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<title>Hark The Herald 2: Wednesday, December 18, 2024 | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Church Christmas tree salesman.....

Hark The Herald 2: Wednesday, December 18, 2024

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's business and tourism reporter, Renée Jean

Renée Jean

Around Wyoming

Mortar rounds were once code-named “Tootsie Rolls” during the Korean War. But no one was diving for cover at the National Museum of Military Vehicles when the Tootsie Rolls started falling in Dubois alongside big, fat raindrops.

Instead, there were children clapping hands and laughing, just before a squealing sprint for a spot under the black helicopter hovering just above one of the museum’s side parking lots, letting fall what looked a bit like rain itself. 

The helicopter drop was arranged by U.S. Army veteran Gene Humphrey, who was born and raised in Burns. Humphrey worked with museum staff and a friend, helicopter owner Steve Funk, to pull it off.

Marines of a certain age were smiling in spite of themselves as the children scrambled after the candies wrapped in special red-white-and-blue paper. They remembered a time and a frozen place when those gooey caramels meant the difference between life and death.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Code Word: Tootsie Roll"}]

The year was 1950 and the location was the Chosin Reservoir, American History Project Founder and The Chosin Few President Shayne Jarosz recalled during a recent lecture series at Dubois’ National Museum of Military Vehicles. The lecture is part of ongoing activities this year that celebrate America’s 250th.

“The men were surrounded by roughly 300,000 Chinese troops,” Jarosz said. “It is minus-40 degrees. They do not have the cold-weather gear that they need, and they are being attacked in force.”

To maintain a level of secrecy about their needs, the Marines had code words for everything important. 

“If you needed something, you didn’t want to say, ‘Hey, we’re almost out of bullets, send them',” Jarosz said. “Because the Chinese were listening. So the code word for mortar rounds was Tootsie Rolls.”

One day, the radio chatter suddenly became all about Tootsie Rolls, but not all the pilots were aware of all the code words.

“We are running low on Tootsie Rolls and we need them right now,’” Jarosz said the men were screaming. “And these great pilots who are flying all these sorties have no idea what in the world is going on. But they know that these men are in a desperate fight for their life and if it’s Tootsie Rolls they want, then it’s Tootsie Rolls they’ll get.”

This version of the story has been disputed by some historians, Jarosz acknowledged. But enough veterans have told him personally about this tale that he feels comfortable repeating it.

“So, along the entire evacuation route, they dropped Tootsie Rolls, and it ended up saving the lives of these men,” Jarosz said. “They had not eaten in days.”

The sudden arrival of the candy was like manna from heaven to these men, providing something simple but vital — sugar and calories in a package small enough to slip into frozen hands and pockets. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"More Than Just Food"}]

The Tootsie Rolls did more than just feed starving Marines. 

“Their fuel tanks had been shot and would not hold any fuel,” Jarosz said. “They could chew on that Tootsie Roll and melt it. Then they could put it in a bullet hole and, at 40 degrees below zero, it would expand and seal that gas tank.”

That allowed them to fuel enough trucks to evacuate their wounded. History records 18,000 casualties during the Chosin Reservoir battle, as well as thousands more who suffered frostbite. Those numbers could have been significantly higher but for the improvised repairs the candy made possible. 

Word of the Tootsie Roll story eventually made its way back to the candy makers. Since the 1950s, the Tootsie Roll Corporation has chosen to quietly honor the Marines of Chosin, sending them more than 150 pounds of their candy to all of their annual reunions. 

“You want to see a bunch of 90-year-old men acting like they’re 5 years old,” Jarosz said with a chuckle. “It’s really wonderful. And what’s even more wonderful about this is, Tootsie Roll is a family organization, and they never forget these guys.”

The candy company still ships the treats to reunions of men sometimes called The Frozen Chosin or The Chosin Few, so named because so few survived. They are a dwindling brotherhood of men who survived a freezing gantlet.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"A Freak Cold Snap"}]

For the men caught up in the Chosin Reservoir Campaign, the battle quickly became less about human enemies and more a fight against the Korean winter itself.

The weather, according to veteran accounts, had been relatively mild when Americans first landed in North Korea. 

Marines and soldiers who reached the Chosin area in early November 1950 were writing family members back home, saying the weather wasn’t “too bad.”

