Chuck Connors

Chuck Connors was devastated when he heard Burt Lancaster had suffered a stroke in November 1990. One day he tried calling Lancaster's office, but the office was not releasing any information at the time. Connors sent a letter supporting David Fury's nomination of Lancaster to the Cowboy Hall of Fame and signed the petition Fury sent in 1991 to the American Film Institute nominating Lancaster for its Lifetime Achievement Award.

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Connors was one of twelve athletes in history to play in both Major League Baseball and the NBA.

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On July 18, 1984, he was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6838 Hollywood Boulevard in Hollywood, California.

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Connors was not the only baseball star to appear in The Rifleman (1958); several former baseball stars appeared on the show, among them Duke Snider and Don Drysdale.

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He was signed as an amateur free agent by the Brooklyn Dodgers before the 1940 baseball season. On October 10, 1950, the Brooklyn Dodgers, with whom he had appeared in a game in 1949, traded him along with Dee Fondy to the Chicago Cubs for Hank Edwards and cash. He spent part of the 1951 season with the Cubs. He also played professional basketball for the Boston Celtics. Playing for the Boston Celtics in 1946, Chuck Connors became the first NBA player to break a backboard during pre-game warmups at Boston Garden.

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A longtime smoker, he was hospitalized with pneumonia three weeks before his death from lung cancer. He was buried in San Fernando Mission Cemetery. His headstone bears the logos of all three sports teams he played for: the Boston Celtics, the Chicago Cubs and the Brooklyn Dodgers.

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Chuck Connors hit only two home runs over his Major League Baseball career, but one of them came in the 1951 season against Sal "The Barber" Maglie of the New York Giants and came during one of Maglie's best seasons: 23 wins (leading the National League), 6 losses, a 2.93 ERA and appearances in the All-Star Game and the World Series.

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He appeared on the front cover of TV Guide five times.

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Before becoming an actor, he spent most of the war as a tank warfare instructor at Camp Campbell, Kentucky, before going to West Point, New York.

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In June 1973, at a meeting at the White House, he became friends with Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. Connors traveled to the Soviet Union in December 1973 and gave Brezhnev two Colt pistols as a gift. In 1982 he asked his friend President Ronald Reagan whether he could attend Brezhnev's funeral, but he was not allowed to be part of the official US delegation.

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Connors graduated in 1940 from Adelphi Academy, a private high school in Brooklyn, New York. He was offered numerous scholarships but chose to attend Seton Hall College (now Seton Hall University), where he played basketball, football and baseball. His college studies were interrupted in 1942 when he enlisted in the United States Army at Fort Knox, Kentucky.

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Until the 1970s he smoked three packs of Camels a day. In the mid-1970s he led anti-smoking campaigns. In a 1987 interview he said he still smoked but claimed to limit himself to only one cigarette a day.

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He is best remembered by the public for his role as Lucas McCain in the series The Rifleman (1958), which was canceled at the end of its fifth season because Connors and his co-star Johnny Crawford decided to move on to other projects. The two remained good friends both during the series' run and after it ended. Crawford later told an interviewer that he too had been an avid baseball fan as a small boy, like Connors, and that Crawford would bring his baseball equipment to the set during filming.

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Actors David Cassidy, Kathy Garver, Clarence Gilyard Jr. and Bill Mumy, comedians Bill Rafferty and Vicki Lawrence, announcers Burton Richardson and Randy West, and talk show host and billionaire entrepreneur Oprah Winfrey all described him as a childhood television hero.

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According to an article on television westerns in Time magazine (March 30, 1959), Connors was 6'5" tall, weighed 215 pounds and had chest-waist-hip measurements of 45-34-41.

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Years after The Rifleman (1958), in the early 1970s, he was a spokesman for the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

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He was an altar server and parishioner at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

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His parents were longshoreman Allan Connors and homemaker Marcella Lundrigan Connors, both of Irish origin. His father was born in Dunville and his mother in St. Marys on Placentia Bay (both in the Dominion of Newfoundland, now part of Canada). Allan Connors died in 1966 and Marcella Connors died in 1971.

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He was inducted into the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum's Hall of Great Westerners (1991).

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Chuck Connors was a member of the Orange County, California Sheriff's Advisory Board.

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Chuck Connors supported Gerald Ford in the 1976 presidential election.

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Nearly a year before his death, Chuck Connors's first wife, Elizabeth "Betty" Connors, died on February 27, 1992, after a long illness.

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Chuck Connors had 10 hobbies: playing golf, horseback riding, reading, swimming, fishing, writing poetry, spending time with his family, baseball, philanthropy and politics.

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Chuck Connors ran Barry Goldwater's campaign in the 1964 presidential election.

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Retired NBA player Chuck Person is named after Chuck Connors.

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At the age of 13, Chuck Connors recalled that he was a terrible first baseman and that the man who had the greatest influence on his life was a small gentleman named John Flynn, his coach on a team called the Celtics.

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In 1967, Chuck Connors took part in a parade in New York in support of the Vietnam War and campaigned on behalf of his friend Ronald Reagan.

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In The Rifleman (1958), Chuck Connors's character used a large number of rifles, and in real life he also owned rifles.

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