As you know I have a love for the outdoors, especially for birds. And I love cats. Back in the 1960s I had a favorite TV show that had me dreaming of living in Africa taking care of wild animals, especially the big cats. I idolized the lead female character, wishing I could live as she did with her father, having a lion, a chimp and all sort of other exotic animals as pets. She and her father cared for animals in the wild and taught appreciation and care for their environment.
The character was Paula Tracy, played by Cheryl Miller. Her father was known as “Daktari,” doctor in Swahili. The chimp was Judy and the lion, Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion.
The show was Daktari and it aired from 1966 to 1969.
Recently the show has been released on DVD (Seasons 1 and 2). I received Season 1 as a Christmas gift from my brother-in-law and his wife and I was so happy to receive it. Their kindness in remembering my mention of the show prompted me to create a fan site (the only fan site) dedicated to the show.
Here’s some more about the site and if you remember loving Daktari in your childhood, I hope you’ll drop by for a visit and subscribe to the blog. I have much more to add to the site for your enjoyment. And be sure and leave comments on about the show!
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Welcome to the Daktari TV Show Fan Site!
This fan site is in honor of my favorite TV show as a child, Daktari.
It was inspired by a wonderfully thoughtful act, and a tremendously stupid one.
The thoughtful act? That comes from my brother-in-law, Tim Bailey, a director for The Simpsons, and his wife Jen. Tim is a serious collector of movie and TV memorabilia and actor autographs. I happened to mention that Daktari had been my favorite show and the DVDs for Season One were out. Guess what I got for Christmas from them? 🙂 I was very touched that they remembered. It was the best Christmas present in years!
Now I’ll confess the stupid act.
First, a little history.
I collected pictures of Cheryl Miller (Paula Tracy) and had amassed a large collection of at least one hundred pictures, along with numerous articles from movie and TV magazines of the day. I was ten when Daktari first aired and wanted to be Paula, spending my days outdoors with animals, especially the big cats. I requested an allowance so I could send away to a company called Stephen Sally (which remarkably still exists!) for glossy photos of my fav. Looking for that familiar large brown envelope in our mailbox each week was a real thrill.
I had my pictures plastered all over the walls of my bedroom. Eventually my parents gave me a large pink scrapbook (undoubtedly so I would clean off the walls!) and I kept my collection there for years, even into adulthood.
I was very proud of that collection.
- Here I am at 11, dressing like Paula Tracy.
The mistake?
I packed away my scrapbook in a box, not knowing that a package of old batteries was also inside. The battery acid leaked all over the book, destroying the binding and staining some of the pictures. Overwhelmed by the idea of transferring all the paraphernalia into a new book, I threw it out. Needless to say, that mistake still haunts me.
So I decided to rebuild my collection with this website.
There appears to be a renewed interest in Daktari now that Seasons One and Two are available on DVD and with that interest, a deluge of new pictures of Cheryl Miller has appeared on the web. I intend to collect them all and preserve them on this site for those of you out there who also love this series.
Daktari’s intrinsic value
I think Daktari has aged rather well considering the fact it is nearly fifty years old.
Role model for girls
As a young girl growing up in the 1960s, Cheryl Miller (Paula Tracy) proved to be a great role model: beautiful, smart, passionate and resourceful with her interest in science and the environment trumping her interest in boyfriends, though I still wish she and Jack Dane (Yale Summers) had gotten together …
People of different races working together
Daktari was one of the first shows to offer an African American man in a leading role (Hari Rhodes as Mike Makula). In fact, the show offered many supporting and guest roles to African American actors. It was a wonderful example of the right kind of race relations, where people were judged on their character alone, just as Dr. Martin Luthor King would have wanted it.
Care for animals and the environment
Marshall Thompson‘s presence as “Daktari,” Dr. Marsh Tracy was very comforting. He genuinely cared about the welfare of animals and the people that shared the land with them, and had a lot of input into the stories.
Yes, it is a children’s show and yes, the stories are simplistic and the characters one dimensional. The animals (Clarence the Cross-Eyed Lion and Judy the Chimp) were the real stars. But the show is refreshingly clean and the gentle message of protecting wild animals and their environment was ahead of its time. The message got across loud and clear without preaching and without the extremism and politicizing that so taints that message today.
Why a Daktari Fan Site?
So, as a result of the release of Seasons One and Two of Daktari on DVD, plus the effort to rebuild my collection, and most importantly, in honor of my thoughtful brother-in-law and his wife who helped me remember the happy days of my childhood, this site has been created.
It is dedicated to you, all the fans of Daktari who have kept the flame lit over the past forty seven years. Enjoy the renaissance of this wonderful TV series!
Click to Tweet & Share: Dreaming of Africa as a child, and remembering the TV show “Daktari” http://wp.me/p2D9hg-rZ
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I remember enjoying the show but don’t remember individual episodes. I’d be happy to watch some of them again! Thanks for bringing back a good memory.
In my mind, Paula and Jack reunited years later and did get together (well that’s what imagination is for ^^). I loved this show and used to watch it with my sister before going to school (this aired in the morning and my classes started around 1 pm).
We both loved the original cast and Judy, Clarence and Toto and the other animals too. I watched the last season and though I liked the new characters, I missed Jack a lot, his presence added a very unique spark and warmth (besides I adored him ^^).
Thanks for the great work!
Thank you! I always wanted to be Paula, romping around with all the big cats in beautiful Africa. Now I just have my two regular cats and I love them very much.