However, a Siberian cold front swept in, precipitously changing all that. Temperatures plunged to around 40 below, with wind chills far colder. Some estimates say it was down to minus-70 — among the harshest conditions ever recorded in that part of North Korea.

The freak cold snap caught the troops without proper cold-weather gear or equipment. Many of the Marines were still dressed for the mild coastal climate they’d left behind when they received their marching orders to head to the Chosin Reservoir. 

When the Chinese launched their massive night assault at about 1 a.m., only half the Marines were on alert. The rest had their boots off, socks draped around their necks, in an attempt to dry them before the next day.

They had no time to put their boots back on. They dove into foxholes shoeless, and sometimes sockless, too.

Enemy fire came in human waves of roughly a thousand men at a time moving in V-shaped, three-man formations to help minimize casualties from machine guns and artillery. The successive waves felt relentless and endless, and were a strategy Jarosz said was aimed at trying to melt down machine gun barrels through sheer numbers. 

But there was also a psychological aspect, too. Every wave, the Chinese were crashing cymbals and blowing horns as they charged to unnerve the Marines.

“The Marines are like, ‘Oh, what in the world is going on?’ ” Jarosz said. “You talk to the veterans today about this stuff, and they said it was the biggest nightmare they ever had.”

Frostbite, meanwhile, ravaged the ranks, and many men later required amputations.

More than 8,000 Americans suffered frostbite at Chosin. 

It wasn’t just Americans suffering from the cold, Jarosz said.

The Chinese soldiers, too, had come dressed in lighter clothing than the moment required. They were wearing thin, cotton-quilted uniforms and shoes Jarosz likened to old “Chuck Taylor” Converse sneakers.

“Their feet would swell so much that their shoelaces would literally pop,” he said. “And at first the Marines didn’t know what in the world that noise was. It was the Chinese shoelaces exploding. So I mean, these guys were really, really miserable, because they had been out there much longer than the Marines had been out there.”

Among the Chinese, Jarosz said 30,000 men are estimated to have died from cold alone, while 40,000 died in combat. 

The Chinese army had been moving toward Chosin Reservoir in stealth mode, tying themselves to trees by day to sleep, and traveling at night so their movements would not be noticed.

“A man who is out during the day would be seen by any kind of spot or airplane and would be shot on sight,” Jarosz said. “So this was a very, very well-disciplined military.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Battle For Fox Hill"}]

Among the most desperate of the Chosin Reservoir fights unfolded on Fox Hill, a rocky ridgeline commanding the Toktong Pass. The narrow mountain defile controlled the way to Yudam-ni and Hagaru-ri and was the 1st Marine Division’s only escape route. 

There, about 220 Marines of Fox Company were giving their all to hold the 2- to 3-mile-long mountain pass against an assault by 1,400 Chinese troops. 

In places, it was a line stretched so thin as to be more gap than men. Still, the men held their own, thanks to Marines like Hector Cafferata, who fought barefoot for three days, batting grenades back at the enemy with his rifle and shooting so many dead that the men who wrote his application for a Congressional Medal of Honor feared to list the true number, lest commanders think they had lied.

“When they wrote his citation up for his Medal of Honor, they purposely said that when the fighting had stopped on Fox Hill, they found more than 15 dead Chinese bodies around Hector’s fighting position,” Jarosz said. “There’s an annotation on that citation that says, ‘We actually counted 100 bodies that he had single-handedly killed, but we knew that nobody back at Headquarters would believe it'.”

Many of those Chinese soldiers were killed in hand-to-hand combat, Jarosz said. 

On the eastern side of the reservoir, things weren’t going quite as well. Soldiers with the Regimental Combat Team 31 — roughly 4,500 undertrained GIs — had been overwhelmed. As their column tried to withdraw under heavy attack, wounded men loaded in the backs of trucks were slaughtered when Chinese forces overran the convoy. 

Survivors, many badly wounded and half frozen, wriggled out from under wrecked vehicles. Too weak to walk, they were forced to crawl across the surface of the frozen Chosin Reservoir. 

Jeeps from the Marine base camp at Hagaru-ri, which sits at the southern tip of the Chosin Reservoir, were sent to pick up the stragglers. It was a grim, slow rescue that took place under the cover of subzero darkness.

Jarosz recalls the story of Col. Warren Wiedhahn. The young Marine machine gunner, a private at the time, was shot across the forehead in the battlefield chaos.

