Whatever happened to Kim Winona? - Part 1
1956, Jan 22 The Pittsburgh Press - Though she portrays a Cheyenne, she's a full-blooded Sioux. .. She's been married for four years to Harvey Buck and "Along with her TV duties, Kim falls into that vague classification known as 'Hollywood starlets.' She is a painter and sculptor of some distinction."
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| 1956, Jan 22 The Pittsburgh Press |
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Kim Winona:
From Tepee to TV
1956, Feb 26 Detroit Free Press
Hollywood - When shapely, raven-haired Kim Winona was a child on the Rosebud Reservation near Yankton, SD, she hated the fact that she'd been born an Indian.
"Living on the reservation," she explains, "was just existing, nothing more. My parents were divorced when I was very young, and the Government used to give Mother $15 a month and food stamps to support the family. There was never enough of anything to go around.
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| 1956, Feb 26 Detroit Free Press |
"When we moved off the reservation into nearby towns I always felt out of place, that I was different from other kids. I hated being three-quarters Sioux."
Today, at 23, Kim has changed her tune. "My Indian blood," she says, "is the greatest thing that ever happened to me." Reason: With it she's earning $600 a week as co-star of Brave Eagle, an adventure-type TV program (CBS, Wednesday nights), and has a growing career in show business.
How did this career come to be?
Pure luck.
In 1951 Kim (whose real name is Connie Mackey) was living in Spokane with her remarried mother and had just graduated from high school when she met Harvey Buck, a student at the University of Washington. After a few days, Buck proposed -- and Kim accepted. A year later the couple moved to Hollywood, where Harvey went to work as a printing salesman and Kim as a receptionist with a publishing company.
One afternoon an Indian actor named Pat Hogan dropped into Kim's office and struck up a conversation. Before long he suggested she try for some acting work. "Pays much better than this," he pointed out.
Kim said she'd never had any training.
"But you're Indian!" Hogan said. "In this town, that's enough all by itself."
He was right, of course. When a studio wants Indians, it usually must go to Oklahoma, Wyoming or Arizona for them. Thus when Hogan took Kim to his agent, the latter rushed her to the company then producing Apache (star: Burt Lancaster). It was a little too late and casting was closed, but the promotion department promptly signed Kim to exploit the film as Miss Apache. Her salary: $100 a day.
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| 1954, Aug 17 Marshfield News Herald |
"They sent me to San Francisco," confesses the lovely Sioux, "supposedly as the prettiest member of the Apache tribe. I was photographed and interviewed in hockey Indian clothes and told stories I'd heard on the reservation. I got along just fine."
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| 1954, July 15 The Los Angeles Times |
A few weeks later Kim was sent to MGM to test for a role in The Last Hunt. Debra Pagent got it instead: Kim wasn't "Indian enough."
Last June, Roy Rogers Productions, looking for a girl to portray Morning Star, a Cheyenne maiden in Brave Eagle, signed Kim. Production got underway on Roy Rogers 130-acre ranch in Chatsworth, and in September the TV series made its debut.
History Repeats?
Playing opposite Keith Larsen, who enacts the title role, Kim received good notices. Wrote one critic approvingly, "She looks more Indian than most TV Indians."
She is, too. It so happens that her husband is a direct descendant of the General Custer who, with his troops, was wiped out in the battle of the Little Big Horn. So, in family arguments, Kim has a powerful clincher: "Remember what the Sioux did to Custer. I can do the same to you!"
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| 1956, Feb 26 Detroit Free Press |
