A thing about growing up in New Mexico is you come to grips pretty early with the concept of rattlesnakes. When I was in elementary school we lived in Roswell, it was town, so we heard about rattlesnakes but hardly ever saw one. But our parents always put the fear of God in us about rattlesnakes. As my dad was fond of saying, “Rattlesnakes might not hurt you, but they can damn sure make you hurt yourself.”

As a kid I lived in abject fear of running into a rattlesnake. I had never even seen one until I was about 10 or 11 when we moved to Hot Springs, which then became Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. It’s on the Rio Grande River, which goes through the Elephant Butte Lake and then on down to Las Cruces, El Paso and Mexico.

When we first moved to Hot Springs my parents were the care-takers of a motel. It was a very small motel. Only had six, or seven units. It was across the street from the river.  It was one of those really, really cheap motels. My dad worked as a carpenter/ handyman or whatever job he could find in town, and he also took care of the maintenance around the motel. Mom was in charge of cleaning and managing the rooms.

We never had very many customers. You’d think since we were right across the street from the Rio Grande, we might have had more customers, but we weren’t on the best side of town. Across the street nestled against the bank of the river was a small tackle shop that my friend Joe’s dad owned.

Unless you’re on the river, it is a parched, bone-dry desert all around T or C,… so whenever it rained the gullies would immediately fill up, and the resulting flash flood would wash all the rattlesnakes into the river. After a big rain, there would be a gazillion rattlesnakes floating down the river. We’d watch them make their way to the bank and try to slither out, and for the next two or three days, you’d better be careful where you stepped.

My friend Joe was Native American… I think, Navajo, but I’m not sure. He and his parents lived about four miles out of town, and sometimes I’d go out there and spend the day. Most of the time I was scared to death because their place was smack dab in the middle of rattlesnake country. Joe had told me that a couple of times his mom had gone into their laundry room and found a coiled rattlesnake among the clothes. That’s when he introduced me to Max! 

Joe had a black Lab named Max… and Max could kill rattlesnakes. I saw it happen. We were in Joe’s back yard and Max, always on the lookout, saw a rattlesnake. He noisily went charging toward it. The snake coiled as Max came running toward it, enticing the snake to strike, (Max made sure he stopped short of the distance the snake could’ve struck him). The snake quickly coiled itself up again. (I found out later a snake can strike about three-quarters of its length.)

Max had lured the snake to strike in order to establish the distance it COULD strike. Max, then stayed just far enough away that both he and the snake know it can’t strike that far. Now Max starts circling the rattlesnake.  He walks very slowly… The rattler’s eyes are glued to Max’s movements,  and as Max goes behind the snake, it quickly swivels it’s head to pick up Max on the other side as he passes behind him. At first, it’s so fast, that it almost seems like the snake’s head can endlessly turn. Now, Max slows down even more… slowly… slowly… even slower. Max is hypnotizing the snake. As he walks slower and slower… the snake begins to get a little lazy.  It doesn’t whip it’s head around quite as quickly… and when the snake finally gets sluggish enough and turns his head slowly enough, Max lunges in from behind and doesn’t let go until the snake’s head is off.

I asked Joe if Max had been trained to kill rattlesnakes… Joe said, “Talk to my dad, and he will tell you the myth of the coyote who could kill rattlesnakes”.

My dad was born in the Territory of New Mexico in June of 1911, some seven months before it became the forty-seventh state. He had a terrible childhood. I don’t have much first-hand knowledge since he almost never talked about it. There were five girls and two boys, he was the youngest son. His parents were homesteading ten acres of hard scrabble on the Texas border near the town of Rogers. They were trying to scrape out an existence where the average yearly rainfall only yielded a crop about once every seven years.

The requirements of the Homestead Act were that the occupants were required to live on the property for five years, to make improvements by building a dwelling, and the cultivating the land. In those hard times, only a few families were able to hold on for five years. Many farms were abandoned within the first two or three years and oftentimes nearby families would move in and continue to work the land in an attempt to complete the five years required in hopes of combining it with their own.

That decision to work two homesteads was blamed for the tragedy that befell my dad’s family. The family living on the adjoining homestead had finally given up and were abandoning their place. My grandfather decided that he would try to work both farms. He took three of the kids: his oldest daughter, his middle daughter and my eight-year-old dad to the new farm. He left his oldest son and three daughters to help my grandmother work the one they were on.

This is hard to talk about.. and it left life-long scars, not only for my dad but for his entire family. My grandfather started sleeping with his oldest daughter… and she became pregnant. My grandfather was arrested for raping his own daughter. There was a trial, he was convicted and was sent to prison. The sheriff came to the farm and arrested him while they were working in the field. The only time I ever heard my dad talk about this was when a relative asked dad if he remembered how he felt that day. My dad finally said. “Just happy”. I’ve heard from other relatives that my granddad would hit you with whatever he had in his hands if he was mad. More proof of that legendary “Cox temper”.

So… with the old man in prison, my grandma eventually lost both homesteads and the family was scattered to the winds. My dad started living with his older brother… quite a bit older, actually. (I think 8 yrs., but I’m not sure). And I don’t know really know what happened to the other siblings and my grandma. Dad never talked about this very much either. I do know that when my dad was eleven, he and his older brother got into a fight and my dad won the fight. His brother kicked him out…. So, at eleven years old, my dad was out in the world on his own. He started work, as a man, on the Heart Ranch in Texas. (the second largest ranch in Texas). I’ve seen pictures of him when he was eleven…. and he looked like a man. There was nothing boyish about him.