He was mistakenly tossed into a pile of bodies when his blood froze over his face and medics thought his skull was gone. 

Thirty minutes later, he woke up and stumbled into a warming tent, shocking everyone.

“With the limited medical care they could give him, they stitched his forehead back together,” Jarosz said. “They bandaged his forehead and gave him four aspirin. Then they said, ‘Get back on the line'.”

Years later, every time schools in his home state of Virginia would call school off for a snow day, he would call Jarosz to marvel — half joking, half bitter — that kids stayed home for a dusting of snow when he’d once been “shot in the head and had to go back to work.”

Many of the men who fought so valiantly at Chosin Reservoir did so despite knowing their families already believed them dead.

Early media reports, even in newspapers back home, were reporting that the First Marine Division had been lost. 

But the Marines did what Marines are trained to do. They started fighting back in reverse, step by bloody step, evacuating their wounded as they went.

Leaders such as Major General Oliver P. Smith, the legendary Col. Lewis “Chesty” Puller, and First Lieutenant Kurt Chew-Een Lee, the first Asian-American officer in the Marine Corps, kept pushing their men forward, doing everything they could to evacuate as many as possible.

Chew-Een Lee had been shot in November, a bullet shattering the bone in his arm. It was still in a sling at the time. But he didn’t let that stop him.

To make sure his men could see him on this fighting rescue mission despite the blinding snow, he wrapped himself in fluorescent aviation tape.   

He was a glowing silhouette on a land where everything else was white drifts and black sky. Men trudged behind him in snow up to their knees, following him toward the embattled company on the Fox Hill ridge.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Blowing The Bridge"}]

Step by step, the men fought their way off Fox Hill and back onto the narrow road that snaked south toward the sea, no longer trying to win ground. They were just trying to stay alive long enough to get out of the mountains.

The road funneled everything — wounded men, frozen trucks, tanks held together thanks to Tootsie Rolls and hope — toward Funchilin Pass. 

The Chinese had already blown up the concrete bridge that had been there, leaving a toothless chasm with no way to cross.

It was a problem others were working on, with a crazy-sounding plan like some writer would dream up for a movie. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"But this was real life."}]

Air Force C-119 “Flying Boxcars” would each carry a single steel bridge section — a chunk of portable treadway about the size and weight of a small railcar and push it out the back, over the mountain.

Each section would float down under giant cargo chutes onto a flat patch of ground near the blown span at Funchilin Pass. The Marines would then bolt the pieces in place to hold them.

On paper, the plan sounded simple enough. Bridge sections would drop from the sky, Marine engineers would stretch them across the gap and bolt them into place, and then everybody would quickly get across. Once everyone was across, the span would be blown up, keeping the Chinese from following.

Two bridge sections dropped too fast and were too badly mangled to use. 

“They … were able to jerry-rig this thing to where they were able to get these men out of there,” Jarosz said.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"How Legends Are Made"}]

All along that frozen gantlet — from Chosin Reservoir to Funchilin Pass — the soldiers found Tootsie Rolls that helped sustain them as well as to plug bullet holes to keep trucks fueled up and running. 

Regardless of which legend one believes, Jarosz said, there’s no disputing that the Tootsie Rolls were in the nick of time to save them all at a critical moment. 

They have become part of an enduring legend of American courage and ingenuity. 

It didn’t take long for the children to scoop up every last Tootsie Roll from the gravel at the National Museum of Military Vehicles after Jarosz’s lecture. They were excited about their sugary haul, even as they were largely unaware of the larger significance behind the moment.

But there were those in the crowd who understood. 

For them, it was enough to see Tootsie Rolls falling from the sky in honor of all the sacrifices made. This time, it was in a country that is at peace, in a Wyoming town a world away from the Frozen Chosin. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"And they wouldn’t have it any other way."}]

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<title>Dubois Tootsie Roll Drop Remembers How Candy Saved ‘Frozen Chosin’ Marines In Korea | Cowboy State Daily</title>

A candy drop at the National Museum of Military Vehicles in Dubois was more than just fun for kids. It honored the "Frozen Chosin" Marines who depended on Tootsie Rolls for calories, field repairs and sheer survival on minus-40 degree days in the Korean War.

