Clint Walker, towering Western star, dies at 90

Clint Walker, a former merchant seaman and deputy sheriff who roamed the West as a towering, solitary figure on “Cheyenne,” the first hourlong Western on television, died Monday in Grass Valley, California. He was 90.

Walker died at a medical facility, but he also lived in Grass Valley, 60 miles northeast of Sacramento.

Walker appeared in the “The Dirty Dozen” and other movies, but he was best known for “Cheyenne” on ABC from 1955 to 1963. The show opened with a theme song that stuck to the brain with the strength of epoxy:

“Cheyenne, Cheyenne where will you be camping tonight?/ Lonely man, Cheyenne, will your heart stay free and light?”

Walker — born Norman but renamed Clint by Jack Walker Warner of Warner Bros. — played Cheyenne Bodie, a big-hearted man who performed good deeds and fought bad men in his wanderings.

His film work included “Fort Dobbs” (1958), with Virginia Mayo. Howard Thompson, reviewing for The New York Times, called him “about the biggest, finest-looking western hero ever to sag a horse, with a pair of shoulders rivaling King Kong’s.”

He had roles in “Send Me No Flowers,” a 1964 comedy with Rock Hudson and Doris Day, and “None but the Brave,” a 1965 war movie with Frank Sinatra, who also directed.

Walker also guested on TV shows, including a comic turn on “The Lucy Show” as Lucille Ball’s love interest. In 1974, he starred on TV in the short-lived “Kodiak,” about an Alaska lawman.

Walker was born in Hartford, Illinois. Among his early jobs was working on the ore ships that plied the Great Lakes.

In 1948 he married Verna Garver; they had a daughter, Valerie. They moved to Long Beach, California, where Walker worked as a port security guard and a nightclub bouncer, and then to Las Vegas, where he was a deputy providing security at the Sands Hotel. It was there that actor Van Johnson suggested he explore acting.

Clint and Verna divorced in 1968. Walker married Giselle Hennessey in 1974; she died in 1994.