My dad and I had a really stormy relationship, and now that I’m older I can see how I could have been more understanding of my dad and of his views of parenthood. You see, I’ve always been a bit of a smart-ass, which got me into a world of trouble with dad. His view was: he was the Dad, that By God that meant he was the “boss”, and anything that challenged his authority meant he wasn’t being respected and that was not to be tolerated. My brothers, and of course my little sister, got along with my dad a whole lot better than I did. Dad would say something that we all knew was ridiculous and my siblings would bite their tongues until they got outside and then giggle about it and go about their business. Why couldn’t I do that? Why couldn’t I see that he needed us to respect him… why was I such a pain in the ass?

There was a quirk about him that was always dangerous… especially for me. Anytime you asked permission to do something, even as simple as going across the street to play with a friend, his first answer was always “No”… it was expected, and then the ritual would start… you would go through the reasons why it was no big deal… you’d be right back… etc. etc. and then he would eventually, although grudgingly, say “Okay”. Ninety-five percent of the time, that was the predictable outcome…. BUT… every now and then you would ask and it would be as though you had committed the most unforgivable offense. He would come down on you in a very bad way… sometimes violently. “How dare you talk back to me”… and the full force of his anger and violence would rain down on you… it was terrifying. So… ninety-five percent of the time, it was easy as pie to sweet talk dad into almost anything, but always lurking in the background ……not pretty when that happened.

In hindsight, I wish I had understood my dad better when I was younger. He died before we ever patched up our differences. I’ve talked to my brothers and sister about their relationship with dad. It’s shocking that their view and their relationships with him are so different than mine.

It wasn’t until I became friends with John Huston, in the last year of his life, that I realized how much I loved my father and could look at our relationship in a different light. It took me lots of years to get there, but I finally tried to write a song about our relationship… I haven’t played it in years and I listened to it the other day… I’d like to revisit it someday. It’s on my Acoustic Eclectricity album….. “To Say Goodbye”.

In a roundabout way, I might owe my life to Stephen Spielberg! I still find it kinda spooky whenever I think about how it could’ve been me who was killed in a freak accident on a movie set back in 1982. Even more unsettling, this tragedy occurred on my birthday. I’m only talking about this because I lost out on the movie role.

My agent called and told me that John Landis wanted to meet with me. This was not a typical casting call. It was late on a Friday afternoon, and there were no other actors there… only me. He wanted to discuss a role in a new movie he was directing and co-producing with Steven Spielberg. I was a big admirer of both, so I was excited by the prospect of getting to work with them.

Landis and I hit it off immediately. (I’m struck more and more how casting decisions often come down to the personal chemistry between the people involved) At the meeting, he enthusiastically told me about the big budget movie version they were planning to make of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone.

During the meeting, since there wasn’t a script available yet, Landis told me about the segment that he was going to direct, which was going to be the first short story in the movie. It was about a racist character who ends up going back in time and redeems himself by rescuing two Vietnamese children.

It sounded like a wonderful part, and I was excited to be considered for it. At the end of the meeting he said, “Ronny, you’re the person I want for this .. The role is yours… It’s a done deal.” I went home with a bounce in my step and told Mary and the boys the good news.

But on the following Monday morning, I got a call from Landis.
“Ronny, I’m so embarrassed,” He told me. “I know that I said the role was yours but, over the weekend, Steven Spielberg met with Vic Morrow and offered him the role and Vic had accepted it. “Ronny, I don’t know what to say to you.”

Obviously, I was disappointed… but what are you gonna do? After all, Stephen Spielberg WAS the Executive Producer and he had final approval on all casting decisions. I wished them well… no use cryin’ over spilt milk.

I bounced back fairly quickly as I was deep into co-writing with Mary my first screenplay and making preparations for our next project – a film called Raw Courage. I ended up co-producing the film as well as starring in it. We shot the film in my home state of New Mexico, and we were there shooting in July of 1982. Raw Courage is an outdoor adventure film, reminiscent in some ways of Deliverance, which required us to run in scorching heat through the desert for hours on end. It was really grueling physically and required more stamina than I had ever imagined. On my forty-fourth birthday, after running all day…I had just collapsed on the bed in our hotel room in Las Cruces when Mary told me about the tragic accident on the set of The Twilight Zone: Vic Morrow and two child actors were killed when a helicopter crashed on top of them.

It freaked me out… but it bothered Mary in a way I’d never seen before or since. She was always the most calm, level-headed person anytime things went South, but it affected her in a really traumatic way. She couldn’t get it out of her mind of how instead of celebrating my birthday that she could be mourning my death. For years after that, the image of the tragic accident bothered her a lot. So much so that she avoided the details of the accident like the plague. If, at any time, anyone mentioned that movie… Mary would leave the room. So, my forty-fourth birthday is one that I’ll never forget.

This is what’s kinda sick about my reaction to the terrible tragedy. I’m such an egotist, (or maybe this is a defense mechanism), I believe that if I had been on that film set the tragedy might not have occurred. As I understand it, there were some safety issues with the helicopter hovering so closely over them – after several close calls and near tragedies we had during the filming of Deliverance …. I have never been shy about making sure that all safety protocols were being observed. I like to think I would’ve refused to let them shoot that scene under those conditions…