Dubois Tootsie Roll Drop Remembers How Candy Saved ‘Frozen Chosin’ Marines In Korea

Wyoming Life

It’s often said that a picture is worth a thousand words, but it’s worth more than that at the Bone Daddy Outlaw Bar and Grill in Dubois, which has undergone a dramatic transformation since it was purchased last year by Ben Barto and his wife, Sherry.

Hanging in one corner of the bar is a picture that says it all, even if few might guess at all the layers of meaning it holds for its owner.

It is a photo of motorcycle handlebars looking out at a scenic vista. The words say simply, “Life Behind Bars.”

“I was in junior high when I had my first motorcycle,” Barto told Cowboy State Daily. “And I had a neighbor with a faster motorcycle. He always used to brag about how he would outrun the cops when he was speeding.”

The brag turned out to be just that — as Barto soon discovered.

“We were riding together one time and we decided we were going to take off and see who was faster,” he said. “No sooner did we get started than there was a highway patrolman coming at us.”

The patrolman flipped his lights on, and the neighbor who loved to brag about outrunning the law meekly pulled over to the side. 

Barto, who’d never made such a claim, kept right on going.

“So the cop chased me for a while, and I couldn’t take a corner very well,” he recalled. “I had to lay the bike over and he caught up to me.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"'He Was A Friend Of Mine'"}]

Barto knew this was bad in every possible way, but he didn’t know just how bad until he got a look at the officer’s face.

“He was a friend of mine,” Barto admitted.

It was a friend who was shocked to see just who he’d been chasing.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"It grew worse as the night went on."}]

“My uncle, who also happened to be a policeman and lived right across the street from me, was at the jailhouse that night,” Barto said. “And my folks were on vacation.”

While his uncle was disappointed in Barto, he decided not to throw the youth in jail, saying he knew his dad too well. He knew what would happen to Barto when his father found out his son had been arrested.

“He did issue me a ticket,” Barto said.

When Barto’s dad did come home, it didn’t take him long to hear through the grapevine what his son had been up to while he was away. 

“He took me to the jail and had my uncle take me downstairs to the jail,” Barto said. “He had me put in the jail and shut the door.”

For a moment, all was silent but for the echoing clang of the heavy door closing.

Then his uncle said words Barto has never forgotten.

“The way you’re going, you’re going to spend a lot of time behind bars,” he told him. 

And then he left Barto there to think it over for a while.

Barto decided then the only bars he ever wanted to live behind were the right kind — his motorcycle bars or, in this case, the bar he’s purchased in Dubois and is restoring. 

The photo is his reminder every day that he chooses the life he wants to live. That includes staying away from the wrong kinds of bars. 

“I haven’t outrun any cops since then,” Barto said with a chuckle.

Decades after that lesson in “life behind bars,” Barto has traded the threat of steel jail doors for steel blades married to custom-carved antler bone handles — a business he calls Bone Daddy Knives. 

The business has quietly been putting Dubois on the map for almost three decades, starting with a contract he picked up after a Montana gift rep died, leaving a shopkeeper with a demand and no knives.

Today, 2 miles inside the Wind River Indian Reservation, Barto buys about 25,000 pounds of antlers a year from local “shed heads,” or antler hunters. The best of the pieces become Bone Daddy knife handles, while the rest become part of the booming antler dog-chew trade.

He and his small crew turn out a couple thousand knives a year, each one a custom job, which sell well across the West.

Barto also at one time carved ornaments from bone antlers, as well as hat pins and figurines, which were sold at gift shops in Yellowstone National Park, Gardiner, West Yellowstone, Sturgis, as well as to larger chains such as Cabela’s, Sportsman’s Warehouse and Bass Pro Shops.

Barto jokes, like a lot of craftsmen, that making knives was something he once liked — back when it was still a hobby.

“Now it’s a business,” he said with a chuckle. “But when you’ve got a business that provides you the funds necessary to keep going in whatever adventure you want to go off into, I guess you still have to keep doing it.”

It’s all about the kind of bars Barto wants to live behind.

The knife business is bankrolling his transformation of the Outlaw Bar from a dive — where 

 in Cowboy State Daily noted people might be concerned for their safety — to an establishment where the opposite is true.

When he and Sherry bought the bar it was, to say the least, not exactly turnkey.

“This was just a dump when we bought it,” Barto said. “But they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.”

Barto could immediately see the potential. His wife took a little more sweet-talking.