I have just discovered this show although I keep getting a ghost memory so I probably watched this show as a very young child but I am HOOKED! I agree, Susan, oh to be Paula! It’s just a lovely show and a life I yearn for. I have been too afraid to look online to whatever happened to Clarence and Judy, I loved them both so much, you could have made an entire show just about them and I would have LOVED it!
Cool, glad you like the show! If you want to do a deep dive on Dakari, you can visit a fan site I created called DaktariTVShow at https://daktaritvshow.wordpress.com/ I also wrote an article about Cheryl Miller last April that you can find in RetroFan magazine. There’s a digital version of the [part of the article that you can read – here’s the link: https://issuu.com/twomorrows/docs/retrofan26preview/18 And if you want the full version: https://twomorrows.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=98_152&products_id=1704&zenid=4otcbnkpf4dpgbvfppiqm52u64
Hello, Lynda.
I went on a mission to find out what became of Clarence after rediscovering ‘Daktari’ in 2017 -I watched the original airing on Tuesday nights on CBS in the late ’60s.
You were right to avoid looking up what became of Clarence and Judy. It appears that poor Clarence died six months after the series ended. While originally belonging to Ralph Helfer of Africa, U.S.A. (A wildlife training site in Soledad Canyon, Acton, CA) Clarence was taken by Ivan Tors Studios sometime late in 1968 after the show ended, actual date is unclear and I may be wrong. He, along with Judy the chimp and two orangutans belonging to Toni Helfer (Ralph’s wife) were moved to Homosassa Springs Wildlife Park (near Tampa, FL).
I am still trying to learn what precipitated this; there was a terrible flood that happened in Soledad Canyon that all but destroyed Africa U.S.A.; rendering it useless as a filming location. I surmise that the flood left Helfer in an unsustainable position, I know he had to relocate some of the animals.
At Ivan Tors Studios (the studios were actually in North Miami while Homosassa Springs Wildlife Park was a five-hour drive north), Clarence was an attraction -one woman who commented on the Daktari WordPress page said she saw a lion in a circular, fenced-in enclosure somewhere in Florida and she had wondered if it was Clarence at Homosassa Springs.
I had heard accounts from some who had been at Africa, U.S.A. during production of Daktari, that the Clarence that was taken away by Ivan Tors Studios was not the real Clarence, but another lion named ‘Clarence.’ I really wanted to believe this, but at this point, mounting evidence makes it seem unlikely.
It seems that Clarence died tragically after travelling to Peoria, Illinois, for a state fair called the ‘Heart of Illinois’ fair. He and Judy had been brought up from Homosassa Springs. Clarence is reported to have died between July 12 – July 14 of sever gastritis, some reports mention he also had blood poisoning. He was 7 ½ years old according to Monty Cox, the trainer travelling with him who had formerly worked at Africa, U.S.A. It was reported that Clarence was to be cremated.
While reading a book entitled ‘The Gentle Jungle’ by Toni Helfer (Brigham Young University Press, 1980)
Chapter 14, ‘Dissolution’ pp. 202:
‘In 1968 our partnership with Ivan Tors came to an end.
We parted from this as friends, but the new group were doing their best to obtain what had always belonged to us –our remaining half of Africa USA.
It became for some of the employees a time of choosing sides. Everyone wanted to be on the winning team, for many of them felt their lives were uprooted by the Helfer-Tors breakup. I suppose we naively assumed from those who had been close to us a kind of allegiance, but the unfulfilled desired of some of them were being stoked by a neurotic society that promised rewards for selling out. Those negotiations certainly separated the strong from the weak.
After a long course of reasoning we succeeded in retaining the property and the bulk of the animals; full ownership reverted to Ralph and me. Those litigations had been emotionally devastating. We were mentally exhausted from the difficult bargaining. The terms and conditions of the final agreement had given us strong subjective feelings, for many of those fabulous animals, whom we had all profited by, were penalized by the dissolution, winding up paying the piper. I would rather they had died than have been shipped off to Florida with that group of men, for these new people knew nothing about Clarence and Judy or Gentle Ben and my two red-haired orangutans, Hannibal and Genghis Khan
But they could, by exploitation, make a good deal of money off them.
It’s very hard not to cry when I think of the sad fate held for each of them, and I call to mind a magnificent verse by Karen Blixen from her book Out of Africa. She stood on the Mombasa shores and watched as two giraffes, loaded in wooden crates, were waiting to be shipped from their homeland to a port far across the sea.
‘Good-bye, good-bye. I wish for you that you may die on the journey, both of you, so that not one of the little noble heads, that are now raised, surprised over the edge of a case, against the blue sky of Mombasa, shall be left to trub from one side to the other, all alone, in Hamburg, where no one knows of Africa.
‘As for us, we shall have to find someone badly transgressing against us, before we can in decency ask the giraffes to forgive us our transgressions against them.”
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It is my personal belief that Clarence was doomed once he left Africa U.S.A. and that once at Homosassa Springs, he had no one looking out for his interests. He should have been allowed to retire, having been the heart and soul of a very successful television show that made a lot of money for all involved -Clarence was insured for $750,000.
Someone from Africa U.S.A. that I’ve become friends with told that he thinks Clarence was closer to nine-years-old, and not 7 ½. They also mentioned that they do not believe Clarence received the best care once he was moved to Florida.
For being the most famous lion in the world in 1969, I would certainly think Clarence deserves a memorial of some sort…. But there is nothing.