Early Clint Eastwood Role: Death Valley Days

“Death Valley Days” was a Western anthology series that ran for 18 seasons from 1952 through 1970, and featured stories drawn from real life incidents in the West. Over the years, they had dramatic and comedic episodes about famous people, people who would become famous, and just plain interesting people. All 18 seasons are currently available on several streaming platforms for free: Roku TV, Pluto TV, Tubi, Peacock and Amazon Prime.

Sometimes, I put “Death Valley Days” on the Roku channel and just let it run through a number of episodes. It’s been quite surprising to spot an actor that I know from a later series. I’ve spotted James Franciscus. I knew him as Mr. Novak. Gardner McKay was another surprise. He was the captain of the Tiki on “Adventures in Paradise”. But they weren’t quite as surprising as seeing a young Clint Eastwood pop up in “The Last Letter” (1956), the 7th episode of Season 5.

Before I was Rowdy Yates

The story revolves around Alex Todd (William Pullen), an entrepreneur who goes into the mail business. The miners aren’t getting their incoming mail on any kind of regular basis. They aren’t even sure if their outgoing mail is going anywhere. Todd offers to pick up and deliver all the mail for the miners. He also guarantees that any letters they send will get through. The hitch: they have to pay an arm and a leg for the privilege.

Todd comes across John Lucas (Clint Eastwood), a young guy who is obviously feeling down. Todd offers his services and gets his head bit off for the effort. Todd leaves and Lucas tears a letter to his uncle in half, muttering that his uncle wouldn’t want to hear his hard luck story anyhow. The paths of Todd and Lucas will cross again and the uncle will have something to do with it.

Clint Eastwood is the only cast member in this episode who went on to scale the heights of fame so I wasn’t too surprised to see it described as “starring Clint Eastwood” on Wikipedia. Actually, he was second-billed. 12 years would pass before Clint got top billing in “Hang ’em High” (1968).

“Death Valley Days” has an even bigger claim to fame: it was the last work in acting for Ronald Reagan, who went on to become Governor of California and President of the United States. Reagan hosted the show from 1964 to 1966, and he also had roles in 4 episodes. Other episodes I have enjoyed are “Little Washington” with Jim Davis and “A Kingdom for a Horse” with Gilbert Roland.

I imagine it will take me a few years to see all the episodes of “Death Valley Days”. Only “Gunsmoke”, at 20 seasons, had a longer run, but I suspect the episode count for “Gunsmoke” would shrink some if you didn’t count repeats of the same story.