tribute, and I hope they do.
If the town really wants to be known for something other than you-know-what they should have jumped on this years ago.
Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.