GARDINER — Not content to sit on her laurels, actress Lynda Day George keeps busy helping to raise scholarship money for area students.
The Sequim School Board approved last week a contract for services between Sequim School District, Day George and her stepdaughter Lisa Cronin, establishing the Douglas P. Cronin Welding Scholarship for a student in the amount of $2,500.
Day George is a well known actress who appeared in multiple television series, including “Mission: Impossible” in the early 1970s.
Douglas was the actress’ longtime husband who died of cancer in December 2010.
Day George, 70, also works with the Gardiner Garden Club, which raised $7,000 for scholarships this year alone.
“These kids are superb, and they deserve this kind of attention,” Day George said.
“And the more of it that they get, the better that it is, because these kids can do a lot that we don’t give them credit for.”
She enjoys helping others succeed because “I had some experience succeeding, and I know what it does for you, how it fills you,” she said.
Day George’s family was not rich by any means, she said. So when she set out to New York after high school, she made sure to send money back home to help pay the bills.
“A great deal of my money went back to Phoenix to help my parents and my brother when he was going to high school,” she said.
While Day George had initially set out to become a surgeon, that dream went by the wayside when she began making excellent money as a model.
That success was soon followed by a career in television.
Her career began with guest roles on many television series of the 1960s and ’70s, including “Route 66,” “Flipper,” “Here Come the Brides,” “The Green Hornet,” “Mannix,” “The Fugitive,” “The Virginian” and “Bonanza.”
Her first major role was as Amelia Cole in the 1970-1971 television series, “The Silent Force.”
In 1971, she was cast as Lisa Casey in “Mission: Impossible,” getting a Golden Globe nomination in 1972 and an Emmy Award nomination in 1973.
In 1970, she was cast in a role for the John Wayne film “Chisum,” which was filmed in Mexico.
She said she will never forget meeting the “Duke” for the first time.
Wayne has a connection to the North Olympic Peninsula as well, as he owned land on Sequim Bay.
After his death in 1979, his family donated some of that land, and the marina on Sequim Bay is named after him.
“I am standing there and I am looking at this man, and I am thinking, ‘oh my God! It is John Wayne,” she recalled. “And I start to cry.”
Disconcerted, Wayne said, “’what’s the matter little lady?’ He loved it, he thought it was funny.”
After they got to know each other better, Wayne would spit tobacco juice on her skirt, she recalled with a laugh.
“He used chaw, and so did most of the other guys that were out there.”
During a break in the filming, she said Wayne came to a party held at Day George’s home in Mexico, a bottle of his favorite brand of tequila — Sauza Conmemorativo — in hand.
It was on that night Day George said she showed the Duke she could “drink him under the table.”
“He and the stunt guys, they all played dollar poker. He would say ‘shots,’ and that was it. You had it. You drank it.”
She was able to keep up with him through the first bottle, and he retrieved another from his truck.
She knew she was able to hold her own better than the rest “because they were all ripped, and I wasn’t because I had things to do,” she said. “I had to clean up after this.”
What “killed him was I said, ‘can I have one more?’ We never had to do that again. I had to let him know I was no sissy. Just because I cried doesn’t mean I was a sissy.”
Day George went on to appear in “The House on Greenapple Road,” “Mayday at 40,000 Feet!” and “Cruise Into Terror.”
She also appeared on “The F.B.I.,” “McCloud,” “Love Boat,” and “Vega$.”
One of her favorite roles was guest-starring on television’s “Wonder Woman” in 1976 as the villain Fausta Grables, the Nazi Wonder Woman.
While Day George has lived through many great times and rubbed elbows with many movie and TV stars, she doesn’t miss those days. She prefers to look forward.
“I did that already,” she said, noting her life’s work now is to provide for the youth of tomorrow so they can have adventures of their own.
“That is very important,” she said.
“Those things are far more important than what I did in the past.
“Although, what I did in the past created a pathway for me to be able to do this. But that is why we work. That is why we have our profession so that we can do the next thing.”
And she strives to “keep a clean heart and keep my feet going in the right direction, one at a time.”
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Sequim-Dungeness Valley Editor Chris McDaniel can be reached at 360-681-2390, ext. 5052, or cmcdaniel@peninsuladailynews.com.
