Farewell, John the Baptist

Charlton Heston passed away at the age of 84. I’ll always remember him as a movie star for Ben Hur and for the fantastic job he did playing John the Baptist in “Greatest Story Ever Told.” Heston played men from the Bible as they ought to be played: as men, often wild, often offensive to their contemporaries, but they were unabashadly masculine. Take any other John the Baptist performance and it pales in comparison to the life Heston brought to the voice calling in the desert and there is no comparison.

 I could listen to Heston talk all day. He had a fantastic voice. I enjoyed his Bible series. I even enjoyed his cameo role in the underrated Paul Hogan movie, “Almost An Angel.”

Of course, people across the west and America remember him as a defender of Liberty. He stopped the gun grabbers in their tracks. He spent his last active years fighting for liberty. A very popular bumper sticker in Montana was, “My President is Charlton Heston.”

When he came out to Kalispell in 2000, it was the practically the biggest thing that happened to the town. I got to hear part of his speech from a distance and then I tried to shake his hand, but he got into the SUV, while I was about 20 feet away. To quote Maxwell Smart, “Missed him by that much.”

Heston was a great actor and a great American, and he’ll be missed.