“She was going crazy,” Barto admitted. “She’s like, ‘At your age, you want to start another project?!’”

Barto took it slow. He’d take his wife to the bar now and again for drinks. And just about every time the occasion presented just the right moment to say something like, “Oh look dear, you know what we could do with this part of the building?” Or, “Could you imagine if we did this in this room?”

Barto held up the mirror often enough that his wife finally gave in and said, “Yeah, let’s go ahead and do it.”

The bar’s biggest potential, he realized, wasn’t just what he could do with an artist’s eye and aesthetic inside. It was its position on a main highway to Yellowstone and the Tetons, a high-traffic strip where lots of tourists, sportsmen and bikers are roaring through town looking for their next adventure.

Its other big advantage is a deep lot, stretching far enough behind the bar to create a parking lot. 

“There is no parking anywhere else in town,” Barto said. “All of the Outlaw’s customers have been complaining about it for years.”

So Barto started his work in the back of the bar, carving out what he hopes will become a signature beer garden and games yard, with expanded parking, turf, fencing and, eventually, a raised stage for large outdoor events.

“We still have room to go back another 100 feet and still have a space for a possible stage up on top for a big venue,” he said. 

Inside, the transformation is further along, and personal. 

He’s hung up some of his and his wife’s work, tracing the arc of their lives from the early Bartolo Collectibles days to the present Bone Daddy Knife days, as well as wildlife mounts from hunting trips and, of course, the poster that captures his life’s motto to live his life behind only the bars he chooses.

There is still much dirt yet to move and asphalt to pour, but Barto is already thinking big for this bar, five to 10 years down the road.

“We want to be the best cowboy biker sportsman bar in Wyoming,” he said. “And from what we’ve been hearing from all of the locals lately, this new makeover has created a vibe all its own. That’s what they’re calling it. They say this place has vibe now.”

The “vibe” was on full display during the Fourth of July weekend, Barto added, when the bar hosted the band Second Ride. 

“I have never seen the bar that busy in my entire life,” he said. “It was standing-room-only Friday night.”

During Dubois’ famous tank parade, announcers even gave Barto a shoutout for cleaning up and reinventing the bar.

Barto is clear that, aside from aesthetics, he’s also made it a priority to clear out questionable clientele.

On his first night as an owner, he spotted a drug dealer working the room and said he “86’d” her on the spot. 

“My main focus, other than cleaning that bar up, was cleaning up the reputation,” he said. “If there was somebody in there who was always raising hell, we 86’d them.”

Signs at every entrance now warn potential troublemakers that a new sheriff owns the bar. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Bone Daddy Needed A Bar"}]

If Bone Daddy Knives is the financial engine behind the bar, the Bone Daddy persona is its soul.

It was developed over a 20-some year period, when Barto served as mascot for the Beartooth Rally’s Iron Horse Rodeo in Red Lodge, Montana.

At first, his costume was simple: The widest brim black cowboy hat he could find and a mask. The next year he added an air-brushed skeleton T-shirt and pants. 

Of course, then, cool costume and all, Bone Daddy needed a more appropriate ride.

The $65,000 custom bike he built includes his own screaming Bone Daddy moon logo as well as other artwork. 

“That was quite the undertaking,” he admitted. “But it is a masterpiece of artwork.”

When Barto retired from the Ironhorse Circuit after a couple of decades, he brought his Bone Daddy logo with him. The rearing motorcycle with its cowboy skeletal rider happened to be an almost-perfect match for the rearing horse logo at the Outlaw, a similarity that wasn’t lost on Barto.

“So I just added Bone Daddy to the back of the horse,” he said. “That’s all I did to change their logo.”

Barto, in addition to all the other hats he wears, is also president of the Professional Biker Rodeo Association, which he plans to start revving up next year as he’s completing renovations.

“Bone Daddy had to have a bar,” he said with a chuckle. “Now the trick is to make it the kind of place people remember for the right reasons.”

Bone Daddy Outlaw Saloon 7 12 26

<title>Longtime Knifemaker Transforming Dubois' Outlaw Bar From Dive Into Destination | Cowboy State Daily</title>

Dubois craftsman Ben Barto owns Bone Daddy Knives, a hobby turned big business that’s now bankrolling a transformation of Dubois' Outlaw Bar and giving the once-seedy watering hole a new vibe. “This was just a dump when we bought it,” Barto said.

Longtime Knifemaker Transforming Dubois' Outlaw Bar From Dive Into Destination

Headshot of Cowboy State Daily's Feature Reporter, Andrew Rossi.

Andrew Rossi

Entertainment

Howard Winchel “Hawk” Koch is a Hollywood legend. His credits include everything from “Chinatown” and “Marathon Man” to both of the “Wayne’s World" films.

Koch was the president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the Producers Guild of America, and 

 Robert Redford and Edward Norton among his close friends.

Those were among the stories and self-reflections he shared, for one night only, at the Shell Bar.

Koch was invited to entertain Shell residents with an evening presentation on what he’s learned after decades working behind the scenes in the film industry. The small but engaged crowd hung onto every word of wisdom and anecdote, many of which he included in his 2019 memoir: “Magic Time: My Life in Hollywood.”

[{"type":"text","text":"“I can’t get you an Oscar, but I can get you my book,” he said."}]

Koch had been to Wyoming several times, but it was his first visit to Shell. He said he was amazed by the scenery and immediately felt at home among the ranchers and strangers in the audience.

“The people have been so lovely, and I can’t get enough of the views,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “I’ve made so many movies (in California), but also in New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. To me, we’re all cowboys.”

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"First Time In The Saddle"}]

Koch started his Shell presentation by sharing his first experience on a movie set. It was in Durango, Colorado, when he was 

“My dad was making a movie up there,” he said. “I was a shy little kid who used to take my mother's dress and put it around my face so nobody would see me. After a 20-minute drive, I saw teepees. I saw cowboys and Indians, and this shy kid started running through the set.”

He didn’t know he was on the set of “Across the Wide Missouri,” released in 1951. 

A “Native American” approached the young Koch, put him on his lap, and told him “stories of many moons.” He was actually being entertained by Ricardo Montalbán.

Then, a cowboy rode up and asked Koch if he’d ever been on a horse. He hadn’t, so the cowboy set Koch in front of him and took him for a ride around the movie set.

Later that night, Koch’s father, Howard Winchel Koch, got to tell his wife their son had gotten his first horse ride with Clark Gable.

From that day, Koch loved the movies. As a result, he’s never worked a day in his life.

“It’s magical,” he said. “I love movies, and hopefully some of you do, too. I loved being on any movie set and in any movie theater. It’s magical for me.”

That was the partial inspiration for the title of Koch’s memoir, “Magic Time.” The other source was a direct quote from the legendary Jack Lemmon.

“I got to work with Jack Lemmon a couple of times, including ‘The Odd Couple,’” he said. “What I learned is that Jack could be talking to you, and if he heard ‘Roll camera,’ he would say, ‘Magic time,’ out loud, and would totally get into character. He could be talking about anything, and he’d get right back into character.”

Now, whenever Koch needs to concentrate, he repeats Lemmon’s line in his head.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"'The Primal Scream'"}]

The first movie Koch worked on was 1966’s “This Property Is Condemned,” starring Natalie Wood and Redford, in one of his earliest films.

Koch, then 19, quickly made a big impression by quickly getting Wood out of her trailer.

“One of the first things I had to do was go get Natalie Wood from basecamp,” he said. “I knocked on her door and said, ‘We’re ready for you.’ She said, ‘Oh, I'll be out in a little while.’”

In an unexpected wave of inspiration, Koch told Wood that the cinematographer James Wong Howe had said to him, “The light is perfect.” That promptly got Wood out of her trailer and onto the set.

Since Wood “never got out of her trailer on the first ask,” Koch impressed his peers by doing just that. He had a comically cynical explanation.

“(Actors) are narcissistic and they like the way they look on camera,” he said. “I used that line on every actor for over 60 years.”

That film started Koch’s lifelong friendship with Redford. He recalled a road trip he took with the young actor, driving from Los Angeles to land the actor had “just bought” in Utah.

“I’m driving on a good road with no moon and a few stars when Redford says, “Pull off the main road.’ I asked why, and he said, ‘Just pull off the main road.’”

Hawk Koch, a Hollywood producer and former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, stopped by the Shell Bar last week to talk about his work on movies such as "Chinatown," "Marathon Man," and "Wayne's World" and his encounters with legendary actors.

Hark The Herald 2: Wednesday, December 18, 2024

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